It works. It's fine. No, it does not need ssl. What, someone is going to hack a floppy driver for a computer, which doesn't even have a built in network stack?!
No, I am not going to do work on it, any work, at all.
Millions of such sites exist, are fine, are safe.
Depending on what the drivers are for, you may be a prime candidate for MitM. People already go to your site to download software they're going to run in the most privileged mode. This is a perfect candidate for a type of watering hole attack.
Considering you're providing those for 90s machines, you could be the last resort website for a few interesting industry computers with no security restrictions around them.
Doing that MitM is technically very easy, but in practice pretty hard. You'd have to have an adversary on your network path watching for connections to this particular esoteric low-volume site hosting drivers for machines from the 80s and 90s.
That is extremely unlikely.
I have a much easier way to target that content: Just put up a new site hosting the same content with malware attached. No need for MitM shenanigans.
Security isn't about absolutes, it is about risk managment and being aware of the likelihood and consequence of the risks is important.
Without HTTPS, the content can be replaced entirely. Last time it was JavaScript that DDOS'd github. If you don't want to serve content over HTTPS, then you don't care what your users receive. Just delete the site and they all get 404's instead, since you already admit that you don't care either way.
If it makes you feel any better, HTTP without HTTPS was a mistake we all made together. It should never have happened.
Given that http predates SSL 1.0 by a few years, somewhat inevitable.
You're at a coffee shop or library using their WiFi. Your computer sends a plaintext HTTP message. The attacker just needs to be able to see that message and get a response back to you before the real site does, and the real site is a lot further away than the guy sitting at the table next to you (or the hacked router, if he doesn't want to be there in person). Then they can feed your browser whatever they want.
A login form to phish you, perhaps?
They can even start replying, then go off and fetch from the actual site before finishing the response, if it helps to incorporate the real data.
There is nothing wrong with your website. However, you shouldn't be surprised when modern browsers stop working with it. Progress doesn't come free.
>are safe
No, they are not.
>No, I am not going to do work on it, any work, at all.
If you are too lazy to do it securely maybe you just shouldn't do it at all.
HTTPS everywhere by default can't come fast enough. There is no excuse at all to not have HTTPS support today and browsers should deny access to these lazy and careless sites by default. Anyone who can't spend the 5m to set it up for their website can go kick rocks as far as I'm concerned.
This genuinely happens a lot in the 2020s.
More likely sites get cloned, improve their SEO over the original, and distribute malware.
Sceptical of that claim, can you provide a few documented cases?
Particularly for low-volume sites like the parent post.
And update all links to not go back to the HTTP site...
And troubleshoot weird issues (TLS errors are generally not helpful)...
And maintain that setup for years...
Not an insurmountable effort for sure, but if you estimate 30 min for the total additional effort of adding HTTPS to a site then I have a bridge to sell you.
Frankly, even sadly, they are also entirely forgettable and don’t add enough value to hold back the modern web.
I always chuckle at this site does not need SSL post from n-gate.
PS: Use the URL directly in browser because the site doesn't like traffic from HN.
Or just fix your browser settings to not send cross-domain Referer headers.
HTTPS can introduce all scenarios for not being able to connect.
I'm not hosting any secret data, but I do want to be able to post from anywhere.