[grrowl]

It's a Good Thing. For example, when Google announced they'll rank HTTPS sites slightly higher, CloudFlare announced adding SSL support to their free tier soon after, free certificates continue to be available. We should absolutely be pushing forward with secure and encrypted HTTP everywhere and be making it as easy as possible for developers to get on board.

[mcosta]

> encrypted HTTP everywhere

Do you really think everything, everything deserves encrypted comunication? cat photos too?

[scrollaway]

Yes, absolutely. Controversial content of all sorts (activism, gay rights, sex, etc) gets censored all over the planet and gets people on watchlists.

When you are talking about the potential for controversy itself creating this problem, then yeah, HTTPS becomes a benefit everywhere. "Oh but we just host cute pictures!" - doesn't matter. Maybe someone commented on one of those pictures and said something about China being a terrible country. Maybe an innocent chinese visitor saw that thread and ended up on a watchlist because of that.

And even ignoring the whole "I have nothing to secure" mentality (which is no better than the "I have nothing to hide" mentality, really), having HTTPS everywhere makes the people for whom it matters safer. Look at what happens with Tor.

In a world where encryption is the exception, the one who uses it is immediately labeled a terrorist.

Make no mistake. This is not about "encrypted communications". This is not about asking the user "Do you think what you are doing here warrants extra security?". This is about the medium. It's about making encryption ubiquitous so that these situations never arise.

When you ssh into a machine, do you ask yourself that question? "Oh well I'm just going to do harmless system monitoring, don't need encryption for that!". No, you don't, because the medium gives you that security and you never have to make that false choice.

So what do you gain by not being secure?

The only argument I ever hear in answer to this is "battery life"/"processing power". Such nonsense. Monochrome displays have a similar benefit, but in general computing you don't give users monochrome displays because of all the situations where colors are useful. And you certainly don't ask the user "Do you think this image you are viewing really deserves colors? What do you gain from them, it's practically black & white already!".

I'm so tired of this whole debate. Can you tell? It's such a waste of time. As Poul-Henning Kamp put it last FOSDEM, the NSA loves that debate and probably perpetuates it. "Do we really need encryption for everything?" is a false question, especially on the internet. You don't, but other people might. And just because you have nothing to hide doesn't mean you should show everyone everything. And just because one kid was raped one time in your town doesn't mean you should store your kids in the basement and treat them like emergency supplies.

[0x0]

There's a huge difference between ssh and ssl's trust model, where the latter requires you to fork over money for each domain name(1) and at the same time trust ALL the other CAs in the world not to work against you.

(1) except for a couple of very inflexible free tiers at a couple of vendors, which caused more trouble than it was worth during heartbleed.

For SSH your key management is 100% in your hands and no third party can create a replacement key pair that would work in a MITM attack.

[cesarb]

The perfect is the enemy of good. With TLS, you reduce the MITM exposure from "everyone who is in the path between you and the server" to "everyone who is in the path between you and the server, AND has control of or has hacked into a CA AND is willing to risk the CA being blacklisted by the major browsers".

The latter category is much smaller than the former (which includes anyone in the public access point you're using, for instance). Yeah, the NSA is probably in the latter category (if they think you're important enough to risk burning a CA), but the NSA is not your only adversary.

[cesarb]

TLS is not just about encryption. It's also about authentication. Without it, your cat photos site can have malicious Javascript injected into it by malicious middleboxes.

In fact, the canonical way to exploit POODLE is by injecting a Javascript code into a non-SSL-protected page, which will do repeated requests to the SSL-protected page. If the user were to only access SSL-protected pages, and never went to an attacker-controlled page (by following a link on an email, for instance), the attacker can't get the user to run attacker-controlled Javascript and thus can't exploit POODLE as easily (there might be slower attacks, but the fast way requires attacker-controlled requests).

There's also the fact that, as far as I have seen, around half the vulnerabilities in the browser I use (Firefox, see https://www.mozilla.org/security/known-vulnerabilities/firef... for the list) need Javascript to be exploited. If you access a single page unprotected by TLS, Mallory can MITM you and inject Javascript into it to exploit whichever vulnerability of the day there is. If every page you access is protected by TLS, or you use something like NoScript to whitelist Javascript for only a few TLS-protected domains, Mallory can't make your browser run his Javascript and thus loses half the potential exploits.

[0x0]

Unless there's an XSS somewhere, which is unfortunately all too common.

[bribriinlondon]

Yes. Unfortunately, this is an area that has become a zero sum game. Encryption needs to happen by default in every communication. It goes beyond that, entire systems and cryptographic constructs need to be overhauled in the wake of the NIST / NSA revelations. Starting with TLS, particularly TLS that relies on commercial certificate vendors to function. It's a total clusterfuck.

[justcommenting]

i do. why let verizon or at&t inject trackers...even for cat photos?

[jplevine]

Yes: https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/08/15/cat-video-hack...