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Comment by tombrossman | Hacker News Reader

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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