Live data from Hacker News

HTTPS on Stack Overflow: The End of a Long Road

nickcraver.com

31–40 of 183 posts

Re: HTTPS on Stack Overflow: The End of a Long Road

#31
post #7

At $previous_job we once turned on HTTPS for our entire customer website and online store, only to have our customer support team be bombarded by phone calls claiming that our "website was down." After much teeth gnashing and research, we determined that a large segment of our user base was still using WinXP and the encryption protocols we offered weren't available to them. We didn't think this would be a problem bec…

[deleted]

Re: HTTPS on Stack Overflow: The End of a Long Road

#32

Wow, I didn't expect this ("switching" to HTTPS) to be so hard.

Yeah, we've been working on this for about a year (not continually, but as we have time to try to work through the problems). We do use subdomains though, so that is part of the problem. We keep feeling like we are getting close, but then we run into another issue. It's like a rabbit hole that has no bottom.

Re: HTTPS on Stack Overflow: The End of a Long Road

#33
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well if it wasn't for someone buying .com back in the day, we probably could have them. Oh and then buying . .com after browsers banned that one, which led to RFC 6125 rule clarifications and restrictions.

Hey, I'm pretty sure that the first real domain name hack was sex.net, which as the proud owner of ex.net [PS: or was it sexnet.com, as we also have exnet.com?] caused some upset for a while, though mainly to disappointed one-handed typists I believe... B^> BTW, did I blink and miss the "It really is all faster over HTTP/2, even given TLS" bit? My testing for my tiny lightweight sites close to their users (the opposi…

I would imagine the more resources your page has, the more benefit you can get from HTTP/2 because of Server Push. So if you're comparing a tiny lightweight site, I'm guessing you can't benefit as much from Server Push.

Re: HTTPS on Stack Overflow: The End of a Long Road

#35
post #7

At $previous_job we once turned on HTTPS for our entire customer website and online store, only to have our customer support team be bombarded by phone calls claiming that our "website was down." After much teeth gnashing and research, we determined that a large segment of our user base was still using WinXP and the encryption protocols we offered weren't available to them. We didn't think this would be a problem bec…

Did you use any alerting mechanism that informed you about the how many % were affected by this?

Re: HTTPS on Stack Overflow: The End of a Long Road

#38
post #8
post #5

Note to self: Use subdirectories, not subdomains in the future

TLS kills this kind of "cool" features which is kind of sad :( Unless you can afford wildcard certs. What's the argument behind LetsEncrypt not doing that? Extended Validation stuff?

There's a long StackExchange answer about this: https://security.stackexchange.com/a/158164

But it boils down to there being no practical way for Let's Encrypt to automatically validate that a wildcard certificate is safe to issue.

Re: HTTPS on Stack Overflow: The End of a Long Road

#39
post #7

At $previous_job we once turned on HTTPS for our entire customer website and online store, only to have our customer support team be bombarded by phone calls claiming that our "website was down." After much teeth gnashing and research, we determined that a large segment of our user base was still using WinXP and the encryption protocols we offered weren't available to them. We didn't think this would be a problem bec…

I know it's hindsight and all that, but why didn't you check your website analytics first? Seems a fairly massive assumption that should have taken 10 seconds to check.

Re: HTTPS on Stack Overflow: The End of a Long Road

#40

Just a reminder, HTTPS isn't enough. Be sure to turn the other security knobs with headers... https://securityheaders.io/?q=https%3A%2F%2Fstackoverflow.co...

Every site I've put in there gets a failing grade. From Google to Apple to Slashdot etc.

Wonder what the point is then.

Post reply on HN