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Comment by dalke | Hacker News Reader

Chrome's ability to control how people interact with the world is also contributing to the death of the old, independent web. From an email yesterday from the administrator of the Computational Chemistry List (which started in 1991), at https://server.ccl.net/cgi-bin/ccl/message-new?2024+08+08+00... :

> I have to redo the CCL Web Site, since currently all pages that are not "secure" (https) will not be displayed in Chrome and some other browsers. So http is gone and practically replaced by https. The http pages are treated as insecure, and you cannot view them as http://www.ccl.net like before. The whole site needs to be redone (I mean gigabytes of stuff). This will be a painful process and the problems will persist for a while. [...] I hope I will finish this conversion before I die... If not, then, Bye, Bye, CCL.

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I am extremely sympathetic to the "SSL inherently breaks the promise of the web" arguments, and yet this story makes no sense... why is the cost of converting a website to use SSL being measured in gigabytes of content rather than in number of hostnames cross endpoints, and how is (from the web page, not your quote of it) breaking all of the URLs even slightly an acceptable step on the way to a solution?! Just none of their situation makes sense to me...

Because the person who is charge is not a software developer, systems administrator, or anything like your background, so is unable to explain things in your terms.

Without knowing the specifics of what the administrator has in mind, it sounds like something easily solved with a reverse proxy.

Yes, and someone followed up with that suggestion.

But the problem is that someone needs to do it. Jan Labanowski is xkcd's "random person in Nebraska", a computational chemist volunteering unpaid time, on a 30 year old code base. That isn't so easy to step into, computational quantum chemists who are interesting in doing that migration are as rare as hen's teeth, and why would a non-QC systems developer help?

Yes, there are other mailing list hosting options, but the style and character of CCL is atypical enough that it warrants commentary in Wikipedia, at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_Chemistry_List . It is unlikely to be transplanted elsewhere.

It is that sort of independent web which gets smothered by Google's near single-handed ability to determine what people are allowed to view with Chrome, in this case in the name of "security".

To be fair, Google isn’t the only voice pushing for TLS being the default. It’s practically dogma in tech circles generally.

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