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I remember when TLS was about security, not privacy. I also remember when proxies were a tool to help everyone, not just corporations who wanted to inspect all
by peterwwillis 9y ago
I remember when TLS was about security, not privacy. I also remember when proxies were a tool to help everyone, not just corporations who wanted to inspect all your traffic.
By ensuring that HTTPS is used everywhere, and that no other security regimes are allowed, they've killed proxies for all uses except spying on users. The end result is some of the Internet is now less private, by design.
If you think proxies are a useful tool to save bandwidth, decrease latency and reduce load, and want to stay secure, but not necessarily private, there are very obvious ways this can be done. But there are people literally fighting against this because they want privacy or nothing.
This is Internet puritanism.
- phicoh 9y agoExplicit proxies are no problem. There are a lot of servers behind proxies. No problem there. There is plenty of client software that can be configured to use proxies. Also no problem there. Where it goes wrong is transparent proxies (also called 'middleboxes') that operate without consent of the endpoints. In general, those proxies have caused so many network problems that most people involved in the IETF will happily see them die. And the easiest way to do that is to encrypt all traffic.
- peterwwillis 9y agoThere's a large number of web users - like myself - who benefited from transparent proxies. The IETF's complaints are probably almost certainly due to incompatibilities between products and erroneous modification of streams in transit, which of course should not happen. But it certainly doesn't need to die - if we killed technology for that, the whole WWW wouldn't exist.