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There are 2.4 billion people on the Internet. We should get to know each other.

twopointfourbillion.com

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Re: There are 2.4 billion people on the Internet. We should get to know each other.

#11

It says "Anonymous and secure", but I don't see HTTPS in the URL. When I prefix https:// Firefox complains about untrusted certificate. Am I missing something?

The certificate being "untrusted" doesn't mean anything about security. It just mean that they have signed it themselves and that no central authorities that you are supposed to trust for whatever reasons has signed it for them. All you want here is an encrypted communication, and you get that with the self-signed certificate as well.

Re: There are 2.4 billion people on the Internet. We should get to know each other.

#13

Well it definitely provided some mental projections into how wonderful would it be to have more people around me that are interested in achieving the same things. Filling out those forms felt nice and regardless of the results, I feel strangely satisfied.

Interesting. I had a similar reaction.

There must be something to the idea, even if this isn't an ideal implementation.

Re: There are 2.4 billion people on the Internet. We should get to know each other.

#14

It says "Anonymous and secure", but I don't see HTTPS in the URL. When I prefix https:// Firefox complains about untrusted certificate. Am I missing something?

Sorry about that! I think the "Secure" copy is a bit misleading. We'll take that down. What we meant to communicate with "Anonymous and Secure" is, "Feel free to be completely honest because we won't show this information to anyone else, and we won't even ask for your name or identity!" It was a weekend project finished on little sleep. Sorry abou the "secure" bit.

You're the Josh Miller from Branch right? Oh well, just clarifying. :) I admire you.

Re: There are 2.4 billion people on the Internet. We should get to know each other.

#15
[meta] Why is this not on the frontpage? I see links with less than 10 points from an hour ago there, but not this link with more than 10 points from less than half an hour ago. Not that I care that much for this particular link, but it seems strange.

Edit: seems to be there now (approx. 20 minutes later). Maybe there was some change in the ranking algorithm recently? I don't believe I saw it acting like this before.

Re: There are 2.4 billion people on the Internet. We should get to know each other.

#16
post #11

It says "Anonymous and secure", but I don't see HTTPS in the URL. When I prefix https:// Firefox complains about untrusted certificate. Am I missing something?

The certificate being "untrusted" doesn't mean anything about security. It just mean that they have signed it themselves and that no central authorities that you are supposed to trust for whatever reasons has signed it for them. All you want here is an encrypted communication, and you get that with the self-signed certificate as well.

Yes, you get encrypted communication all the way to the person intercepting your internet traffic, and they have an encrypted channel to the server they are relaying your traffic to.

Security!

Re: There are 2.4 billion people on the Internet. We should get to know each other.

#17
post #11

It says "Anonymous and secure", but I don't see HTTPS in the URL. When I prefix https:// Firefox complains about untrusted certificate. Am I missing something?

The certificate being "untrusted" doesn't mean anything about security. It just mean that they have signed it themselves and that no central authorities that you are supposed to trust for whatever reasons has signed it for them. All you want here is an encrypted communication, and you get that with the self-signed certificate as well.

No. Without a trusted authority or some other means to verify that the self-signed certificate is indeed coming from the site, there is effectively no security because it is trivial to launch a MITM attack.

Re: There are 2.4 billion people on the Internet. We should get to know each other.

#20
post #17
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The certificate being "untrusted" doesn't mean anything about security. It just mean that they have signed it themselves and that no central authorities that you are supposed to trust for whatever reasons has signed it for them. All you want here is an encrypted communication, and you get that with the self-signed certificate as well.

No. Without a trusted authority or some other means to verify that the self-signed certificate is indeed coming from the site, there is effectively no security because it is trivial to launch a MITM attack.

For some definition of trivial. But you're right, it's not that simple (see below¹, I need to rant first). It's just that it upset me so much each time Firefox (or whatever browser, they all do it) load a webpage with a self-signed certificate and it acts like if I was attacked and my security is compromised or something… It's not worse than HTTP without SSL so why make me click two times like if I don't know what I'm doing? Nowadays it's more easy to do phishing in plain HTTP than in HTTPS: it's stupid.

¹ Actually it depends on your threat-model. If you assume that the first time you connect to the site there is no MITM (like we all do with SSH connections, don't tell me you always double check the fingerprint of the box you are SSHing to for the first time ;-)), then it is okay to trust the certificate as long as it doesn't change.

EDIT: formating

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