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HTTPS on NYTimes.com

open.blogs.nytimes.com

31–40 of 167 posts

Re: HTTPS on NYTimes.com

#31

A good step forward. Does the NY Times itself track what its users read? Does it provide that information to others? If so, this change amounts to not protecting user privacy as much as insisting that only the NYT can monetize their users' privacy.

Random coffee shop / hotel / etc wifi owners and other users on the network will only know that you're reading nytimes.com, and not which particular section/article.

And your session cookie..

Re: HTTPS on NYTimes.com

#32
post #2

Oh no, this was my go-to site whenever I had to login to public wifi and https wouldn't redirect :(

http://apple.com will probably always work since that's what ios uses when you join a network. I think specifically this url: http://www.apple.com/library/test/success.html

It's http://captive.apple.com/. That's always my go-to.

Re: HTTPS on NYTimes.com

#33

A good step forward. Does the NY Times itself track what its users read? Does it provide that information to others? If so, this change amounts to not protecting user privacy as much as insisting that only the NYT can monetize their users' privacy.

I don't see how anyone can monetize user privacy without NYT's permission, with or without HTTPS. All of the monetization methods, ad trackers on NYT pages, browser fingerprinting, malware on your computer, etc works with or without HTTPS.

Without HTTPS, whoever owns the LAN you use, its ISP, and various intermediary networks can easily track everything that appears in your web browser by reading the same traffic your browser reads.

Re: HTTPS on NYTimes.com

#34
post #28

They mention it has been a complex undertaking and not complete yet - does anyone know why they can't just sit a traffic manager in front of everything with SSL offloading? Also does anyone know what the new personalisation features are that they mention being able to offer now HTTPS in place?

Third party content. You have ad providers that won't agree to you delivering their content. They want to keep control over that (which is by the way a huge security risk on its own, but that's the state of things).

Re: HTTPS on NYTimes.com

#35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Random coffee shop / hotel / etc wifi owners and other users on the network will only know that you're reading nytimes.com, and not which particular section/article.

And your session cookie..

Session cookies are transmitted as headers which are protected by HTTPS.

Re: HTTPS on NYTimes.com

#36

A good step forward. Does the NY Times itself track what its users read? Does it provide that information to others? If so, this change amounts to not protecting user privacy as much as insisting that only the NYT can monetize their users' privacy.

Random coffee shop / hotel / etc wifi owners and other users on the network will only know that you're reading nytimes.com, and not which particular section/article.

Yes, that's assumed in what I meant. Vendors that track their users, such as Google and maybe the NYT, by implementing HTTPS are basically saying: We don't want to share that data with anyone else (e.g., 'random coffee shop / hotel / etc wifi owners'); we want to keep the monetization of our users' privacy to ourselves.

Re: HTTPS on NYTimes.com

#37
A nice farewell gift for Chris Soghoian's time at ACLU (during which he constantly tried to get news organizations, law firms, and government agencies to use HTTPS and STARTTLS).

Re: HTTPS on NYTimes.com

#38

It's nice to see more news media moving towards using HTTPS. NYTimes now joins a small club, alongside the Guardian and the Washington Post. Here's a dev blog post on the WaPo moving to https: https://developer.washingtonpost.com/pb/blog/post/2015/12/10... And one on the Guardian moving to https: https://www.theguardian.com/info/developer-blog/2016/nov/29/...

Google Chrome is supposed to soon start flashing a "not secure" warning on HTTP sites that have password forms [0]. That's probably at least one motivation for these publisher moves to HTTPS [0] https://security.googleblog.com/2016/09/moving-towards-more-...

I could have sworn firefox already did this, or maybe that ws just elinks...

Re: HTTPS on NYTimes.com

#39
post #2

Oh no, this was my go-to site whenever I had to login to public wifi and https wouldn't redirect :(

I totally had to figure this out for myself to use the Wi-Fi on a Southwest flight. Man, I thought I was clever!

Re: HTTPS on NYTimes.com

#40
post #28

They mention it has been a complex undertaking and not complete yet - does anyone know why they can't just sit a traffic manager in front of everything with SSL offloading? Also does anyone know what the new personalisation features are that they mention being able to offer now HTTPS in place?

This is likely an organizational, rather than a technical problem. Having worked for large media organizations, often different parts of the site are different deployable applications that share only a hardware device or small nginx or haproxy layer if they're on the same subdomain. It may be that in order to enable SSL on all parts of nytimes.com you need to affect ssl termination at a higher layer on a number of different servers/deploy locations which requires time and testing.

It's also possible that terminating the SSL and then passing through unsecured traffic lower in the stack is not ideal due to where the different parts of the site are hosted - e.g. passing traffic unsecured back and forth between private DC and public cloud.

Note: All speculation based on having implemented SSL migrations at large media companies.

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