The Impending Doom of Expiring Root CAs and Legacy Clients • Hacker News Board

Re: The Impending Doom of Expiring Root CAs and Legacy Clients

#101

Post by nitrogen » Mon, Jun 08, 2020, 6:10 PM UTC

cameronbrown wrote: post #96

lscharen wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn’t that work in _favor_ of the startup idea? If the hardware is a commodity and the market is for a bare-bones, self-serviceable “just a TV”, then the startup should have significantly lower engineering costs and benefit from the low component costs. Given that people on this thread are stating that they would pay a premium for such a product makes it seem even more viable. Maybe other people have different “se…

What people on HN say they would pay for, and what people actually pay for, are very different.

There's both a time lag and the influence of manipulative product offerings. "Revealed preference" is just code for exploitation of vice.

Re: The Impending Doom of Expiring Root CAs and Legacy Clients

#102

Post by nitrogen » Mon, Jun 08, 2020, 6:13 PM UTC

coldpie wrote: post #69

non-entity wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Someone on HN recently floated the idea of a company that would make quality, non-smart electronics and appliances that would also be easily serviceable. I wish this existed and would pay significantly more for products like this. You know, I've wanted something like this as well for a while. I know next to nothing about startups or companies, but I wonder how hard it would be to create a hardware startup around th…

I've thought about this, too. I don't know if you could sustain a company on this idea. The profit margins on consumer tech are miniscule, and if you do it well, you will have very few repeat customers. But I think it could do well as a one-off Kickstarter thing, if you have the knowledge & reputation to back up your claims, or in small, infrequent batches. Buy a bunch of flat panel displays, slap 10 HDMI ports on th…

You might do better with a modular system. A single port on the display, a separate box that handles rapid switching and HDCP. HDMI switch boxes exist, but they seem to forward HDCP responsibility to the display, so switching is still slow. A broadcast quality switch/crossfade box would rock.

Re: The Impending Doom of Expiring Root CAs and Legacy Clients

#103

Post by renewiltord » Mon, Jun 08, 2020, 6:13 PM UTC

lscharen wrote: post #71

cameronbrown wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doubt it would work. Hardware is commoditized and low margin. That's why TVs are embedding internet advertising, to make fat stacks from their otherwise barely profitable products.

Wouldn’t that work in _favor_ of the startup idea? If the hardware is a commodity and the market is for a bare-bones, self-serviceable “just a TV”, then the startup should have significantly lower engineering costs and benefit from the low component costs. Given that people on this thread are stating that they would pay a premium for such a product makes it seem even more viable. Maybe other people have different “se…

* They're not going to buy it for the most part. They just like saying "I would buy it". Ultimately, price will determine almost all. You can see this when the already committed market for open source phones just didn't materialize when the device arrived. Turns out when people say "I want an OSS phone" they mean "I want a phone that is exactly like this top of the line phone but the software should all be OSS and it should not be a penny more expensive". In this case, you can judge by the fact that these already exist and when people say "significantly more" they mean "5% more" because they don't actually buy the thing.

* You can't compete on price because the TV guys are selling access to the data they collect for ad targeting / attribution.

But don't let anyone stop you from doing it. None of us thinks this is worthwhile, so you might be on to a Thiel Truth.

Re: The Impending Doom of Expiring Root CAs and Legacy Clients

#104

Post by nitrogen » Mon, Jun 08, 2020, 6:14 PM UTC

qq11ww22ee33 wrote: post #83

hanklazard wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone on HN recently floated the idea of a company that would make quality, non-smart electronics and appliances that would also be easily serviceable. I wish this existed and would pay significantly more for products like this. To address your question, I think they’re all “smart” now. I ended up getting a low-end Samsung 4K a few months ago and it’s been good so far. It starts up very quickly, maybe 1-2 seconds.…

> I wish this existed and would pay significantly more for products like this. But the average person wouldn't, and "fickle hacker news user" is not a wide open market.

Maybe some day we'll invent the technology to address small markets without being told we're doing something wrong.

Re: The Impending Doom of Expiring Root CAs and Legacy Clients

#105

Post by hinkley » Mon, Jun 08, 2020, 6:14 PM UTC

hanklazard wrote: post #9

geerlingguy wrote: post #3

I begrudgingly bought a 'Smart TV' just because I wanted a 4K monitor. But I use it as a dumb monitor and watch app-based content through an Apple TV. At least I'm reasonably sure the Apple TV will be updated for 5-10 years, and is a lot more disposable than a giant TV. My last TV worked great for about 12 years. No way Panasonic would've kept supporting it that long. Honestly, the thing I hate most about smart TVs,…

Someone on HN recently floated the idea of a company that would make quality, non-smart electronics and appliances that would also be easily serviceable. I wish this existed and would pay significantly more for products like this. To address your question, I think they’re all “smart” now. I ended up getting a low-end Samsung 4K a few months ago and it’s been good so far. It starts up very quickly, maybe 1-2 seconds.…

In my perfect world, controller cards have a standardized physical interface, which SBC makers can target as a repair/customization option.

In practice I suspect many of these systems barely function, each is a special snowflake, and that any bad input from controller could result in fire or water damage to your house.

So maybe TVs and fridges are a good place to start and we should give washing machines a while to figure it out.

Re: The Impending Doom of Expiring Root CAs and Legacy Clients

#106

Post by imhoguy » Mon, Jun 08, 2020, 6:15 PM UTC

That is why we need open hardware specs, open-source firmware and a right to reverse-engineer out of market devices. Like OpenWRT or LineageOS, they keep old devices usable for long and reduce electronic waste.

Re: The Impending Doom of Expiring Root CAs and Legacy Clients

#107

Post by hinkley » Mon, Jun 08, 2020, 6:17 PM UTC

oarsinsync wrote: post #64

hanklazard wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone on HN recently floated the idea of a company that would make quality, non-smart electronics and appliances that would also be easily serviceable. I wish this existed and would pay significantly more for products like this. To address your question, I think they’re all “smart” now. I ended up getting a low-end Samsung 4K a few months ago and it’s been good so far. It starts up very quickly, maybe 1-2 seconds.…

> I’m just waiting for the day when all TVs require a working internet connection We're not there yet, but we're on our way. My Philips Ambilight TV pops up a warning every few weeks to remind me that I should connect the TV to the network to benefit from all the smart apps it has bundled. Immensely frustrating.

With ethernet over HDMI being a thing, I've heard reports of TVs tunneling out through a media box without asking first.

Re: The Impending Doom of Expiring Root CAs and Legacy Clients

#108

Post by nitrogen » Mon, Jun 08, 2020, 6:20 PM UTC

plorkyeran wrote: post #93

gindely wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the advantage of this? Surely they're better off pricing it at 2x the expected ad revenue, since then they can expect to get twice as much now as they otherwise would get eventually ? Indeed, even if it were 1.01x the expected ad revenue they've won with this upsell.

Charging 1.01x the expected ad revenue wouldn't cover the cost of implementing the no-ad option. Even 2x might be in break-even territory when you include extra support costs and the like (one person on the phone because they bought no-ads and got ads due to a mishap somewhere wipes out the profit from a lot of no-ad sales). There's also the funny issue where people who can afford to pay extra for the no-ads option a…

Isn't this advertising pricing paradox proof of the exploitative nature of advertising?

Re: The Impending Doom of Expiring Root CAs and Legacy Clients

#109

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Jun 08, 2020, 6:21 PM UTC

jakub_g wrote: post #65

Smart TVs are the worst. Unrelated to TLS: I work for a video streaming company, and while almost all of desktop/mobile Chromium-based traffic is Chrome v80+ or at least v70+, the smart TVs have webviews based on Chromium v45~55 (most TVs) or ~v60 (cutting edge modern Samsungs), and some older ones (~2016) are even worse, based on a very outdated webkit which is more or less Safari 8.0 - basically hardly better than…

[deleted]

Re: The Impending Doom of Expiring Root CAs and Legacy Clients

#110

Post by ec109685 » Mon, Jun 08, 2020, 6:22 PM UTC

devit wrote: post #7

Having expiring certificates/key rotation might be a net negative: if you keep the private key secure, there is no need to rotate it, and it avoids a lot of hassle. Also, if you have a revocation mechanism, then rotation doesn't add that much for keys that are only used for signing and not for encryption (like the CA keys). Of course in some cases like domains it's necessary since the domain can be transferred, but t…

If you aren’t rotating certificates regularly, then when you do need to rotate it, you won’t have a procedure to do so and clients might do things like assume they will never be rotated.