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Comment by platz | Hacker News Reader

It seems like the thing an immature boy would do, but hey it just HTTP/2 protocol, no harm done!

I downvoted you, but I thought I'd explain why - I don't think it's reasonable to characterise this as childish. Government surveillance is something which our industry is the best positioned to speak out against. This type of thing seems to be clearly political speech, and not a prank.

It also is something that really hurts our industry, perhaps more so than any other industry out there.

Edit: To be clear, I mean the spying hurts our industry.

Legit question, why?(in this case) If you mean general lack of professionalism, sure, but in this case encoding this as a matter of protest seems appropriate.

Genuine question, how does it really hurt our industry?

You mean because "outsiders" will see us as childish or for some technical reason?

I meant the spying hurts our industry as those who buy IT services lose trust in the confidentiality of their data.

Yes; the entirety of our internet infrastructure is...almost...hopelessly insecure. The OpenSSL team refuses to even use SSL/TLS on their website because "they don't want anyone to get the slightest illusion that it's secure" and want everyone to manually verify the SHA hashes.

Have they posted their concerns regarding SSL/TLS? It would make interesting reading. I am assuming the issue is the certificate issuance hierarchy and correspondent lack of transparency, but that's just a guess.

Of course if those hashes are also served via plaintext, then comparing them also doesn't matter, and using them as verification is akin to praying to not be compromised

The OpenSSL team uses TLS on www.openssl.org. I don't know where you found that quote.

> The OpenSSL team refuses to even use SSL/TLS on their website because "they don't want anyone to get the slightest illusion that it's secure"

Eh?

1) Visting http://www.openssl.org automatically redirects me to https://www.openssl.org .

2) The OpenSSL source code is stored in a git repo in GitHub. While this doesn't ensure that the code hasn't been tampered with, git does make it substantially easier to detect tampering than other VCSs do.

3) All of the release tarballs are PGP signed. Verification of the authenticity of these files is just about as automatic as it gets.

I could be mistaken but I think, not too long ago, openssl.org used to redirect to openssl.net.

And if I recall correctly, it was http://openssl.net not https://.

Is it possible there have been some changes in recent years?

> Is it possible there have been some changes in recent years?

Well, I made my comment based largely on information that I verified a few minutes before I wrote the comment. I'm unaware of the site's history.

> This type of thing seems to be clearly political speech

So it's your assertion that a thing cannot be both "childish" and "political speech" at the same time?

As part of the in-group I can think it's kind of funny in a "stick it to the man" kind of way. But considering that much of what let's the NSA do what it does is because of the failure of organizations like the IETF (and bystanders like ourselves not to put more pressure on them) to make secure technologies prevalent, it's not that funny anymore.

This is exactly what the NSA wants. That you feel like you're on the right side and "sticking it to the man" while they laugh all the way to their long term data storage.

Apparently Feynman is pretty "childish" too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10650175

I don't think Feynman would have disagreed with that.

It might be political speech, but it's also childish.

What is it intended to accomplish? What is the actual statement being made, and who is the intended audience? Not the government - they already know what PRISM is. Also not the common internet user. If it had the potential to be effective at influencing or censoring political dialogue, I would be upset at the attempt to bake propaganda (however sympathetic the tech community might be to it) into what should be a politically neutral protocol. But it does seem more like a prank than anything else.

If IETF members were all immature boys, the Internet (along with many other things) would probably be a lot worst than it is today.

I disagree! I think there's a pretty good case to be made that if the IETF is not in fact comprised of immature hobbyists, its overall behavior is well described by a reversion to that lowest common denominator.

There are some great IETF success stories (mostly from a long time ago), but most of the best IETF products are the result of forceful and expert engineering done by just one or two people, carefully documented. You can see how much better that kind of work is than the IETF collaborative process by looking at the v2's and v3's of standards that started out the other way.

It's not a crazy observation to make. Think about the culture of heavily-engaged Wikipedia volunteers. Wikipedia is an amazing resource, probably the most impressive thing on the entire Internet, but most HN commenters would have no trouble calling it out for immaturity, insularity, and frivolity.

You disagree with the statement:

> If IETF members were all immature boys, [...]

and then you go on to make a point that agrees with OP, pointing out that IETF members are very mature engineers that are trying to solve hard problems.

No. You've misread me. I do not like the IETF, and feel like even though there are lots of well-intentioned and highly-competent engineers working within it, its process and current overall membership produces results that are sometimes indistinguishable from "immature hobbyists".

Specifically, I think the argument that the success of the modern Internet is evidence that the IETF is "mature" is dubious and worth debating.

(Hey: just to be totally clear: I do not think the string "PRISM" is evidence of immaturity.)

The Internet is apparently in its "infantile" brain stage. Would we notice when the Internet's "memory" (the Web) becomes a cantankerously irreverent mentally unstable adolescent?

And we're imprisoned in this madness!

It's called "satire". It's truth speaking to power.

BTW, "I'm rubber and you're glue..."

Updated: And what's gender got to do with it?

"Martin" is usually a boy's name.

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