> Connecting to TLS to news.ycombinator.com is nice in that I know nobody has read or altered the message in transit. The fact that a third party vouches that n

> Connecting to TLS to news.ycombinator.com is nice in that I know nobody has read or altered the message in transit. The fact that a third party vouches that news.ycombinator.com is who they say they are doesn't add anything for me, because I don't trust news.ycombinator.com any more than I would trust somebody impersonating news.ycombinator.com. The CA in this situation simply complicates things and adds nothing for me. You don't know that the message isn't read or altered in transit unless you know that your TLS connection is to the real news.ycombinator.com. ISPs have been running transparent HTTP proxies to inject ads and other nonsense into your content. It'd be trivial for them to run a transparent HTTPS proxy to do the same - aside from the little detail that your browser would try and fail to verify the certificates provided by said proxy were vouched for by a CA. I don't consider this is a "largely-hypothetical" attack. ISPs have been doing it for a few extra pennies of ad revenue.