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Still Why No HTTPS?

troyhunt.com

21–30 of 345 posts

Re: Still Why No HTTPS?

#21
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I appreciate the efforts of certbot to make it as user-friendly as possible I still find this state of things unforgivable. I don't know where it went wrong so that today a developer must spend time learning and tweaking a low-level encryption tools. I'm just saying https will never be 100% unless it becomes a baked-in feature of any hosting.

Starting with baking ACMEv2 in the major webservers (apache, IIS, etc).

[deleted]

Re: Still Why No HTTPS?

#22

Some websites adamantly insist they did not need HTTPS because they are purely static. https://www.troyhunt.com/heres-why-your-static-website-needs... The same website to my surprise has an article on why this is faulty reasoning.

Our asshat twin n-gate has something to say about this

> Horseshit. Users must keep themselves safe. Software can't ever do that for you. Users are on their own to ensure they use a quality web client, on a computer they're reasonably sure is well-maintained, over an internet connection that is not run by people who hate them. None of the packets I send out are unsafe, so my site does not need HTTPS.

> None of those things are my problem. If people don't want to see my site with random trash inserted into it, they can choose not to access it through broken and/or compromised networks. If other website operators are concerned about this sort of thing, they are free to use HTTPS, but I have no reason to do so. Encryption should be available to anyone who wants to serve encrypted content, but I have no interest in using it for my website. It's a shame that people are using web browsers (note: not my website, but BROWSERS) as attack vectors. The legions of browser programmers employed by Mozilla, Google, Apple, and Microsoft should do something about that. It's not my flaw to fix, because it's a problem with the clients. My site does not need HTTPS.

> Earlier you recommended letsencrypt, and now suddenly you want me to pick a competent certificate authority? The only reason they didn't leak my info already is because my site does not need HTTPS.

> Obviously my site does not display ads; as has [been pointed out][https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14666391], It does not even appear to be monetized. This is because I have a real job and the entire web ad industry can fuck itself off a cliff. So, while mixed-content warnings are pretty obnoxious, my site does not need HTTPS.

http://n-gate.com/software/2017/

Re: Still Why No HTTPS?

#23
post #5

I don't get it. With Lets Encrypt, it's like one or two lines to get everything set up. I'm guessing people aren't as lucky as I am to be running on newer machines and such. I mean it even edits your nginx files to redirect http to https if you agree. It's not hard.

I'm fine with people who think it's too hard... What i cannot stand is people who can do it, but refuse to out of laziness. Or because they want their content to be insecure on purpose. This applies mostly to big orgs, so indie devs can have some leeway if it's too hard to implement.

I’m curious what your opinion is on people who don’t to make a point.

Re: Still Why No HTTPS?

#24
post #12
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Instructions are here: https://certbot.eff.org/ I don't know how it could possibly be any simpler.

It is simple for a one-server website. When you're on Alexa 1M, you certainly have a load balancer, multiple servers for redundancy, etc. It makes things not straightforward, and you certainly don't want to use the default certbot which overwrites your config.

I am on alexa 1m (50k even). I do not have a load balancer, I do not have multiple servers for redundancy. This isn't even a static site, most of our page views are the wiki, the server running all of this has 8 cores and 4 are constantly maxxed out by a non-website related process.

Most websites now and days are over engineered.

Re: Still Why No HTTPS?

#25

Some websites adamantly insist they did not need HTTPS because they are purely static. https://www.troyhunt.com/heres-why-your-static-website-needs... The same website to my surprise has an article on why this is faulty reasoning.

Our asshat twin n-gate has something to say about this > Horseshit. Users must keep themselves safe. Software can't ever do that for you. Users are on their own to ensure they use a quality web client, on a computer they're reasonably sure is well-maintained, over an internet connection that is not run by people who hate them. None of the packets I send out are unsafe, so my site does not need HTTPS. > None of those…

The website is actually quite useful: I notice that intersection between the threads discussed there and the ones I comment on is almost exactly the empty set. So it’s a great check to see whether I’m doing a good job ;)

Re: Still Why No HTTPS?

#26
post #5

I don't get it. With Lets Encrypt, it's like one or two lines to get everything set up. I'm guessing people aren't as lucky as I am to be running on newer machines and such. I mean it even edits your nginx files to redirect http to https if you agree. It's not hard.

Nope, it is not straight-forward and still a confusing process.

It is relatively straightforward if you have a single site hosted on a well-supported operating system and web server.

It suddenly becomes really, really complicated if you have multiple servers, multiple domains, nginx configurations that the tool does not expect (but insists on rewriting).

Re: Still Why No HTTPS?

#27
There is one "good" reason against https: handshakes take enormous amounts of CPU, relatively speaking. It's quite easy tp DoS server by skipping the expensive part on your end. You can load a core with 10~30Mbit@2k rps if your not even optimized.

Whereas the same server could tank 40k rps HTTP requests.

Re: Still Why No HTTPS?

#28
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Instructions are here: https://certbot.eff.org/ I don't know how it could possibly be any simpler.

While I appreciate the efforts of certbot to make it as user-friendly as possible I still find this state of things unforgivable. I don't know where it went wrong so that today a developer must spend time learning and tweaking a low-level encryption tools. I'm just saying https will never be 100% unless it becomes a baked-in feature of any hosting.

It’s for ops. Not dev

Re: Still Why No HTTPS?

#29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope, it is not straight-forward and still a confusing process.

So true. Even on hosting that fully supports let's encrypt thru an web based admin like cpanel or directadmin, the process can be confusing and error prone.

If we're purely talking about Let's Encrypt, it's not straightforward to set up on Azure either.

It's easy to set up a standard cert through Azure, but if you want to use Let's Encrypt there's a whole dance you have to go through to get there, and for many people it's not worth the time and they'll happily pay a bit of money to make it a few-clicks thing.

Re: Still Why No HTTPS?

#30
post #19
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are some other confusing ones as well. nature.com is marked as Chinese, as are nginx.org and ntp.org. example.com is Indian in the list as is the now defunct dmoz.org. I don't understand the methodology behind the country assignments at all…

Weirdly nature.com seems to actually redirect to https, as does zara.com, lenovo.com, genuis.com, and senate.gov. Is this list stale, or did no one spot-check this?

[deleted]
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