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Comment by _zagj | Hacker News Reader

Meanwhile it's 2026 and Greg's own website still doesn't support TLS.

Honestly, until encrypted client hello has widespread support, why bother? I mean I did it for fun the first time and now with caddy its not a lot of effort. But for a personal blog, a completely static site, what benefit do you get from the encryption? Anyone monitoring the traffic will see the domain in clear text anyway. And they'd see the destination IP, which I imagine in this case being one server that has exactly one domain pointed at it.

Men in the middle including predatory ISPs can not only spy but also enrich. Injecting JavaScript and embedding ads is the best case scenario. You don't want that.

In addition even without bad actors TLS will prevent random corruption due to flaky infrastructure from breaking the page and even caching those broken assets, preventing a reload from fixing it. TCP/IP alone doesn't sufficiently prevent this.

TCP ensures what gets sent on one side gets received on the other side. TLS just encrypts the data. So even without TLS, random corruptions won't happen unless someone does MITM attack.

No it does not. I've had this happen in legacy systems myself. The checksums of TCP/IP are weak and will let random errors through to L7 if there are enough of them. It's not even CRC and you must bring your own verification if it's critical for your application that the data is correct. TLS does that and more, protecting not only against random corruption but also active attackers. The checks you get for free are to be seen only as an optimization, letting most but not all errors be discarded quick and easy. Just use TLS.

I saw myself years ago that Verizon injected marketing tracking headers into http traffic. My ISP was the MITM.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/11/verizon-x-uidh

> JavaScript

Why do you allow that RCE in the first place?

Most users have JS enabled nowadays. Much of the web doesn't work without it. It was just an example.

Integrity. TLS does prevent man-in-the-middle attacks. For a personal blog, that may not be important but you _do_ get a benefit, even if the encryption is not necessary.

Yeah, that was my point. This guy is Linus' chief lieutenant and heir apparent, and he doesn't even bother to ensure the integrity of his transmissions is protected through TLS.

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