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by kerng 2883 days ago
Because otherwise an ISP might insert ads, or some adversary changes the content and inserts malware. Also, as a consumer of your blog I want privacy, no need for ISP to know what I click on and read exactly. These are just a few reasons why.
1 comments

> Also, as a consumer of your blog I want privacy, no need for ISP to know what I click on and read exactly.

In this hypothetical example, you're clicking on a video game guide. Someone watching you buy games from Gamestop would have more information than someone watching you click on "How Factorio Trains Work" or something else on this hypothetical example.

If the reverse DNS points to the IP address of the blog (ie: people see that you're browsing "FactorioGuide.com"), they're gonna figure out that you're learning how to play the game Factorio in any case. Even if all the traffic were encrypted.

The only way people don't know what you're doing is if the guide were on a shared host with many-many webpages on a singular IP Address. But otherwise, the typical website (ie: self-hosted on a VPS) would have a unique IP Address and a unique reverse-DNS entry. And people would figure out how long you've been browsing and what you've been looking at, even through HTTPS.

If the site is using Cloudflare (free), AWS CloudFront (cheap), or another CDN, it won't have a unique IP address. For now, the domain name will still leak in plaintext through DNS and over the TLS connection in the SNI field, but browsers are planning to implement DNS over HTTPS [1], and encrypted SNI is on the way [2].

[1] https://blog.nightly.mozilla.org/2018/06/01/improving-dns-pr...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17401509