4 ms·

I suspect the redirect exists because people were confused by the 404s. As to why no HTTPS, no idea.

chrismorgan 3y ago
If you just don’t listen on port 443, or (if you have other things on the same IP address that do talk HTTPS) even reject connections when clients indicate during TLS handshake that they’re here for www.bom.gov.au, you have no problems. There is no 404—you’ve got to have made a successful HTTP request before there can be one! There’s a regular connection error that the browser knows what to do with. The problem is when you bypass the normal, universally-supported error path technique in order to try to be helpful. You just shouldn’t do that, ever as far as I can tell. Same deal with DNS providers that intercept NXDOMAIN and replace it with a redirect to a search page: it breaks so much stuff. In 2012 I was stuck behind an ISP that intercepted NXDOMAIN on all DNS traffic, so I couldn’t even switch DNS provider to fix it. It was awful. (This, incidentally, is why everything needs transport encryption, because ISPs keep on proving themselves untrustworthy as a class.)
- aragilar 3y ago
  Sorry, I had conflated 404 with a timeout error in my head. I'm not suggesting this is a good thing (and where possible I've pushed to use https), but presumably it's a reaction to something (and so the correct solution is find out why, and fix that)?
  - chrismorgan 3y ago
    I’ve tried over the course of years to imagine any legitimate reason for it, even any technical reason for it, for why you might ever do it. None comes to me. I do not believe that any legitimate reason exists: I suspect it was just a badly-thought-out arbitrary technical decision from quite a few years ago when the impact would have been felt less often, and which they haven’t been willing to revert, if they’ve even noticed any complaints. As for “find out why”, I’ve tried contacting them, multiple times by two or three means, and never received a response, including by one form where they explicitly guaranteed a response to every enquiry.

If you just don’t listen on port 443, or (if you have other things on the same IP address that do talk HTTPS) even reject connections when clients indicate during TLS handshake that they’re here for www.bom.gov.au, you have no problems. There is no 404—you’ve got to have made a successful HTTP request before there can be one! There’s a regular connection error that the browser knows what to do with. The problem is when you bypass the normal, universally-supported error path technique in order to try to be helpful. You just shouldn’t do that, ever as far as I can tell. Same deal with DNS providers that intercept NXDOMAIN and replace it with a redirect to a search page: it breaks so much stuff. In 2012 I was stuck behind an ISP that intercepted NXDOMAIN on all DNS traffic, so I couldn’t even switch DNS provider to fix it. It was awful. (This, incidentally, is why everything needs transport encryption, because ISPs keep on proving themselves untrustworthy as a class.)

aragilar 3y ago
Sorry, I had conflated 404 with a timeout error in my head. I'm not suggesting this is a good thing (and where possible I've pushed to use https), but presumably it's a reaction to something (and so the correct solution is find out why, and fix that)?
- chrismorgan 3y ago
  I’ve tried over the course of years to imagine any legitimate reason for it, even any technical reason for it, for why you might ever do it. None comes to me. I do not believe that any legitimate reason exists: I suspect it was just a badly-thought-out arbitrary technical decision from quite a few years ago when the impact would have been felt less often, and which they haven’t been willing to revert, if they’ve even noticed any complaints. As for “find out why”, I’ve tried contacting them, multiple times by two or three means, and never received a response, including by one form where they explicitly guaranteed a response to every enquiry.