Last week on the show Bart talked about the POODLE vulnerability that was avoidable if you told your browser to remove support for SSL. I hopped over to podfeet.com to find the link he posted on how to tell Chrome to ignore SSL. The instructions given were anything but clear. They made me hop from page to page, and open a Terminal (which I’m not afraid of) and run some commands I didn’t understand, which launched Chrome in a safe state but left the Terminal running with all kinds of glop on the screen. I posted about my confusion in the comments and Bart explained that even with all that work the fix is only one time, the next time I’d launch Chrome it would be insecure.
Luckily, Dorothy, aka @MacLurker in the chat room, also read my complaints and she decided to see if she could figure out an easier solution. I scoffed as I always do and said it couldn’t be done. The next day she sent me a Clarify document giving fantastic instructions on how to solve this problem. It’s a very clever solution. Basically she teaches you how to create a version of Chrome that applies the Terminal command right before launching Chrome. It’s just that one line that was in the arcane instructions plopped into an Automator action that you save as an application. I like this because you don’t have to trust Dorothy, you can do it yourself an know exactly what’s going on.
The arcane instruction, now that I read it in Dorothy’s tutorial simply tells Chrome to launch with a minimum SSL version of TLS1.
I love that Dorothy keeps helping us with automation! If you have something you want her to automate, let me know!
Here’s a link to Dorothy’s easy to follow tutorial on how to launch Chrome in a safe mode:
https://www.podfeet.com/blog/how-to-make-chrome-safe-from-the-poodle-vulnerability/.
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