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Ask HN: What feature would you want the web to “force” next, after HTTPS?

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251–260 of 279 posts

Re: Ask HN: What feature would you want the web to “force” next, after HTTPS?

#251
post #9

Dropping TLS in favor of IPSec. Now every protocol is transparently secure by default and there's no chance of developers accidentally messing it up.

IPSec is a complex design by committee, with NSA's help. Schneier does not believe it will become a secure system.

http://www.mail-archive.com/cryptography@metzdowd.com/msg123...

https://www.schneier.com/academic/paperfiles/paper-ipsec.pdf

Re: Ask HN: What feature would you want the web to “force” next, after HTTPS?

#252
post #33
post #9

Dropping TLS in favor of IPSec. Now every protocol is transparently secure by default and there's no chance of developers accidentally messing it up.

IPSec is beautiful and definitely was the correct way to handle encryption. IKE and ISAKMP was the problem, that stuff is an absolute nightmare. Maybe now with IKE2 it might get better...

> IPSec is beautiful.

Could you elaborate?

Re: Ask HN: What feature would you want the web to “force” next, after HTTPS?

#253
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

curl -H "" -o stuff.html && elinks stuff.html I've been looking for a site I can run this on over TOR at random times for reading news but I haven't found one.

Can elinks read from stdin?

links2 can, and both of them have --dump.

The nice thing about doing it like this is that the file persists on disk so viewing a page is decoupled from fetching it (which is nice for a lot of reasons.)

Re: Ask HN: What feature would you want the web to “force” next, after HTTPS?

#254

A ban of everything JS except for these so-called web apps, which obviously need it. Make the internet great (performant/efficient/secure) again!

Forgive me, but I just don't understand this sentiment at all. I understand your general frustration with over-engineered websites - but is it not your choice to visit that website? Do you not also have the ability to block javascript just like the scourge of flash websites before it? We aren't talking about vulnerabilities here though, youre just saying that there are websites out there that could do with less (or n…

>Let me ask it a different way - do you have any reasonable expectation that your proposal will ever be accepted?

There are hundreds of pie in the sky suggestions being floated here, and the one about javascript is the one you choose to attack with this argument?

JavaScript has unequivocally made the web worse for everyone but advertisers and perhaps the people that run CDNs.

Why, of all the proposals here, are you trying to shit on this one on particular?

Honest question.

Re: Ask HN: What feature would you want the web to “force” next, after HTTPS?

#255

I'm ignorant of a lot but, segregation of cookies by browser tab. If I log into Xsocialmedia in Tab 1, and go to news site in Tab 2 using Xsocialmedia plugin, it doesn't know that tab A logged in, or that it came from same browser. Basically, I want my tabs to be isolated and treated as completely separate, isolated browsing histories, caches, and cookies. ...This is my gmail tab. All that tab ever sees is gmail. Thi…

I think you're talking about first party isolation, which I second. In the same way that the web should be secure by default, I think we should have privacy by default.

> First party isolation means that all identifier sources and browser state are scoped (isolated) using the URL bar domain.

From: https://www.torproject.org/projects/torbrowser/design/

Re: Ask HN: What feature would you want the web to “force” next, after HTTPS?

#256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Client TLS certs already exist, and they are a massive pain for the average user.

So I have heard of client TLS authentication, but does it exist for the web (I mean just in principle, not whether it is really used). That is, do browsers support it? The thing is, if it is a massive pain for average users, then that is an own-goal. Look at SSH: there is no certification chain there. All you do is generate a keypair and then (here's the awkward bit) magic the pubkey over to the server. It would be e…

It is a massive pain for average users but it's well supported by browsers is because big corporations have IT departments that provision (and admin) computers for their users, average or otherwise, and the provisioning process includes setting up client certs.

So while browsers do support client certs, there has been very little effort to make them easy to install due to a chicken-egg situation. They're hard to use, so no one uses them, but no one (random sites on the Internet, that is) uses them for client auth because they're hard to use.

Re: Ask HN: What feature would you want the web to “force” next, after HTTPS?

#257
post #163

Add SRV lookups to the HTTP standard. There's a tremendous amount of complexity and cost attached to the fact that browsers look up the IP address of the hostname and then connect to port 80. First, it's true that you can specify another port in the URL, but nobody does that because it's ugly and hard to remember. If you want to be able to send people to your website, you need to be able to tell people what the url i…

This doesn't make any sense at all. CNAMEs don't help with running multiple sites on a single IP address, it's just a convenience in the DNS. More like a symlink really, it means 'when you're looking for X try Y instead'.

If you want to run a web server on port 80 without the server having root access there's many ways to do that, the firewall can rewrite the packets so they go to a different port, you can give the web server the right to open port 80 without root privileges, you can proxy the requests etc.

Re: Ask HN: What feature would you want the web to “force” next, after HTTPS?

#258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I kind of agree, using OIDC with users selecting providers in the form of an email address (i.e. you enter an email address and the provider is selected based on that) seems like ideal UX.

And that also is standardized via WebFinger and OIDC Discovery.

Yep, although those aren't really very (at all?) popular yet :/

Re: Ask HN: What feature would you want the web to “force” next, after HTTPS?

#259
post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can elinks read from stdin?

links2 can, and both of them have --dump. The nice thing about doing it like this is that the file persists on disk so viewing a page is decoupled from fetching it (which is nice for a lot of reasons.)

Yeah, I may have done that once or twice myself.

https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/naya9wqdemiovuvwvoyquq

Why browsers don't dump to disk in a format that makes for easy rendering ... I don't know.

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