rurcliped

If you want this added to the standard of care, then work on having it introduced at Grey Sloan Memorial Hospital. Seriously.

The great fallacy of spam filtering is that access control SHOULD be probabilistic whenever it is easy to implement that. Let's look at the physical world where implementation is harder. It's very unlikely that I'll arrive home from work at 4:30 AM, AND that I'll be driving a rental car instead of my own car, AND that I'll be wearing new shoes with a sole pattern that my smart walkway hasn't seen before. So, ideally my home security system would automatically call the police. Right?

This is a topic where a big chunk of the highest-quality information is available only offline. A recent book has an entire chapter (22 pages) about the history of Brownie cameras:

Old Fields: Photography, Glamour, and Fantasy Landscape by John R. Stilgoe (2014), ISBN 978-0-8139-3515-7.

This has a side question: is there a business model for curated information about what ISN'T online (not even in Google Books)? I want a product that intercepts my Google web searches and tells me "You're wasting your time. Searches for this topic prove satisfactory in only 12% of cases. Consider buying some books or hiring an expert."

I have public content that I'm willing to share over the web. To offer it over HTTP, I only need a few thousand lines of code on top of TCP. It's realistic to prove that that code has no memory-safety problems. To offer it over HTTPS, I need to add tens of thousands of lines of extra code related to cryptography. No existing implementation is known to be correct. The popular implementations don't have a strong history of code quality. It's completely reasonable to expect that, over time, new vulnerabilities will be found that will allow attackers to read or write to unintended memory locations on my server.

I totally understand that, by adding a popular but historically unsafe cryptography implementation, I can help web clients to avoid MITM shenanigans while reading my content. MITM indeed is a problem. But, I'm not willing to make that my problem. The vast majority of my customers don't experience MITM data modification while reading my content. The vast majority of my customers wouldn't care if the whole world knew that they have read my content.

Perhaps in the future, code for all the required cryptography layers will be just as provably correct as code for reading the cleartext HTTP protocol. When that day comes, I will add HTTPS. Not before.

Suppose I operate a small general practitioner healthcare facility that often has only two patients at the same time. If I offer free Wi-Fi in the waiting area, should I consider that a HIPAA violation, because I'm reasonably confident that one patient will see ads related to the other patient's medical condition?