6 ms·

Why isn't all Internet traffic encrypted?

77 points by chrisaycock 15y ago

pak 15y ago
Putting aside the whole issue of delegating trust via certificates, the simpler answer is that encryption is hard, and thereby expensive. For many purposes, both service provider and client continue to consider it an unnecessary expense. Only recently, with the spread of wireless networks, has the threat of en masse MITM and eavesdropping attacks become realistic. For a long time, it took serious knowledge to pull these things off on a wired LAN or within the walls of an ISP. You could say the same about phone calls--why isn't the POTS network encrypted?--but that's because it's well constrained within wires run by trusted people and such cost is not justifiable; but with the advent of cell phones, protocols like GSM had encryption built into them, since telcos couldn't ignore that data sent over the air is readily captured and manipulated.
- tomp 15y ago
  WiFi traffic has nothing to do with internet traffic per se. The problem is that the only popular WiFi protocol that is anonymous (doesn't require passwords/user credentials) is also not encrypted. This problem could elegantly be solved with a ssh-like tunnel between the consumer device and the WiFi router, the rest of the traffic could still be plain text.
  - simonbrown 15y ago
    The user's device would somehow have to be sure it's talking to the legitimate router, and not one an attacker set up with a deceptively similar SSID. I can't think of a way this would be possible, unless popular access points were signed by CAs.
    - Herring 15y ago
      You could require physical contact in order to connect. Touch your ipad to this surface & exchange keys. Cumbersome, though.
      - steve-howard 15y ago
        We already have Wi-Fi Protected Setup, which allows you to press a button on the router to connect. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wi-Fi_Protected_Setup http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wi-Fi_Protected_Setup I think it's legitimate to want encryption even if you can't verify identity. Man in the middle may be trivial in that case, but it's still harder than just sniffing packets.
    - drzaiusapelord 15y ago
      This is the classic excuse to not implement encryption: "but we need a web of trust and certificate authorities and central management of identities and a million complex things that'll never work right even if implemented." Encryption without identity validation is a worthy goal in itself, especially when we're talking consumer grade stuff.
      - wmf 15y ago
        MITM is so trivial on Wi-Fi that protecting against passive sniffing but not MITM just provides a false sense of security. Fortunately there is some progress in this area: http://www.usenix.org/events/sec11/tech/full_papers/Gollakota.pdf http://www.usenix.org/events/sec11/tech/full_papers/Gollakot...
    - tomp 15y ago
      That's really just another way of saying that users shouldn't connect to routers they do not trust. There's this new feature of SSH key generators, where the user is shown an ASCII art of the generated SSH key, to be able to visually remember and recognize it. A standardized graphical representation of certificates could be used to confirm the identity of the router. Imagine walking into Starbucks or any WiFi enabled place, you see a sign on the wall that gives you the network name and the "VisiSign", you connect to the router, your computer shows you the VisiSign of the router, and you can visually confirm the identity of the router.
    - icebraining 15y ago
      Publish the key fingerprint visibly? Then at least savvy users could verify it.
- drzaiusapelord 15y ago
  Oh, I wouldn't say it took expert knowledge in the past. I've been able to download ettercap for years. It'll sniff switched networks. I just need to plug into your LAN. >why isn't the POTS network encrypted? Because I can't pick up the receiver and listen to my neighbor's calls. That's exactly how ethernet doesn't work. I hear all, even on switched networks with a simple tool. Wireless? Even worse, it's the equivalent of using a non-switched hub. I'll even toss in that POTS should be encrypted point to point, but if you would have attempted it before Phil Zimmerman trail-blazed strong encryption for us commoners, you would most likely have ended up in a federal prison if you used non-trivial encryption. So, to address the original question: 1. Encryption really was expensive in 1996 or so, but in the age of multicores, its questionable if there's a real cost now. 2. Performance hit. SSL handshake is long and annoying. We could use a replacement here. 3. Legacy. The hackers who slapped together networks and the various protocols we use weren't interested or couldn't properly secure this stuff. Thus the legacy of spam, plaintext everything, etc. Retro fitting security is hard. Its good if its there from the start like GSM. 4. Standards are hard to change. Imagine telling all the browser makers and open source projects that we should all switch to something that won't add to the bottom lines/download rate/market penetration, but instead cost them time and complexity as well as add server load. Google can't get anyone to care about SPDY. Who is going to re-architect this stuff? We're essentially living in a world convcieved in the 70s, implemented in the 80s, and made popular in the 90s. The easy answer is to stop allowing non-encrypted wifi. I'd love to see the wifi consortium just default to a random key for non-authenticated guests in whatever the newest version of wifi will be. It'll be transparent to the end user and probably stop all these local attacks. It won't help you past the gateway, but right now between the client and the gateway is the problem area. Heck, why not make all networking gear do this, even on wired networks? We have the processing power.
  - MediaBehavior 15y ago
    > 1. Encryption really was expensive in 1996 or so, but in the age of multicores, its questionable if there's a real cost now. A lot of "budget-priced" hosting services are near-free for http and heavily-surcharged for https. - Pricing it to make it seem as if there were some huge cost difference. Makes a difference when shoestring clubs/nonprofits want to throw up a cheap static site.
- Zigurd 15y ago
  > encryption is hard, and thereby expensive The problem with that is that systems like Skype require strong encryption to work at all, and Skype manages to provide high quality voice transmission despite using encryption on a wide variety of OSs and hardware. It will probably be more technically difficult to make Skype friendly to snooping than it was to make it secure.
jedberg 15y ago
The problem here is that encryption is an overloaded term. There are two different things happening when one encrypts, and both are useful independently. The two parts are identity and obfuscation. Obfuscation protects you from listeners who do not control the network, and identity protects you from listeners who do control the network. Together, you know only your intended recipient is getting your message, but apart, at least you are protected from certain threats. So even if we just had obfuscation, that would protect us from most threats. When people say "we need encryption everywhere", I think generally what they mean is "we need obfuscation everywhere" to protect from the worst threats, which are those of the uncontrolling listener. The flip side is that the uninformed will get complacent and assume that obfuscation is giving them identity protection as well.
- Herring 15y ago
  If we're going to overhaul the entire structure of the internet, it wont be because of coffee shop eavesdroppers that haven't learned how to inject traffic.
  - tptacek 15y ago
    I think that's it in a nutshell. When we talk at the level of the design of protocols, we generally concede everything we can reasonably concede to the attacker, and then design against that well-armed attacker. Denying attackers the ability to redirect or inject traffic ties their hands behind their back. There's really no such thing as an "purely passive" attacker. Since the 1990s, probably starting with the deployment of switched ethernet, active attacks have gotten steadily easier and more popular, and passive attacks less so. The frustrating thing here is, we are so close to having this problem licked, but so many smart people are spending time concentrating on problems we don't have. What we need to do is to come up with a credible replacement for the Mozilla/Microsoft/Google-controlled CA system. It's probably no harder to solve that problem than it is to push adoption of weak unauthenticated protocols.
- simonbrown 15y ago
  I assume by obfuscation you mean browsers accepting self-signed certificates in some cases. To do that would require everyone to be using a browser that accepts them, nearly all don't. On the other hand, StartSSL is free and already accepted in some browsers. It seems more promising that eventually nearly all browsers in popular use will have StartCom as a root CA. Of course, there are other problems preventing small and large sites from using SSL, like the requirement of a dedicated IP address (which SNI fixed, but is again not supported in all popular browsers) and the overhead.
brlewis 15y ago
I think it would be paranoid to encrypt all Internet traffic. A lot of traffic isn't sensitive enough to warrant disabling that benevolent man in the middle, the proxy cache.
- wmf 15y ago
  If you want to use a proxy, you can connect to it explicitly.
Adaptive 15y ago
This is two distinct questions rolled up: Why technically Why politically The technical issues are real and deep but they can, were, and continue to be tackled. The bigger issue is that successfully addressing and deploying robust encryption solutions is not a political priority (quite the opposite). Keep well in mind that for many online in the 90s, the assumption was that eventually standards for email encryption, as one example, would become well deployed. The fact that email is today routinely not encrypted (disregard ssl connections for the moment, a whole different barrel of fish) is a demonstration that interested power structures (governments, US primarily) were successful in limiting uptake. There are real challenges to successful distributed crypto, but the political forces in play had the effect of early work withering on the vine for the most part.
- tptacek 15y ago
  I hear it all the time, but I think this is a pretty silly sentiment. Nobody wants the entire Internet encrypted more than the giant banks that Redditors believe control the political system. What malign forces do you believe the government is actually wielding to retard adoption of crypto? Who controls how much of the Internet is encrypted? Because the Internet is an end-to-end system design, the two parties most responsible for crypto adoption are your browser vendor (which vigorously supports crypto adoption), and the people who run servers (most of whom vigorously support crypto adoption). The onus is on you to provide evidence to back your silly argument up.
  - rdl 15y ago
    It was absolutely the case in the 1990s that much of the government actively retarded crypto deployment. The whole ITAR/export control thing (40 bit as a compromise) was a HUGE factor in keeping crypto out by default. Then there was the clipper thing and proposals for key escrow. And, A5 on GSM being weak. Outside of payments, where the government and industry have pushed for strong integrity and authentication (although not really confidentiality), government and big corps have hindered the deployment of crypto. There has been some improvement in the past decade or so, at least in other regulated areas, both in regulation and in industry self-regulation/compliance standards. I think the majority of the reason cryptography isn't more widely deployed is that it's 1) hard to do well and 2) most people writing applications have a hard enough time getting a non-encrypted form working and 3) few people make it a requirement as a customer. However, government has definitely hindered ubiquitous crypto deployment.
onedognight 15y ago
Here djb discusses his proposed protocol for encrypting the internet. http://27c3.iphoneblog.de/recordings/4295.html http://27c3.iphoneblog.de/recordings/4295.html
biot 15y ago
Most people are focusing on modern reasons. The historical reason is that when the internet was being developed, public key encryption hadn't been invented yet. The 1960s and early 1970s was when the internet was created and it was only until the mid 1970s that public key encryption came about. The problems of secure key exchange hadn't been solved at the time. Even if those problems had been solved, clock speeds were measured in megahertz [edit: sometimes kilohertz]; every clock cycle mattered. Fast forward to today and this legacy has remained. Many protocols are being retrofitted to support encryption, but it's similar to why railroad tracks are the width they are: Roman chariots used the same width. Additionally, don't discount developer laziness. It's much easier to debug a plaintext stream than an encrypted one.
- aaronbrethorst 15y ago
  > Roman chariots http://www.snopes.com/history/american/gauge.asp http://www.snopes.com/history/american/gauge.asp
  - biot 15y ago
    Thanks. It looks like I'll need to find a new "historical inertia" analogy to use. Suggestions welcomed.
    - DLWormwood 15y ago
      Read the Snopes article in it's entirety. It's still "technically true;" it just didn't happen with deliberate or accidental intent. "Inertia" is the perfect word in such a case.
esutton 15y ago
it is mentioned briefly on the page, but the major victim of encryption is caching. That is one of the main reasons encrypted traffic is slower.
- Joakal 15y ago
  Caching in which aspect? Browser cache, server cache, server SSL cache, etc?
teilo 15y ago
One might also add that to encrypt all traffic would significantly increase the energy usage of the Internet as a whole.
sandroyong 15y ago
Bruce Schneier was a great proponent of cryptography. In he lat 90's, he touted encryption as the end-all of security measures. Since then, he has backed off his claim. (He later went on and continues to be a proponent of legislative laws for proper surveillance and forcing companies to be more security compliant). So, even Bruce doesn't think encryption is a good idea. Excerpt from a 1998 essay, "Security Pitfalls in Cryptography" that sums it all up: "Strong cryptography is very powerful when it is done right, but it is not a panacea. Focusing on the cryptographic algorithms while ignoring other aspects of security is like defending your house not by building a fence around it, but by putting an immense stake into the ground and hoping that the adversary runs right into it. Smart attackers will just go around the algorithms."
- throwaway64 15y ago
  that is not the same thing as him saying "encryption isn't a good idea"
  - sandroyong 15y ago
    I agree. Encryption is a good idea, but I just don't think it's all that practical. If people really wanted to crack encryption, the technology is there (and if the person has the patience and time) it will be cracked. And they don't want to spend the time and effort to get that encrypted info, there are other ways to really get at it. The user still remains the unpredictable variable and weakest link in network security. I just think there are better ways to secure networks and the internet...
moe 15y ago
The FreeS/WAN project wanted to give us Opportunistic Encryption. http://www.freeswan.org/ending_letter.html http://www.freeswan.org/ending_letter.html (tldr: nobody cared)

77 points by chrisaycock 15y ago

pak 15y ago

Putting aside the whole issue of delegating trust via certificates, the simpler answer is that encryption is hard, and thereby expensive. For many purposes, both service provider and client continue to consider it an unnecessary expense. Only recently, with the spread of wireless networks, has the threat of en masse MITM and eavesdropping attacks become realistic. For a long time, it took serious knowledge to pull these things off on a wired LAN or within the walls of an ISP. You could say the same about phone calls--why isn't the POTS network encrypted?--but that's because it's well constrained within wires run by trusted people and such cost is not justifiable; but with the advent of cell phones, protocols like GSM had encryption built into them, since telcos couldn't ignore that data sent over the air is readily captured and manipulated.

tomp 15y ago
WiFi traffic has nothing to do with internet traffic per se. The problem is that the only popular WiFi protocol that is anonymous (doesn't require passwords/user credentials) is also not encrypted. This problem could elegantly be solved with a ssh-like tunnel between the consumer device and the WiFi router, the rest of the traffic could still be plain text.
- simonbrown 15y ago
  The user's device would somehow have to be sure it's talking to the legitimate router, and not one an attacker set up with a deceptively similar SSID. I can't think of a way this would be possible, unless popular access points were signed by CAs.
  - Herring 15y ago
    You could require physical contact in order to connect. Touch your ipad to this surface & exchange keys. Cumbersome, though.
    - steve-howard 15y ago
      We already have Wi-Fi Protected Setup, which allows you to press a button on the router to connect. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wi-Fi_Protected_Setup http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wi-Fi_Protected_Setup I think it's legitimate to want encryption even if you can't verify identity. Man in the middle may be trivial in that case, but it's still harder than just sniffing packets.
  - drzaiusapelord 15y ago
    This is the classic excuse to not implement encryption: "but we need a web of trust and certificate authorities and central management of identities and a million complex things that'll never work right even if implemented." Encryption without identity validation is a worthy goal in itself, especially when we're talking consumer grade stuff.
    - wmf 15y ago
      MITM is so trivial on Wi-Fi that protecting against passive sniffing but not MITM just provides a false sense of security. Fortunately there is some progress in this area: http://www.usenix.org/events/sec11/tech/full_papers/Gollakota.pdf http://www.usenix.org/events/sec11/tech/full_papers/Gollakot...
  - tomp 15y ago
    That's really just another way of saying that users shouldn't connect to routers they do not trust. There's this new feature of SSH key generators, where the user is shown an ASCII art of the generated SSH key, to be able to visually remember and recognize it. A standardized graphical representation of certificates could be used to confirm the identity of the router. Imagine walking into Starbucks or any WiFi enabled place, you see a sign on the wall that gives you the network name and the "VisiSign", you connect to the router, your computer shows you the VisiSign of the router, and you can visually confirm the identity of the router.
  - icebraining 15y ago
    Publish the key fingerprint visibly? Then at least savvy users could verify it.
drzaiusapelord 15y ago
Oh, I wouldn't say it took expert knowledge in the past. I've been able to download ettercap for years. It'll sniff switched networks. I just need to plug into your LAN. >why isn't the POTS network encrypted? Because I can't pick up the receiver and listen to my neighbor's calls. That's exactly how ethernet doesn't work. I hear all, even on switched networks with a simple tool. Wireless? Even worse, it's the equivalent of using a non-switched hub. I'll even toss in that POTS should be encrypted point to point, but if you would have attempted it before Phil Zimmerman trail-blazed strong encryption for us commoners, you would most likely have ended up in a federal prison if you used non-trivial encryption. So, to address the original question: 1. Encryption really was expensive in 1996 or so, but in the age of multicores, its questionable if there's a real cost now. 2. Performance hit. SSL handshake is long and annoying. We could use a replacement here. 3. Legacy. The hackers who slapped together networks and the various protocols we use weren't interested or couldn't properly secure this stuff. Thus the legacy of spam, plaintext everything, etc. Retro fitting security is hard. Its good if its there from the start like GSM. 4. Standards are hard to change. Imagine telling all the browser makers and open source projects that we should all switch to something that won't add to the bottom lines/download rate/market penetration, but instead cost them time and complexity as well as add server load. Google can't get anyone to care about SPDY. Who is going to re-architect this stuff? We're essentially living in a world convcieved in the 70s, implemented in the 80s, and made popular in the 90s. The easy answer is to stop allowing non-encrypted wifi. I'd love to see the wifi consortium just default to a random key for non-authenticated guests in whatever the newest version of wifi will be. It'll be transparent to the end user and probably stop all these local attacks. It won't help you past the gateway, but right now between the client and the gateway is the problem area. Heck, why not make all networking gear do this, even on wired networks? We have the processing power.
- MediaBehavior 15y ago
  > 1. Encryption really was expensive in 1996 or so, but in the age of multicores, its questionable if there's a real cost now. A lot of "budget-priced" hosting services are near-free for http and heavily-surcharged for https. - Pricing it to make it seem as if there were some huge cost difference. Makes a difference when shoestring clubs/nonprofits want to throw up a cheap static site.
Zigurd 15y ago
> encryption is hard, and thereby expensive The problem with that is that systems like Skype require strong encryption to work at all, and Skype manages to provide high quality voice transmission despite using encryption on a wide variety of OSs and hardware. It will probably be more technically difficult to make Skype friendly to snooping than it was to make it secure.

jedberg 15y ago

The problem here is that encryption is an overloaded term. There are two different things happening when one encrypts, and both are useful independently. The two parts are identity and obfuscation. Obfuscation protects you from listeners who do not control the network, and identity protects you from listeners who do control the network. Together, you know only your intended recipient is getting your message, but apart, at least you are protected from certain threats. So even if we just had obfuscation, that would protect us from most threats. When people say "we need encryption everywhere", I think generally what they mean is "we need obfuscation everywhere" to protect from the worst threats, which are those of the uncontrolling listener. The flip side is that the uninformed will get complacent and assume that obfuscation is giving them identity protection as well.

Herring 15y ago
If we're going to overhaul the entire structure of the internet, it wont be because of coffee shop eavesdroppers that haven't learned how to inject traffic.
- tptacek 15y ago
  I think that's it in a nutshell. When we talk at the level of the design of protocols, we generally concede everything we can reasonably concede to the attacker, and then design against that well-armed attacker. Denying attackers the ability to redirect or inject traffic ties their hands behind their back. There's really no such thing as an "purely passive" attacker. Since the 1990s, probably starting with the deployment of switched ethernet, active attacks have gotten steadily easier and more popular, and passive attacks less so. The frustrating thing here is, we are so close to having this problem licked, but so many smart people are spending time concentrating on problems we don't have. What we need to do is to come up with a credible replacement for the Mozilla/Microsoft/Google-controlled CA system. It's probably no harder to solve that problem than it is to push adoption of weak unauthenticated protocols.
simonbrown 15y ago
I assume by obfuscation you mean browsers accepting self-signed certificates in some cases. To do that would require everyone to be using a browser that accepts them, nearly all don't. On the other hand, StartSSL is free and already accepted in some browsers. It seems more promising that eventually nearly all browsers in popular use will have StartCom as a root CA. Of course, there are other problems preventing small and large sites from using SSL, like the requirement of a dedicated IP address (which SNI fixed, but is again not supported in all popular browsers) and the overhead.

brlewis 15y ago

I think it would be paranoid to encrypt all Internet traffic. A lot of traffic isn't sensitive enough to warrant disabling that benevolent man in the middle, the proxy cache.

wmf 15y ago
If you want to use a proxy, you can connect to it explicitly.

Adaptive 15y ago

This is two distinct questions rolled up: Why technically Why politically The technical issues are real and deep but they can, were, and continue to be tackled. The bigger issue is that successfully addressing and deploying robust encryption solutions is not a political priority (quite the opposite). Keep well in mind that for many online in the 90s, the assumption was that eventually standards for email encryption, as one example, would become well deployed. The fact that email is today routinely not encrypted (disregard ssl connections for the moment, a whole different barrel of fish) is a demonstration that interested power structures (governments, US primarily) were successful in limiting uptake. There are real challenges to successful distributed crypto, but the political forces in play had the effect of early work withering on the vine for the most part.

tptacek 15y ago
I hear it all the time, but I think this is a pretty silly sentiment. Nobody wants the entire Internet encrypted more than the giant banks that Redditors believe control the political system. What malign forces do you believe the government is actually wielding to retard adoption of crypto? Who controls how much of the Internet is encrypted? Because the Internet is an end-to-end system design, the two parties most responsible for crypto adoption are your browser vendor (which vigorously supports crypto adoption), and the people who run servers (most of whom vigorously support crypto adoption). The onus is on you to provide evidence to back your silly argument up.
- rdl 15y ago
  It was absolutely the case in the 1990s that much of the government actively retarded crypto deployment. The whole ITAR/export control thing (40 bit as a compromise) was a HUGE factor in keeping crypto out by default. Then there was the clipper thing and proposals for key escrow. And, A5 on GSM being weak. Outside of payments, where the government and industry have pushed for strong integrity and authentication (although not really confidentiality), government and big corps have hindered the deployment of crypto. There has been some improvement in the past decade or so, at least in other regulated areas, both in regulation and in industry self-regulation/compliance standards. I think the majority of the reason cryptography isn't more widely deployed is that it's 1) hard to do well and 2) most people writing applications have a hard enough time getting a non-encrypted form working and 3) few people make it a requirement as a customer. However, government has definitely hindered ubiquitous crypto deployment.

onedognight 15y ago

Here djb discusses his proposed protocol for encrypting the internet. http://27c3.iphoneblog.de/recordings/4295.html http://27c3.iphoneblog.de/recordings/4295.html

biot 15y ago

Most people are focusing on modern reasons. The historical reason is that when the internet was being developed, public key encryption hadn't been invented yet. The 1960s and early 1970s was when the internet was created and it was only until the mid 1970s that public key encryption came about. The problems of secure key exchange hadn't been solved at the time. Even if those problems had been solved, clock speeds were measured in megahertz [edit: sometimes kilohertz]; every clock cycle mattered. Fast forward to today and this legacy has remained. Many protocols are being retrofitted to support encryption, but it's similar to why railroad tracks are the width they are: Roman chariots used the same width. Additionally, don't discount developer laziness. It's much easier to debug a plaintext stream than an encrypted one.

aaronbrethorst 15y ago
> Roman chariots http://www.snopes.com/history/american/gauge.asp http://www.snopes.com/history/american/gauge.asp
- biot 15y ago
  Thanks. It looks like I'll need to find a new "historical inertia" analogy to use. Suggestions welcomed.
  - DLWormwood 15y ago
    Read the Snopes article in it's entirety. It's still "technically true;" it just didn't happen with deliberate or accidental intent. "Inertia" is the perfect word in such a case.

esutton 15y ago

it is mentioned briefly on the page, but the major victim of encryption is caching. That is one of the main reasons encrypted traffic is slower.

Joakal 15y ago
Caching in which aspect? Browser cache, server cache, server SSL cache, etc?

teilo 15y ago

One might also add that to encrypt all traffic would significantly increase the energy usage of the Internet as a whole.

sandroyong 15y ago

Bruce Schneier was a great proponent of cryptography. In he lat 90's, he touted encryption as the end-all of security measures. Since then, he has backed off his claim. (He later went on and continues to be a proponent of legislative laws for proper surveillance and forcing companies to be more security compliant). So, even Bruce doesn't think encryption is a good idea. Excerpt from a 1998 essay, "Security Pitfalls in Cryptography" that sums it all up: "Strong cryptography is very powerful when it is done right, but it is not a panacea. Focusing on the cryptographic algorithms while ignoring other aspects of security is like defending your house not by building a fence around it, but by putting an immense stake into the ground and hoping that the adversary runs right into it. Smart attackers will just go around the algorithms."

throwaway64 15y ago
that is not the same thing as him saying "encryption isn't a good idea"
- sandroyong 15y ago
  I agree. Encryption is a good idea, but I just don't think it's all that practical. If people really wanted to crack encryption, the technology is there (and if the person has the patience and time) it will be cracked. And they don't want to spend the time and effort to get that encrypted info, there are other ways to really get at it. The user still remains the unpredictable variable and weakest link in network security. I just think there are better ways to secure networks and the internet...

moe 15y ago

The FreeS/WAN project wanted to give us Opportunistic Encryption. http://www.freeswan.org/ending_letter.html http://www.freeswan.org/ending_letter.html (tldr: nobody cared)