Like the TSA at the airport.
Security that we never needed before, but now suddenly we do.
Now we’re dependent on a third party gatekeeper for permission to have a web site.
Free, for now.
It’s a move by the weasels-that-be to turn the Internet into yet another tool for profit and control.
Go ahead, submit your credit card details in plain text. I’m sure nothing bad will happen.
But 99% of us with websites don’t take credit card numbers.
Do you take login credentials that could be skimmed and used for identity theft?
Maybe this one will strike home for people who think it’s a scam by The Man:
With no HTTPS, every single thing you do on the web can be monitored by your ISP’s automated tracking system and sold to data warehouses that then sell the data on to AI aggregators who can profile your activity to figure out how to shape your future behaviour based on how you responded in the past.
And HTTPS isn’t just about protecting secrets, it’s about validating the communication channel hasn’t been tampered with. Without it, anyone between you and your destination could be modifying what actually gets sent back to you, injecting anything from malware to slight changes in text content based on the above profiling info.
HTTPS is part of what keeps the web free and federated.
Yes, security. We love security now. The argument is well known.
But now you need permission from an official to have a web site. That’s bad, right?
You should probably be more concerned about DNS than HTTPS. DNS is a point where government censors actually do go after web sites they don’t like.
What? I’ve got all sorts of self hosted websites. Encrypted by HTTPS. No permission needed. If Let’s Encrypt vanished, I’d just switch to self-signing my certificates and using a pinning service.
Doesn’t chrome flag self-signed certificates?
Ok, I didn’t know that was a thing. Thanks
Wait, what? Who needs permission from whom to run a website? I can spin up a website right now, I can spin up as many as I want. You can too. There is no permission needed to get https setup on your website, it can be simple or a bit more involved depending on who you are using as your host or if you are handling everything yourself from a vps or locally hosted server.
Please do yourself a favor and delete this thread and stop commenting. You are way out your depths here and have no idea how anything works.
I don’t need permission to have a website. I need to prove I have control over a domain so that I can get a certificate for it. That way I can’t get a certificate for lemmy.org when I don’t own or control lemmy.org.
I don’t know what drug You’re smoking friend but please stop. It’s giving you brainrot.
Yes, you need an organization which signs your certificate, so it is trusted by default. This is our trust-anchor so we know the certificate presented was validated and it was given only to the website owner.
There are numerous around the world for that.
And if that is no longer offered, you can just not have your certificate signed, which means browsers will complain about it.
But you can trust your own certificate yourself. Or create your own certificate authority which can then sign other certificates for the community as their new trust anchor.
I think we would very quickly build the web-of-trust, but for certificates.You can even not have certificates, but keep an weak form of TLS (no idea if browsers support TLS_DH_anon_*), but its still encrypted and can only be broken by an active Man-in-the-Middle-attack. (which is theoretically detectable later on)
Diffie-Hellman is an awesome key-exchange.
No.
HTTP is like using a postcard, HTTPS is using a sealed envelope. Which would you use for your bank information?
The “third party gatekeeper” does more than just secure data, it also acts as a validation that your site is what it says it is. So if someone jacks your domain out from under you and hosts something totally different, people can tell that something’s up.
99% of us with websites never touch bank information.
But would you be OK taking all the stuff you write on those websites, and scrawling it on a giant chalkboard in your town square instead? One where anyone can see (or even change) what you’ve written?
That’s never been an issue for me.
Yes, I can see how that would be a bad thing but it’s so hypothetical. Why do we even care? Do we really feel the breath of the NSA on our neck to that degree?
You can not only use that information for e.g. blackmail, but also to build material to manipulate you to do things without you knowing.
Information is a powerful tool.
And http still works in any browser I know of.
I kind of get your frustration though. I set up my personal website precisely to get away from big platforms; yet my HTTPS is validated by Google. It feels like a defeat still having them involved in the process.
I have HTTPS on all my services and the only third-party involved is Let’s Encrypt.
If I really wanted to, I could create my own authority and certificates, and as long as people connecting to it trusted my authority they’ll have encrypted and trusted connections without any third party involved.
Yeah, there’s ways around it for sure, so it’s not the end of the world.
I’m not super technical though, so as my hosting provider uses Google for HTTPS authentication I’ll just reluctantly stick with that for now. Of course I could have found a different provider, but I found it a somewhat difficult market to navigate. I’m enough of a rookie that part of me is just happy things seem to be working - when I set up the website a few months ago I kind of assumed HTTPS was some black magic stuff that I would never manage to implement.
I remember when I thought it was black magic, but after doing some work creating my own certificate authority and self-signed certificates it makes a lot more sense.
Now Kubernetes, that’s black magic
Thank you.
Use http and Chrome calls you insecure and there’s a red flag and you have to hit a special button… daunting for the average user for sure.
Firefox is good tho.
One person pointed out that letsencrypt is backed by a bunch of good powerful people. Which might be bullshit but it makes me think again.
No, it is not a scam or like the TSA. (… which is of much less clear benefit, but that’s a different story.)
Security that we never needed before, but now suddenly we do.
How do you figure? Dropping unsafe practices earlier would’ve been a great idea, it was just another item in the long list of “people suck at technology”, that stuck around out of habit and sloppiness. HTTPS is not new, but for a long time it was much more acceptable to deal with plain unsafe solutions for many uses. Since setting up an HTTPS site for free got very, very easy, there just weren’t many excuses left.
Now we’re dependent on a third party gatekeeper for permission to have a web site.
Sort of. By necessity, in a chain of trust, the buck has to stop somewhere, that’s your root “authority”. In some cases you just make your own on the logic that you trust yourself, or accept some other cert/authority as trusted, or tell the browser “yeah whatever, I know what I’m doing” if you know it’s safe. The catch is that then, for any number of reasons, you can’t necessarily know it’s safe.
It’s a move by the weasels-that-be to turn the Internet into yet another tool for profit and control.
No offense, are you sure you have the technical background required to know that?
Websites were already dependent on third parties for domain registration in the first place, so OPs complaint about cert authorities makes less sense.
Good parallel. Trusting DNS with interpreting a hostname is not all that different from trusting CAs about whom else you should trust.
The problem with TSA is that it reduces our privacy and dignity in exchange for security (that security may be theatre). HTTPS is different because it increases privacy which allows us to keep more dignity (security that is not theatre.)
TSA is like needing to strip so that your clothes don’t get wet while going out in the rain, while HTTPS is like wearing a raincoat so your clothes don’t get wet while going out in the rain.
I’d consider my internet browsing unknowingly being snooped on or having content injected as a benefit and not a scam.
The latest post from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital freedom and privacy advocacy group touches on HTTPS, and how HTTPS becoming the norm is an improvement on privacy compared to the past.
deleted by creator
Now we’re dependent on a third party gatekeeper for permission to have a web site.
Source ?
Even though most browser would return an alarm in case of “self signed certificate” you can still do-it, and it’s still more secure than non encryption
Source ?
I refer to the issuer of the security certificate
That’s not how security certificates work
I understand the issue of big tech being the authority, but I also see the benefit of hiding my data from ISP and snooping. There are practical p2p ways to make this work or even a federated authenticator but we are probably stuck with https for a long while yet
no.
