[geeks] Looking for subdomain?

[Nathan Raymond]

On Thu, Jul 22, 2021 at 9:03 PM Mouse <mouse at rodents-montreal.org> wrote:

> Lack of HTTPS support is close to incompatible with the contemporary
> Web.  There used to be a few websites that I thought the net was better
> for having.  They have now all drunk the "ram HTTPS down everyone's
> collective throat" koolaid.  There are still a few fringe websites left
> that don't insist on HTTPS, but they are relatively minor.
>

I've been trying to understand the philosophical position you are taking,
and I think I get it, but I'm not sure, and I'm curious if you could
elaborate? Personally I'm rather ambivalent to HTTPS, as in I realize it
has it's problems, but I also see how it's needed and we don't have
anything better right now. I see the desire to make HTTPS a default state
of the web as a work-around for the fact that the internet is so
ubiquitous, that people connect from many different places public and
private and can't always trust the security of the devices at every hop,
people who design websites often can't be trusted to design them properly
in terms of handling people's data, people transmit lots of information
they want to protect/keep private, and without prevalent and default HTTPS
the utility and safety of the modern web would be greatly reduced. The EFF
has long been a proponent of HTTPS everywhere. These days, even the WELL
(i.e. the circa 1985 Whole Earth bLectronic Link) is at <
https://www.well.com/>. That being said, SSL certainly isn't perfect - see
Moxie Marlinspike's 2013 DEF CON 19 talk on "SSL and The Future of
Authenticity".

I do have favorable memories of the pre-web internet in general. I really
liked the old usenet and gopher. But those were also the days when the
internet was very much the hybrid of the military-industrial complex and
'60's hippie idealism (see "What the Dormouse Said" by John Markoff). In a
sense it has all been downhill once it went mainstream, but I'm not sure
it's fair to compare what the internet is now to what it was, I really
think of them as being different things that just happen to share some of
the same protocols.

- Nate