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Comment by StavrosK | Hacker News Reader

Because if there's one thing pirates are known for, it's their commitment to your security.

I just checked, the two most popular public torrent sites have COMODO CA default-on https.

These sites do want to maintain security, so their users can keep coming back rather than getting copyright strikes or worse fines and getting scared off. That doesn't stop them from putting viruses in the ad banners, but that is not getting their users arrested.

Except that torrent sites are not necessarily completely used for pirating.

Torrent sites, especially the popular ones mentioned above, are almost entirely used for pirating. Bittorrent, on the other hand, is not exclusively used for piracy.

I'm fairly sure that raiding ships isn't very good for the security of the crew. Although, it might teach them to invest in better cannons.

Pirates that don't pay attention to security don't last very long, so I would tend to agree with that statement.

Try a quick survey of the most popular pirate sites and see how many support HTTPS. You might be pleasantly surprised.

That's not caring about security, it's just not wanting to get blocked by firewalls. I don't think you can seriously argue that pirate sites care about security when the biggest thing on a page is an adware-installing, fake "DOWNLOAD" button.

How does HTTPS help circumvent firewalls? I wasn't aware this was a feature. My understanding is that a firewall blocking file-sharing sites would do so whether the site was HTTP or HTTPS.

My point is that by using HTTPS, these sites have demonstrated a higher level of proficiency with security tools than many more popular mainstream sites. I agree the scammy fake download buttons are a problem though, but that's what ad-blockers are for...

How does HTTPS help circumvent firewalls?

The firewall cannot do deep packet inspection on encrypted connections, since it cannot decrypt the data: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_packet_inspection

But AFAIK they can block the whole domain, when you access an https site any proxy or firewall you have can see the domain but nothing more.

For example a firewall would see that you entered Google.com but not what you searched

A firewall cannot see encrypted layer-7 traffic, true, but you can block sites by IP/hostname. HTTPS does not help you circumvent firewalling.

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