> Declining quality of comments? Creeping influence of politics?
It's a fallacious argument in my book. Like comparing apples and oranges.
Say I run a bakery. What I care the most about is the quality of
my bread. So much, I spend all my time working on that and only that.
So much, I didn't ever bother to have a lock at the door. But it's
not even a big deal if someone comes in and poisons one of the bread, as long
as the overall quality is increasing!
> SSL is a giant waste of time for Hacker News
Yes, if by "giant" you mean that it takes like 2 hours to set-up, and a small payload for each
negociation. But concerning the payload, Arc is not especially fast,
so there is room for improvements there to compensate, if needed.
> modulo the fact that people might be crazy enough to use a shared password here.
Not the point, the point is HTTP sniffing.
And anyway, people could use a shared password, making it easier for them (don't overestimate
human memory), if HN used (HTTPS and) a "real" password encryption scheme (bcrypt or the like). Why put the burden on the user when you can put it on the computer?
No, that is an extremely bad idea. Even if they use bcrypt. Bcrypt exists to protect the site owner from calamity, like, "thousands of user passwords posted to Rapidshare". It does very little to protect individual users against the attacker who busts into your server; whether you use bcrypt or not, they still get the contents of every input type=PASSWORD that hits the site.
If this was a real product, this would clearly not be my advice. But it's not. It's just HN. The worst case to an attack here is not all that bad.
There's some goofy YC stuff that happens through this site. If asked, my advice regarding security and YC would not be "make HN more secure so the YC stuff is safer". It would be "get the YC stuff the hell off HN."
<really, really dumb question>
Hi Thomas, I have checked your profile because I am confused by this whole conversation (I mean the social dynamic of it where you are mostly being downvoted into oblivion -- I have no hope of following the technical points). I can't find the info I want. For the unwashed masses (like myself), can you clarify: Aren't you some kind of security professional?
Oh come on. How long would it take someone who knew what they were doing to set up SSL? Run Apache on the same machine, listen on 443, and reverse proxy to the arc app. It would take less than 30 minutes to set up.
Fifty bucks worth of work, once, which pays a dividend each and every time a security conscious user visits the site. That's not a waste of time, that's a no-brainer.