Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Termination of StartCom business

startcomca.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 47 posts

Re: Termination of StartCom business

#31

Post by LukeShu »

justinjlynn wrote: post #28
LukeShu wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the email I received, it's a non-ASCII apostrophe encoded in UTF-8. The email headers say "Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1", but then the HTML body says " ". Clients that give preference to the header will get it wrong. The full raw email: https://lukeshu.com/dump/startcom-email.txt

eh, the header should match the body encoding regardless of meta tag; should it not?

Yes, the header should match the body encoding, but it doesn't necessarily have to; that is in part what the tag is for; it may be interpreted as saying "the value of header is potentially wrong, use this value instead" (of course, the thing says "http-equiv", and in an email, it isn't an HTTP header, it is a MIME header!)

In HTML4/XHTML1, the isn't meant to be interpreted by the user agent; the HTTP server is supposed to parse it and set the the HTTP header accordingly.

Of course, the people writing the (X)HTML probably have a better idea of what encoding they're using than the people configuring the HTTP server, so it's common for user agents to allow to override the actual header, as it allows more things to work "correctly" for users. But, strictly speaking, that is non-conforming.

In (X)HTML5, that practice was codified, and the tag is given preference over the actual headers (for a whitelist of allowed headers).

So, which interpretation is "correct" depends on if it is HTML4/XHTML1 or (X)HTML5.

Now, the MIME type of the email body said "text/html" which can be anything, and the body used the HTML5 doctype, but specified the XHTML1 xmlns. I'm honestly not sure which interpretation is correct in that case.

Re: Termination of StartCom business

#32

Post by cratermoon »

justinjlynn wrote: post #28
LukeShu wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the email I received, it's a non-ASCII apostrophe encoded in UTF-8. The email headers say "Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1", but then the HTML body says " ". Clients that give preference to the header will get it wrong. The full raw email: https://lukeshu.com/dump/startcom-email.txt

eh, the header should match the body encoding regardless of meta tag; should it not?

ISO-8859-1, aka "Latin 1" is a single-byte encoding but it represents the Unicode codepoints 0-127 (ASCII) in exactly the same way as UTF-8. This is a legacy of Microsoft Windows.

Re: Termination of StartCom business

#34

Post by nurettin »

stryk wrote: post #11
ahoka wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe you get a shiny new Turk Trust cert in exchange. Who knows.

I have no idea if 'Turk Trust' is even a real CA or if you made up the name in jest. I'm honestly scared to Google it and find out, in slight fear of finding out that is an actual CA. (Not to get too political here, but given Turkey's current government, I'm not sure how anyone in their right mind would 1- trust them to say or do _anything_, and 2- trust SSL encryption certs coming out of there)

I'm Turkish and I agree. Also, Turk trust got involved in a controversy where they admitted that they leaked a private key. https://www.google.com.tr/amp/s/nakedsecurity.sophos.com/201...

Re: Termination of StartCom business

#35

Post by jsmthrowaway »

pcunite wrote: post #22
kyriakos wrote: post #17

Even though it ended badly they were the first to offer free certificates.

I think dealers give away coke at the onset, no?

You’re thinking of other drugs with intensely addictive properties, like heroin. Cocaine is way too expensive to hand out much more than a free bump or two, maybe a line, and that’s not necessarily enough to addict someone. Some people can do all the blow they want and not get addicted at all, which is obviously not a good RoI for the dealer.

So I hear, anyway...

Re: Termination of StartCom business

#39

Post by jcoffland »

jsmthrowaway wrote: post #35
pcunite wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think dealers give away coke at the onset, no?

You’re thinking of other drugs with intensely addictive properties, like heroin. Cocaine is way too expensive to hand out much more than a free bump or two, maybe a line, and that’s not necessarily enough to addict someone. Some people can do all the blow they want and not get addicted at all, which is obviously not a good RoI for the dealer. So I hear, anyway...

> Some people can do all the blow they want and not get addicted at all

Many users think they are such a person.

Re: Termination of StartCom business

#40

Post by linkmotif »

I had an interesting experience with these guys. About 3 years ago I registered the domain "getmoneymakemoney.com" and got a free StartSLL cert from them. Three days later they revoked it because they said the domain sounded like a scam site. I called them and tried arguing to no avail. I said it was just an adaptation of line from a rap song and hosted my personal blog (which it did!) but they didn't care. Go figure. Never understood why they cared so much about my site but then accrued all the negative publicity they did.
Post reply on HN