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r00ty Admin ,
r00ty avatar

Not sure I get this one. You can still run a website with http. Now it might alarm the browser and users. But you can do it.

As for certificates being free but maybe not now. It's actually the other way round. As I recall when https was pretty new the main way was via verisign, and it was not cheap to get one.

The fact you could later get one for free for example via letsencrypt is what made it so everyone could run https (along with the changes that allow multiple certs on a single server with multiple domains).

If it became expensive to get certs again I'd bet a lot of hobbyist stuff would go back to http or self signed and browsers would need to tone down the warning. But, I cannot imagine that happening now. Having most sites encrypted is a good thing.

Rentlar ,

I’d consider my internet browsing unknowingly being snooped on or having content injected as a benefit and not a scam.

The latest post from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital freedom and privacy advocacy group touches on HTTPS, and how HTTPS becoming the norm is an improvement on privacy compared to the past.

squid_slime ,
@squid_slime@lemmy.world avatar

I understand the issue of big tech being the authority, but I also see the benefit of hiding my data from ISP and snooping. There are practical p2p ways to make this work or even a federated authenticator but we are probably stuck with https for a long while yet

amio ,

No, it is not a scam or like the TSA. (... which is of much less clear benefit, but that's a different story.)

Security that we never needed before, but now suddenly we do.

How do you figure? Dropping unsafe practices earlier would've been a great idea, it was just another item in the long list of "people suck at technology", that stuck around out of habit and sloppiness. HTTPS is not new, but for a long time it was much more acceptable to deal with plain unsafe solutions for many uses. Since setting up an HTTPS site for free got very, very easy, there just weren't many excuses left.

Now we’re dependent on a third party gatekeeper for permission to have a web site.

Sort of. By necessity, in a chain of trust, the buck has to stop somewhere, that's your root "authority". In some cases you just make your own on the logic that you trust yourself, or accept some other cert/authority as trusted, or tell the browser "yeah whatever, I know what I'm doing" if you know it's safe. The catch is that then, for any number of reasons, you can't necessarily know it's safe.

It’s a move by the weasels-that-be to turn the Internet into yet another tool for profit and control.

No offense, are you sure you have the technical background required to know that?

ryathal ,

Websites were already dependent on third parties for domain registration in the first place, so OPs complaint about cert authorities makes less sense.

amio ,

Good parallel. Trusting DNS with interpreting a hostname is not all that different from trusting CAs about whom else you should trust.

thisfro ,

It’s defenitively not a scam. It does exactly ehat it should and is pretty good at it.

However, especially google is pushing it on everything, even when they are not needed. Punishing search results if they don’t enforce https, make it hard to access sites in chrome etc.

I have a static website that takes no user input whatsoever, thus https is pointless and a waste of compute power/energy.

In the end I see the biggest issue in not very tech literate useres thinking everything with https is legit and trustworrhy, while it really isn’t.

stinerman ,
@stinerman@midwest.social avatar

Your problem seems to be with cert authorities, which is not the same as HTTPS.

I’d be interested in what your solution is that doesn’t rely upon a 3rd party to guarantee that a website is ran by who it says it is.

Also if you’re complaining that browsers warn the user when using http, that’s a complaint about the browser, not HTTPS.

HubertManne ,

no.

Ziggurat ,

Now we’re dependent on a third party gatekeeper for permission to have a web site.

Source ?

Even though most browser would return an alarm in case of “self signed certificate” you can still do-it, and it’s still more secure than non encryption

Dr_Satan OP ,

Source ?

I refer to the issuer of the security certificate

Semi-Hemi-Demigod ,
@Semi-Hemi-Demigod@kbin.social avatar

That's not how security certificates work

dhork ,

HTTP is like using a postcard, HTTPS is using a sealed envelope. Which would you use for your bank information?

The “third party gatekeeper” does more than just secure data, it also acts as a validation that your site is what it says it is. So if someone jacks your domain out from under you and hosts something totally different, people can tell that something’s up.

Dr_Satan OP ,

99% of us with websites never touch bank information.

dhork ,

But would you be OK taking all the stuff you write on those websites, and scrawling it on a giant chalkboard in your town square instead? One where anyone can see (or even change) what you’ve written?

Dr_Satan OP ,

That’s never been an issue for me.

Yes, I can see how that would be a bad thing but it’s so hypothetical. Why do we even care? Do we really feel the breath of the NSA on our neck to that degree?

originalucifer ,
@originalucifer@moist.catsweat.com avatar

back in the day, i used to sit in the airport and read nearby peoples email, watch them browse sites. https and other security measures make this actually difficult now.

you should be concerned with more than just 3 letter agencies.

Nyfure , (edited )

You can not only use that information for e.g. blackmail, but also to build material to manipulate you to do things without you knowing.
Information is a powerful tool.

sab ,

And http still works in any browser I know of.

I kind of get your frustration though. I set up my personal website precisely to get away from big platforms; yet my HTTPS is validated by Google. It feels like a defeat still having them involved in the process.

Dr_Satan OP ,

Thank you.

Use http and Chrome calls you insecure and there’s a red flag and you have to hit a special button… daunting for the average user for sure.

Firefox is good tho.

One person pointed out that letsencrypt is backed by a bunch of good powerful people. Which might be bullshit but it makes me think again.

Semi-Hemi-Demigod ,
@Semi-Hemi-Demigod@kbin.social avatar

I have HTTPS on all my services and the only third-party involved is Let's Encrypt.

If I really wanted to, I could create my own authority and certificates, and as long as people connecting to it trusted my authority they'll have encrypted and trusted connections without any third party involved.

sab ,

Yeah, there's ways around it for sure, so it's not the end of the world.

I'm not super technical though, so as my hosting provider uses Google for HTTPS authentication I'll just reluctantly stick with that for now. Of course I could have found a different provider, but I found it a somewhat difficult market to navigate. I'm enough of a rookie that part of me is just happy things seem to be working - when I set up the website a few months ago I kind of assumed HTTPS was some black magic stuff that I would never manage to implement.

Semi-Hemi-Demigod ,
@Semi-Hemi-Demigod@kbin.social avatar

I remember when I thought it was black magic, but after doing some work creating my own certificate authority and self-signed certificates it makes a lot more sense.

Now Kubernetes, that's black magic

ted ,

The problem with TSA is that it reduces our privacy and dignity in exchange for security (that security may be theatre). HTTPS is different because it increases privacy which allows us to keep more dignity (security that is not theatre.)

TSA is like needing to strip so that your clothes don’t get wet while going out in the rain, while HTTPS is like wearing a raincoat so your clothes don’t get wet while going out in the rain.

toasteecup ,

Go ahead, submit your credit card details in plain text. I’m sure nothing bad will happen.

Dr_Satan OP ,

But 99% of us with websites don’t take credit card numbers.

adespoton ,

Do you take login credentials that could be skimmed and used for identity theft?

Maybe this one will strike home for people who think it’s a scam by The Man:

With no HTTPS, every single thing you do on the web can be monitored by your ISP’s automated tracking system and sold to data warehouses that then sell the data on to AI aggregators who can profile your activity to figure out how to shape your future behaviour based on how you responded in the past.

And HTTPS isn’t just about protecting secrets, it’s about validating the communication channel hasn’t been tampered with. Without it, anyone between you and your destination could be modifying what actually gets sent back to you, injecting anything from malware to slight changes in text content based on the above profiling info.

HTTPS is part of what keeps the web free and federated.

Dr_Satan OP ,

Yes, security. We love security now. The argument is well known.

But now you need permission from an official to have a web site. That’s bad, right?

adespoton ,

What? I’ve got all sorts of self hosted websites. Encrypted by HTTPS. No permission needed. If Let’s Encrypt vanished, I’d just switch to self-signing my certificates and using a pinning service.

Dr_Satan OP ,

Doesn’t chrome flag self-signed certificates?

Ok, I didn’t know that was a thing. Thanks

fubo ,

You should probably be more concerned about DNS than HTTPS. DNS is a point where government censors actually do go after web sites they don’t like.

toasteecup ,

I don’t need permission to have a website. I need to prove I have control over a domain so that I can get a certificate for it. That way I can’t get a certificate for lemmy.org when I don’t own or control lemmy.org.

I don’t know what drug You’re smoking friend but please stop. It’s giving you brainrot.

rdyoung ,

Wait, what? Who needs permission from whom to run a website? I can spin up a website right now, I can spin up as many as I want. You can too. There is no permission needed to get https setup on your website, it can be simple or a bit more involved depending on who you are using as your host or if you are handling everything yourself from a vps or locally hosted server.

Please do yourself a favor and delete this thread and stop commenting. You are way out your depths here and have no idea how anything works.

Nyfure , (edited )

Yes, you need an organization which signs your certificate, so it is trusted by default. This is our trust-anchor so we know the certificate presented was validated and it was given only to the website owner.
There are numerous around the world for that.
And if that is no longer offered, you can just not have your certificate signed, which means browsers will complain about it.
But you can trust your own certificate yourself. Or create your own certificate authority which can then sign other certificates for the community as their new trust anchor.
I think we would very quickly build the web-of-trust, but for certificates.

You can even not have certificates, but keep an weak form of TLS (no idea if browsers support TLS_DH_anon_*), but its still encrypted and can only be broken by an active Man-in-the-Middle-attack. (which is theoretically detectable later on)
Diffie-Hellman is an awesome key-exchange.

cali_ash ,

No it’s not.

And it’s not really like the TSA on the airport. It’s more like a “having a door on your plane” type of security.

Dr_Satan OP ,

What if the issuer of the security certificate started charging you $1000 a year?

Why wouldn’t they?

Shadow ,
@Shadow@lemmy.ca avatar

Letsencrypt certs are free dude. Https literally costs you nothing.

Dr_Satan OP ,

They’re free today. Maybe not tomorrow. But by then HTTP will have been “phased out” and asking the “security authority” for permission will have become common practice.

Shadow ,
@Shadow@lemmy.ca avatar

They’re a non profit backed by a ton of major internet players, it’s not going to happen. letsencrypt.org/about/

What you’re talking about was already the situation before LE existed, we’re not going back to that. There’s other free providers now too.

Dr_Satan OP ,

Ok. That’s a good argument. I didn’t realize that the forces for good here were so strong in this.

But frankly I’d rather not depend on them either.

towerful ,

Well, self-sign your own certs and deal with the implications of not being a trusted root certificate authority

z3rOR0ne ,

Just out of curiosity, what other trusted certificate authorities are there that offer ssl certs for free and no strings attached other than letsencrypt?

Shadow ,
@Shadow@lemmy.ca avatar
cali_ash ,

I’d switch to another certificate provider …

Dr_Satan OP ,

Don’t play the fool.

If “charging $1000 for security certificates” became common practice (much like HTTPS) then you would be stuck paying it.

(And maybe there would be a “standards of behavior” clause in the security certificate contract too. lol)

You are now dependent on a third party gatekeeper. He can bend you over literally any way at all. He just hasn’t yet.

And that goes for the legal authority behind that authority too, of course.

udon ,

That’s a good theory sir/lady, and actually was the case until around 10 years ago.

Then Snowden happened, and we found out that the nsa is sucking all unencrypted traffic out of the net and into their databases.

Then letsencrypt happened and now you can get your certificates for free. Don’t pay 1000$. Letsencrypt is free and you can automatically update certificates. If your hoster doesn’t offer https for free, choose a different hoster.

Dr_Satan OP ,

Yes it’s free today. Maybe not tomorrow. And the fact remains that you need permission from a third party (basically a gov official) to have a website now. Doesn’t that trouble you?

KingWizard ,
@KingWizard@kbin.social avatar

No, and its clear you don’t understand the fundamentals here and you are throwing around baseless stats.

It’s not even about the certificate itself but the trust of who generates the cert. Just about anyone can generate a https cert, therefore it will always be free.

Who’s going to trust a company selling certs for $1000? Now that money is involved, trust is lost and the cert becomes worthless.

Dr_Satan OP ,

Consider. We’re all using HTTPS and depending on certs.

Suddenly a wild threat appears.

For our own safety, from now on, certs will only be issued by those who get special permission from the gov.

Google will be cooperating in this.

It’s technically trivial after all, because we’re all already using HTTPS anyway. It’s just a matter of changing the lock on the gate.

Thank you for your cooperation in these troublesome times.

(And a year later. We’re installing new security software. We need to charge you $1000/year now. This will have no effect upon our main clients…)

towerful ,

Nah, anyone can become a certificate authority.
The difference is that the current trusted certificate authorities are autonatically trusted by browsers and operating systems.

But you could run your own CA, issue certs for yourself and your friends, and get them to import your CA public key to their trusted CA store.
Then it would work just like getting a cert from letsencrypt. The only difference is that letsencrypt is already included the CA store of OSs and browsers, so people dont have to do all the manual stuff

KingWizard ,
@KingWizard@kbin.social avatar

Your entire premise requires sustained cooperation of the whole world to collude and agree on something.

udon ,

@KingWizard is right, you don’t understand the fundamentals of this. You’re asking good questions, but people have been asking them decades ago and already found reasonably good answers. HTTPS works okay for what it does. Check out letsencrypt, watch some talks about it. Informing yourself about the matter will get you further than asking more random questions on lemmy.

ares35 ,
@ares35@kbin.social avatar

there's still the very real possibility they're hoovering all the encrypted data, too. and storing the stuff to/from 'interesting' end points for later 'analysis'--that is, if they don't already have the current tech broken.

udon ,

Sure, but one thing we learned is that encryption sure makes things more annoying for them

cali_ash ,

And if everyone would suddenly charge $10.000 for food, a lot of people would starve to death! Does that make grocieries stores a scam?

Your scenario is just absurdly unrealistic. Https and TLS are juststandards. No single entity controls them. If all the certificate provider would suddenly charge money, you’d have a bunch of new, free certificate provider the next day.

Dr_Satan OP ,

But if you needed permission to be a certificate provider then you’d be stuck.

Once you are dependent upon that official certificate, upon that issuer, you’re stuck. At their mercy.

Jajcus ,

If your browser or your OS insist on only trusting $1000 certificate, blocking access to most of the internet, then change the browser or OS. There is no grand authority telling which root certificates can be trusted. Yes, Google or Apple could scam their users this way if they wish to, but it would not make much sense for them. People would use something else.

brygphilomena ,

You have the timeline backwards. That’s pretty much how it was untile letsencrypt hit the scene.

But the technology of https works even with a cert not from a trusted root issuer. You just have that annoying page to click through on web browsers.

Nollij ,

Not THE issuer. AN issuer. All of your devices have a number of trusted top-level issuers (Root certification authorities). Windows has about 50 preloaded, and this list largely matches what you’ll find on Android, Mac, etc. Everyone’s been mentioning Let’s Encrypt, which descends from ISRG Root X1. But you can (relatively) easily get certs from Thawte, Verisign, and many others.

And if none of those are to your liking, you can install your own. Seriously, there’s nothing technical stopping you. Most corporate devices (Windows, Mac, Linux; Android or iOS; mobile, client, server) have the company’s root certs installed. The challenge for public trust is exactly that- Trust. You must operate in a way that is generally trustworthy.

Let’s Encrypt was actually pretty revolutionary. You aren’t entirely off base with your concern. Prior to that, getting a cert that was trusted by most devices was non-trivial, and came with an expense. But that wasn’t because of the desire for encryption. Rather, it was about verifying that you were who you said you were. These also served as proof of identity.

nxdefiant ,

This is the best analogy I’ve ever read in the subject, bravo.

Nemo ,

Bruh it’s been here for well over two decades.

That’s too long a run-up for a scam.

bloopernova ,
@bloopernova@programming.dev avatar

No.

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