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All of this has always been about forcing everyone onto HTTPS at any cost. Denying referral headers, not allowing HTTP/2 over HTTP, treating self-signed certifi
by byuu 11y ago
All of this has always been about forcing everyone onto HTTPS at any cost. Denying referral headers, not allowing HTTP/2 over HTTP, treating self-signed certificates as the worst thing ever, soon putting red X'es in the URL bars, etc.
It's all disgustingly heavy-handed. But they get away with it because most people are on board with it. They seem to lack empathy of how this would look if they weren't on board with the change. The general idea is a great one: who doesn't love extra security? But all of those cons ... interfering with caching, costing money for wildcard certificates, all the security vulnerabilities in the TLS libraries, the (miniscule, but non-zero) extra computational power required, the added setup difficulty (yes, even if you trust Let's Encrypt to execute code on your box, it's still an added burden), putting trust in the CA system that has shown several major flaws already (such as rogue certificates) ... all conveniently ignored or whitewashed away.
But all the posturing in the world won't be enough to eliminate HTTP from the web. It's going to outlive all of us. Not even because people like me want it to, but because there's just so much legacy code out there that's never going to get touched. Millions of devices and applications that only speak HTTP, that nobody's ever going to update. Hell, it's trivial to find Gopher proxy layers, and that never even got 1% of the uptake that HTTP has today.
- otabdeveloper 11y agoThis would have been OK if HTTPS truly did increase security. In reality, however, the sensitive part is the 'who' and 'when', not the 'what'. HTTPS makes sense for hiding passwords or bank data, for everything else it's mostly pointless. (If you've watched any police procedural shows you've noticed that they don't need wiretaps to make an arrest, a destination phone number and time is all that's needed.)
- seabee 11y agoHave we already forgotten FireSheep?
- Ono-Sendai 11y agoI agree the whitewashing is annoying. One correction: the 'miniscule, but non-zero' computational power for TLS connections, in particular the handshake, is actually quite significant. (like 0.4s of CPU time in my tests). So the whitewashing problem may be worse than you think!