4 ms·
As personal websites become less and less frequent, it become easier for governments to disregard them and regulate them out of existence. Expect the barrier to
by ghssds 2y ago
As personal websites become less and less frequent, it become easier for governments to disregard them and regulate them out of existence. Expect the barrier to entry for building a website to become so high only corporations can afford it.
- aboardRat4 2y agoThis is already the case in China. You need a mass media license for a website.
- aitchnyu 2y agoBritish forum admins cutting off a couple of decades of posts to be legally compliant.
- zhouzhao 2y agoDo you have any source for that? Chinese language content is also fine
- aboardRat4 2y agoSure, pretty much any cloud provider has detailed info. For example, Tencent: https://cloud.tencent.com/developer/article/1396101 https://cloud.tencent.com/developer/article/1396101 The are, basically, two kinds of licenses, for websites participating in commercial activity (ads, shops), called ICP证，and for smaller websites, not directly involved into commercial activity, ICP备案.
- lproven 2y agoInformative. Scary, but informative.
- superkuh 2y agoFor example, HTTPS-only in browsers and CA TLS only connections in HTTP/3 protocol libraries. It's near impossible to host a visitable website without getting permission from a third party corporation every 90 days. These things make sense for corporate/institutional/etc sites but make the barrier to entry, and especially mantainence over time, of personal websites much more difficult. To the point it really does keep people from running personal websites. And it also creates central mechanisms of control for those that do jump through the hoops. LetsEncrypt won't remain benevolent forever as it's popularity grows. Just look at what happened to dot org, and what's happening in the USA in general. HTTP+HTTPS is a fine solution for personal websites.
- bruce511 2y agoOn the one hand, yes, certificates are issued by certificate authorities. And this is a critical part of the current web landscape. But, I'll counterpoint that LetsEncrypt isn't the only ACME provider. Should they behave badly others can step into the gap. The 90 day thing isn't a barrier. Certificates in general are automated- it's no harder to be HTTPS than HTTP. Promoting HTTPS and dropping HTTP is ultimately valuable to all sites, because it prevents HTML injection. Given that your reader will be accessing the web via an ISP it prevents that ISP from injecting things into your site. As an author of my own websites, I'm https only, and I think LE improves the indie web experience. There is a long chain of big companies between my site and my reader (Isp, LE, DNS, browser etc) but HTTPS offers me the best way of making sure the contect I create is the content delivered.
- superkuh 2y agoWhy is dropping HTTP valuable? CA HTTPS is extremely fragile and will eventually break over even just a few years without mantainence. HTTP sites have no expiration date(s). HTTP+HTTPS is the best of both worlds. Unless your threat model includes targeted MITM attacks and your website requires the execution of javascript code.
- aboardRat4 2y agoIPSs constantly inject ads and trackers into plain http. Maybe less so in the West, but on a permanent basis in the East.
- ForTheKidz 2y agoI cannot overemphasize how dumb it is to allow your isp to see what you're doing.
- superkuh 2y agoI feel the same way about letting a corporation control who can visit your site and when (CA TLS only). I personally tunnel to a VPS for browsing because my ISP, Comcast, will do MITM injections of javascript into HTTP pages. This notably used to break the Steam browser. So the best solution is HTTP+HTTPS on the server and using HTTPS till it inevitably breaks (for legal, technical, social, or other reason), then the HTTP is there to keep things accessible. I'm not anti-HTTPS. I'm anti-HTTPS-only. And you should be too if you care about human persons over corporate use cases.