Hacker News Reader

Comment by Aaron1011 | Hacker News Reader

> Also, if Google succeeds, it will make a lot of the web's history inaccessible.

> It's like a massive book burning, at a much bigger scale than ever done before.

How on earth did the author reach these conclusions?

A lot of the web properties are HTTP based and they probably won't bother to switch either because the owner doesn't care enough to go through all the hassle, or because they hosted their site/pages on a server whose owner doesn't care enough to go through all the hassle.

Just because these owners don't care about their site, doesn't mean they are not valuable.

I was referring specifically to the author's claim that deprecating HTTP and displaying a warning to users is the equivalent of "rendering large parts of the web inaccessible" and "massive book burning".

That's what I was referring to. I don't understand what you don't understand about the reference.

Displaying a warning to users doesn't make sites "inaccessible".

Sure it does. Users fear warnings they don't understand, and some will not click past they warning. For those users, you might as well replace the page with a 404 for all the good it does them. Maybe there are not MANY such users; I don't know and would love to find out. But surely some.

If you mark something as 'Not Secure' you're effectively telling users not to access it. It doesn't matter in practice if the content is still accessible when the browser tells people that accessing it is dangerous.

A lot of content that exists on the unmaintained web is going to effectively be lost, and maybe that's okay because the benefits are worth it, but that's the argument that needs to be made.

> It doesn't matter in practice if the content is still accessible when the browser tells people that accessing it is dangerous.

It certainly does matter. There's a fundamental different between people being discouraged from accessing a website, and said website being completely inaccessible.

A lot of content which exists on the unmaintained web is going to be lost anyway, regardless of HTTP. Hosting sites shut down after a while. There's a ton of content that was on Geocities, for example, which is now inaccessible.

A migration of newer websites to HTTPS is no more a loss to data than deprecating old versions of HTML in newer versions of Chrome or upgrading newer servers to HTTP/2. The old ones will still exist. And if they cease to exist, it's almost certainly not going to be because a browser displays a "not secure" warning on the top left corner of the scene.

There are also entire websites and communities built upon the archival of data:

https://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Main_Page

https://archive.org

Reply on news.ycombinator.com