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NeverSSL

fdbhclmrkstnvwxz.neverssl.com

191–200 of 206 posts

Re: NeverSSL

#191

I used http://www.dia.mil for years, and expected that if anyone could be relied on to computer as wrong as possible it would be the US government; but that now 301s to the HTTPS version.

That’s a surprising expectation given that they funded and created the Internet.

DIA is a HUMINT agency, so they should have been among the first organizations to go HTTPS-only. Instead they were among the last.

Re: NeverSSL

#192
post #108

"This website is for when you try to open Facebook, Google, Amazon, etc on a wifi network, and nothing happens. Type " http://neverssl.com" into your browser's url bar, and you'll be able to log on." I don't get it. How does browsing to http://neverssl.com help you to log in to other websites?

You don't use a lot of hotel, airplane, airport, guest or otherwise captive portals do you? Most will gracefully redirect but a lot are painful. Add in things like HSTS (can't just go to Google), HTTPS Everywhere, etc and it's downright annoying to get to the portal. NeverSSL is a huge frustration reducer, especially as I've been able to just tell less technical able co-workers to just go there.

One trick that often works at hotels is to enter the hotel's domain name, which typically has an entry in the wifi DNS. I don't know how that works related to SSL, I just know it often solves the problem.

Re: NeverSSL

#193
post #57

The fact you need this is incredibly unintuitive to anyone without technical prowess.

Even with technical prowess - I'm a software developer and spent much of today designing a cloud load balancer architecture for a startup's global infrastructure - I had never realized that this issue had to do with SSL.

I usually just futz around with things like the local gateway IP or the business's domain name (e.g. hotel domain name) until it works.

Re: NeverSSL

#194
post #27
post #23

Why not just alksjdhflkjahdskjfhalskjdhfas.com or something that definitely doesn't exist? Since there's no HSTS on domains that don't exist, it should allow the wifi network to redirect to http://myloginportal/whatever and do its thing so you can access the network.

Some captive portals do TCP redirection, but no DNS redirection. And for good reason. Once user has finished jumping through whatever hoops captive portal want them to jump, a new connection to the same server is likely to be attempted, and having a fake DNS response cached somewhere in libresolv or browser in the client is not the least bit conductive to that.

Of course some portals do use DNS and so you end up with your favorite site's home page getting a bunch of irrelevant arguments appended to it, resulting in an error page.

Re: NeverSSL

#195

You can also use Microsoft's Network Connection Status Indicator (NCSI) URL: http://www.msftconnecttest.com/ Also has an IPv6 endpoint: http://ipv6.msftconnecttest.com/

Not nearly as memorable.

Just remember it has two non-adjacent t's, two adjacent t's, two adjacent n's, and two non-adjacent s's. It's easy!!

Re: NeverSSL

#198
post #66

http://neverssl.com/changes > I also want to keep neverssl.com ad free, but as it's now costing me about $2,000 a year to host it, […] Wait, how could hosting a static website cost $2k/year?!

Bandwidth, maybe? That page is 53.8 KB total. $2k does seem high though.

Looks more like 2.7KB and then it loads some resources from Twitter to make up the rest of the size.

Re: NeverSSL

#199
post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1 raspberry pi 4 could handle this...

Who's opinion carries more merit regarding how a thing can be built? Someone who has built the thing or someone who hasn't? I'm continually stupefied by how willing so many HN commenters are to publically advertise their ignorance by giving useless advice to actual experts.

I was about not to bother to respond, but I have a few minutes.

There is an assumption that if there's nothing really visible made by one person it means they don't know what they are talking about. So, background: I'm a linux sysadmin at a very large internet company, and has been running hobby and small business sites for 20 years parallel to this. About a decade ago I wrote cache plugins for WordPress and run a lot of tests of 128MB VPS machines to see when they break. The traffic from neverssl.com really should be fine on a Raspberry Pi 4, because the whole app, including the temporary redirect db needed would easily fit in memory. The OS can be read-only, so the SD card wouldn't wear out either, and the Pi 4 has a Gbit link. But as it's been pointed out, the internet uplink could indeed be a problem, so instead of that, there's Hetzner: 33€/m gets you unlimited traffic, 2GB RAM, 320GB HDD. That's 400€/year, and that's all the cost. Note: Rpi4 has 1-4GB RAM.

Next time please consider that people may actually know what they are talking about even if they don't have their name attached to an "internet scale" service.

Re: NeverSSL

#200
post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t understand. What’s the pricing costs? Bandwidth? Instance hours? S3? A database?!? This website can literally be hosted on a free tier at almost any major cloud provider.

Free tiers usually only give you a paltry amount of egress bandwidth, like 1GB. This site is serving 6,000,000 hits a day, according to the author. At 2.8kB/hit, its using a little under 17GB/day. Still, that shouldn't cost $2000/year - one would think serving a couple hundred hits/second of static, easily cached data could be done with something like lightsail for $10/month or less.

You could do it on Digital Ocean or Linode or Vultr or many other providers for $5 a month and use just over half the included bandwidth.
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