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All I got from your explanation is:

I am going to cross the street in front of that speeding car because driver will be held liable when I get hit and die.

If there is not even a possibility to hijack the traffic whole range of things just won’t happen. And holding someone liable is not the solution.

Technological measures don't make things impossible: they make them harder. And they rarely solve all the consequences of a problem: only the ones that have been explicitly identified.

The situation is more akin to demanding that pedestrians should be prevented from crossing the road at all cost because a malicious driver could ignore all red lights. And of course banning pedestrias ins't enough. After all, motorcyles are also pretty unsafe so we ban those too. But you see someone could also be pointing a bazooka at the road so then we require all cars to have sufficient armor plating in order to be allowed on the road. That is, before realizing that portable nukes exists and you never know who has one. We don't do that. Instead we develop specific solutions (e.g. an over/underpass for high risk intersections, walls for highways) where they are actually needed without loosing sight of the unreasonable cost (not just monetary) that demanding zero risk would impose.

For me TLS is an overpass - yeah it costs more to build it, pedestrians have to climb the stairs to get on the other side but it is worth it. Then hopefully we have Let's Encrypt that can be an elevator/lift so pedestrians don't have to climb the stairs.

But that analogy of course runs dry rather quick because you can look both ways when crossing street - on the internet as I mentioned you cannot control where data flows and bad actors already proven that they are doing so.

This is why it is not like overpass that you can build where the need is - because for internet traffic the need is everywhere.

> The situation is more akin to demanding that pedestrians should be prevented from crossing the road at all cost because a malicious driver could ignore all red lights.

Only if you are talking about actual events in which this is happening as a matter of course. Because that's what it is when ISPs inject ads into plain-text HTTP traffic: a matter of course. It's a bit more like saying that we don't have a way to effectively enforce our laws against maliciously reckless driving so we install a series of speed bumps on the road (it's still not quite the same thing because it doesn't make the reckless driving impossible but it does increase the cost).

But it's not like we're talking about agreeable activity here, anyway. This particular case against TLS sounds like a case that favors criticizing an imperfect solution to widespread negative behavior over criticizing the negative behavior. It seems reasonable to look at the speed bumps (which one may or may not find distasteful) and curse the reckless behavior of those who incentivized their construction.

Counterpounts:

> Transport security doesn't make 0-days any less of a concern.

It does. Each layer of security doesn't eliminate the problem but does make the attack harder.

Mail and food are different in that there are not limitless scalable attacks that can originate anywhere around the globe.

> transport security doesn't make 0-days any less of a concern.

It does make the actual execution of said attacks significantly harder. To actually hit someone's browser, they need to receive your payload. In the naive case, you can stick it on a webserver you control, but how many people are going to randomly visit your website? Most people visit only a handful of domains on a regular visit, and you've got tops a couple days before your exploit is going to be patched.

So you need to get your payload into the responses from those few domains people are actually making requests from. If you can pwn one of them, fantastic. Serve up your 0-day. But those websites are big, and are constantly under attack. That means you're not going to find any low-hanging fruit vulnerability-wise. Your best bet is trying to get one of them to willing serve your payload, maybe in the guise of an ad or something. Tricky, but not impossible.

But before universal https, you have another option: target the delivery chain. If they connect to a network you control? Pwned. If they use a router with bad security defaults that you find a vulnerability in? Pwned. If they use a small municipal ISP that turns out to have skimped on security? Pwned. Hell, you open up a whole attack vector via controlling an intermediate router at the ISP level. That's not to mention targeting DNS servers.

HTTPS dramatically shrinks the attack surface for the mass distribution unwanted payloads down to basically the high-traffic domains and the CA chain. That's a massive reduction.

> The only people who can realistically MITM your connection are network operators and governments.

Literally anyone can be a network operator. It takes minimal hardware. Coffee shop with wifi? Network operator. Dude popping up a wifi hotspot off his phone? Network operator. Sketchy dude in a black hoodie with a raspberry pi bridging the "Starbucks_guest" as "Starbucks Complimentary Wifi"? Network operator. Putting the security of every packet of web traffic onto "network operators" means drastically reducing internet access.

> You have no more security that your food wasn't tampered with during transport but somehow you live with that.

I've yet to hear of a case where some dude in a basement poisoned a CISCO truck without having to even put on pants. Routers get hacked plenty.

HTTPS is an easy, trivial-cost solution that completely eliminates multiple types of threats, several of which are either have major damage to their target or risk mass exposure, or both. Universal HTTPS is like your car beeping at you when you start moving without your seat belt on: kinda annoying when you're doing a small thing in tightly controlled environments, but has an outstanding risk reduction, and can be ignored with a little headache if you really want to.

I especially agree with your point about Cisco trucks (although I think you meant Sysco, an important distinction since we are comparing food supply to networks). The fact is, there are plenty of ways to poison the food supply in our current society. Even ways that might minimize your ability to be discovered. And yet it is rarely tried. But networks are infiltrated all the time. I think partially because networks are accessible from anywhere in the world. No pants (as you said) or passport required.