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The attacker will merely reply on your behalf. Does not improve the situation.

I don't think that's helpful. Perhaps more along the lines of putting a flat redirect on port 80, with no content.

(It sounds like this attack depends on a complete version of the website being available over port 80)

> (It sounds like this attack depends on a complete version of the website being available over port 80)

No, it doesn't. An attacker can always connect to the website over HTTPS and proxy the content to the victim over port 80.

Hmm, yes, of course you are correct. I'm not sure why I was thinking that wouldn't be a risk.

The real drastic solution is to disable HTTP for the entire internet and stop implicitly trusting the identity of servers. Until we decide that is worthwhile we're just going to be patching a leaky boat.