Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, but the fact that copyright infringement is not theft might.
Haha, looks like the MAFIAA war machine has been working pretty effectively that even HN readers are starting to believe it!
Should All Web Traffic Be Encrypted?
111–120 of 136 posts
Re: Should All Web Traffic Be Encrypted?
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
Referrer information allows website owners to see who is linking to their site. It's like a private, reverse form of tags
I agree that referrer information is useful to site owners. What you need to understand is that just because something is good for site owners, doesn't mean it's good for site visitors, or the web in general. If you wanted to see who was linking to your site, and referrer headers didn't exist, you'd use a search engine. Hell, people would build dedicated search engines which alert you when somebody links to your site…
Re: Should All Web Traffic Be Encrypted?
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree that referrer information is useful to site owners. What you need to understand is that just because something is good for site owners, doesn't mean it's good for site visitors, or the web in general. If you wanted to see who was linking to your site, and referrer headers didn't exist, you'd use a search engine. Hell, people would build dedicated search engines which alert you when somebody links to your site…
The interests of web site owners align a lot with the web itself. And referrer headers are much easier than having to build a search engine and being at their whims.
Not in this particular case.
"And referrer headers are much easier than having to build a search engine and being at their whims."
Absolutely. And if your browser sent a HTTP header containing your name, address, sexual preferences and date of birth, that would also make things even better for website owners. Just imagine how much better they could target their adverts!
Re: Should All Web Traffic Be Encrypted?
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's a relative URL. It would be equivalent to http://static4.scirra.net/static4.scirra.net/images/favicon....
Wow, this took forever to click. I have never written sites that spanned several servers like that. Thanks!
Re: Should All Web Traffic Be Encrypted?
#115For content that is already public but needs to be protected from modification like images and scripts couldn't it be hashed and the hash just sent with the page your viewing. Then the browser could download extra assets from an insecure source like a proxy or cdn and know that it hasn't been modified?
So then the browsers have to implement two security systems.
However, I do believe that we should investigate ways of authenticating larger downloads automatically.
Re: Should All Web Traffic Be Encrypted?
#116What about the case where you're virtual-hosting many sites on one IP address? Since the SSL handshake occurs prior to any HTTP data being sent, and the browser will reject a server-certificate whose hostname does not match, you're normally restricted to one HTTPS domain per IP address.
I gather there are TLS extensions to suppport SSL vhosts, but I don't know how widespread they are. There are also methods of including more than one hostname per certificate, but I'm assuming that when you purchase a SSL cert from a registrar, you're going to be restricted to one host.
Re: Should All Web Traffic Be Encrypted?
#117Re: Should All Web Traffic Be Encrypted?
#118One item that this (excellent) blog post does not adress is what to do about referer information which is generally not passed along when clicking on links on sites being browsed over SSL. In order to "get credit" for all of the traffic that they send everywhere twitter had to develop a fairly elaborate system of redirections (built into t.co) to make sure that clicks from twitter.com ended up being sent out to the r…
If HTTP referrers never existed, the web would still be huge and would still be full of amazing content. Why should we care about retaining referrers? I think the only reason that people dislike the idea of losing them, is because they've got used to them being there. I don't particularly like the fact that sites which I click through to can see where I'm coming from, or what I was searching for, so I've installed a…
Could happen though I suppose. /shrug/
Re: Should All Web Traffic Be Encrypted?
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
If HTTP referrers never existed, the web would still be huge and would still be full of amazing content. Why should we care about retaining referrers? I think the only reason that people dislike the idea of losing them, is because they've got used to them being there. I don't particularly like the fact that sites which I click through to can see where I'm coming from, or what I was searching for, so I've installed a…
> If HTTP referrers never existed, the web would still be huge and would still be full of amazing content. While we're at it, let's get rid of User-Agent. No sarcasm intended, I'm serious. It only does bad things.
(We can get into all the evils suggested by http://xkcd.com/869/ , but for the purposes of this argument I'm assuming that web developers and sysadmins are competent and not evil.)
Re: Should All Web Traffic Be Encrypted?
#120One item that this (excellent) blog post does not adress is what to do about referer information which is generally not passed along when clicking on links on sites being browsed over SSL. In order to "get credit" for all of the traffic that they send everywhere twitter had to develop a fairly elaborate system of redirections (built into t.co) to make sure that clicks from twitter.com ended up being sent out to the r…
When going from https to https site, referer information is usually being sent, at least with modern browsers. So if the whole web goes encrypted (yay), the issue is solved.