Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2014 January 2

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January 2

Wikipedia's SSL certificate wierdness

Dear Wikipedians:

How come https://en.mobile.wikipedia.org would trigger a certificate warning. Whereas https://mobile.wikipedia.org and https://en.m.wikipedia.org would not.

I know that a wildcard certificate is used: *.wikipedia.org. My logic goes as follows:

1. If the wildcard is used in the same sense as the UNIX wildcard, then https://en.mobile.wikipedia.org should be allowed.
2. If the wildcard does not permit further dots inside its representation, then https://en.m.wikipedia.org should be disallowed, yet it is allowed.
3. If mobile is somehow excepted, then https://mobile.wikipedia.org should be disallowed, yet it is allowed.

Much appreciated if someone can elucidate this situation.

Thanks,

184.148.180.144 (talk) 20:23, 2 January 2014 (UTC)

I don't have time right now to thoroughly dig into your interesting question, but take a look at Wildcard DNS record, wherein you'll be dismayed to discover that the meaning of wildcards is somewhat, er, wild. -- Finlay McWalterჷTalk 22:32, 2 January 2014 (UTC)

This has nothing to do with DNS. The wildcard in the common name does not permit dots. A certificate has an optional "Subject Alternative Name" field, which is where additional hostnames for which the certificate is valid can be added. This field lists *.m.wikipedia.org, which is why it's accepted. Unilynx (talk) 14:55, 4 January 2014 (UTC)

Thank you. I am crystal clear on the security certificate rules now. 69.42.180.58 (talk) 12:57, 6 January 2014 (UTC)

Resolved

Need low-level tool for sending HTTP requests

I'm looking for a tool for sending HTTP requests. Something that runs on Windows. Specifically, I'm looking for something that will let me send an HTTP 1.0 request without a host header. Every tool I've tried forces me to include a host header. I've tried Fiddler and several others. I even tried writing my own tool using .NET but the .NET Framework adds host header even if you remove it. Can anyone recommend anything? AnonComputerGuy (talk) 20:40, 2 January 2014 (UTC)

Netcat -- Finlay McWalterჷTalk 21:13, 2 January 2014 (UTC)

You'd build the request in e.g. foo.txt and then do nc 192.168.0.20 < foo.txt -- Finlay McWalterჷTalk 21:25, 2 January 2014 (UTC)

But given that you seem to already be coding in .NET, I think you can solve this in that environment too. I imagine you're using .NET's http facilities (perhaps system.net.http.httpclient). Because it knows about HTTP, it's taking it upon itself to "fix" your request. You can avoid this if you avoid the httpclient library and use TCP directly (with e.g. system.net.sockets.tcpclient. You have to build the request yourself (but that sounds like what you want anyway) and handle the headers in the response anyway (which isn't very hard). -- Finlay McWalterჷTalk 22:26, 2 January 2014 (UTC)

I presume you're doing this as part of some kind of debugging. Normally, of course, you really, really do always want the Host: header (and of course it causes no harm even if the webserver you're hitting isn't hosting multiple domains). —Steve Summit (talk) 23:22, 3 January 2014 (UTC)

Using search engine

Apparently Google no longer thinks I should have full control over my searches. Is there any way to enforce that what is put between quotation marks is included in the search? For example I'm looking for a particular road safety video that was part of the "Think!" campaigns. Google thinks they know better and will also accept "think" but I inserted the exclamation point for a reason. --78.148.110.243 (talk) 21:30, 2 January 2014 (UTC)

Unfortunately, Google doesn't seem to actually index most punctuation and only cares about a select few (e.g. '@', '#'). Google's documentation can be found here: https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/2466433. 8.17.117.40 (talk) 21:42, 2 January 2014 (UTC)

Even if it's not indexed, they could still do the search. They would first need to retrieve everything indexed with "think" in it, then filter out those without the following exclamation mark. This would take quite a bit longer, of course, and they may refuse, due to the system load doing these type of searches would create. If the system load is the issue, it would be nice if they would allow you to do the filtering using your own PC, on the records they provide. StuRat (talk) 18:43, 4 January 2014 (UTC)

Default settings in Word 2010

Whenever I create a brand new file in Word 2010, the following two settings are set as the default: (a) the font is set at Calibri; and (b) the paragraph setting has the item "Don't add space between paragraphs of the same style" with no check mark in front of it (and, hence, there is added space between paragraphs). Every time that I create a document, I change these two settings to: (a) Times New Roman font; and (b) a check mark added to the paragraph setting. Is there some way to set up as a default the settings that I want, rather than the pre-set Microsoft default settings? I looked around at "options", but that didn't seem to have the things I was looking for. Thanks. Joseph A. Spadaro (talk) 23:47, 2 January 2014 (UTC)

You can apply style changes to the default stylesheet, as described here. -- Finlay McWalterჷTalk 00:08, 3 January 2014 (UTC)

Thank you. I will check that out. Thanks a lot. Joseph A. Spadaro (talk) 17:23, 4 January 2014 (UTC)