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Comment by nullbyte808 | Hacker News Reader

The irony, starts a cryptography association and doesn't even use SSL.

Possible (half-serious) counter-point: people who understand cryptography know when it is and isn't necessary and don't need to default it on for everything like the rest of us mortals?

Serious counter-counter-point for anybody interested: HTTPS protects people from ISP-based MITM attacks. This by itself is more than enough reason to always use HTTPS if your website can be accessed by other people, even if it is just a small little innocent static blob of HTML.

Can’t the ISP still know what site you are visiting?

Not necessarily. That's a simple question with a complex answer. There's a lot of "ifs" and maybes and it depends a lot on how the site is set up internally.

That’s not really the point. Say the MITM just replaces the phone number with one of their own so that a potential client calls the wrong number and pays the wrong person.

doesn't man in the middle only apply if there were forms or anything requiring user input. I.e. a portion of the website is real, but the user interaction is attacked with MITM.

If the risk is that an ISP would spoof the entire website at AI, then that can be done regardless of HTTPS.

> If the risk is that an ISP would spoof the entire website at AI, then that can be done regardless of HTTPS.

No, an ISP cannot spoof a valid certificate for a website

> HTTPS protects people from ISP-based MITM attacks

On the infinite list things to worry about, "ISP-based MITM attacks" ranks somewhere around "getting bitten by a shark while fighting a velociraptor" and "accidentally getting abducted by a UFO".

Please, please, let's start solving real problems.

P.S. I know about dishonest ISP's that try to inject ads into pages. Switch to a better ISP, problem solved.

> Switch to a better ISP, problem solved.

There are a lot of people in this world who can choose between exactly one ISP.

There are a lot of people who can choose between exactly one supermarket.

Should you equip everyone in the world with an e-coli tester? You know, it's super-easy for a supermarket employee to infect your food with e-coli!

Some problems don't need a technical solution, okay?

In 2022, the strongest possible argument against using HTTPS is "it's not strictly necessary". That's it. It's not expensive, it's not hard, it's not slow. The worst case is you've done something unnecessary for most people (arguably).

Yeah, if "e-coli testers" were free, easy to distribute, and consumed no resources, including them with every supermarket purchase would be a great idea.

Also if it has been proven that, given a chance, many supermarkets have and still actively do inject e-coli into their foods because they are able to profit off of it somehow, then the "e-coli testers" would be an even better idea.

That might be very new information, but there are 195 countries in the world (194 apart from yours!) with plenty of them forcing internet censorship or gov espionage.

I'm kinda happy that the worst scenario in yours are internet ads, but you can't say that if your country don't force providers to inject fake pages for selective pages, there is not need to protect traffic for the whole world.

And no, you can't switch ISP in the case if the hacking comes from gov censorship agencies.

You must be a theoretician, because people who actually have to deal with censorship know that government entities mandate certificate MITM or block domains whole-sale.

So https does nothing for censorship unless you're worried about the absolutely unrealistic case of a government entity running search-and-replace on your webpage content at the ISP level. (Unrealistic because they can just send a legal order to whoever is hosting this content instead.)

I'm a holder of Russian passport, so no, I'm not a theoretician.

1) They block the whole-domain only in case of https which reminds you to turn-on the VPN. In case of http you could just have something like 404 response for particular page and you would never know that it's actually not 404, but ISP block (depends on ISP and DPI). So still https is preferable to be able to distinguish between two types of blocks.

2) They don't do "replace" in general, true, but for opposition resources they might be creative.

3) Most of hosters and content providers (if they don't have legal presence in Ru) don't care about legal orders from Russia (as well as from other third-world dictatorship regimes) until it's some real valid stuff to complain about.

Those who know, know, that selectively using encryption creates metadata that paints targets on more sensitive communications

This is the sort of thing that lay people like me imagine that serious infosec pros would pay attention to.

But to be perfectly honest: between the uncle with TS at a defense contractor, the ex-girlfriend Political Science valedictorian with an Arabic minor who “taught English” in Waziristan, and the pre-IPO Facebook job, I just sort of assume that if the Equation Group wants to know if I watch Internet porn, “I will do nothing, because I can do nothing”.

I was just kidding around folks: obviously TLS is the right default.

Incidentally you can bet your ass that someone at YC has a model of their amortized differential deal flow per page view and that they work harder at keeping it up-to-date than the RustHN discord channel where they call in the Team.

So troll-ass threads like this are pure free-ride.

Seemingly none of these TLD-only domains have valid certs. Perhaps no certificate authority will sign this format?

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