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Comment by mschuster91 | Hacker News Reader

> Like, yeah, once the secure way is sufficiently easy to use, we can then push everyone off the insecure way; that's how it's supposed to work.

The problem is that this requires work and validation, which no beancounter ever plans for. And the underlings have to do the work, but don't get extra time, so it has to be crammed in, condensing the workday even more. For hobbyist projects it's even worse.

That is why people are so pissed, there is absolutely zero control over what the large browser manufacturers decide on a whim. It's one thing if banks or Facebook or other truly large entities get to do work... but personal blogs and the likes?

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We've reached a point where securing your hobby projects essentially means setting the "use_letsencrypt = true" config option in your web server. I bet configuring it takes less time than you spent reading this HN thread.

And with regards to the beancounters: that is exactly why the browsers are pushing for it. Most companies aren't willing time and effort into proper certificate handling procedures. The only way to get them to secure their shit is by forcing them: do it properly, or your website will go offline. And as it turns out, security magically gets a lot more attention when ignoring it has a clear and direct real-world impact.

> but personal blogs and the likes?

Yep, the result of the current security hysteria/theater is it makes it increasingly difficult to maintain an independent web presence.

Yes, I know, you can just use Cloudflare and depend on it...

Cloudflare uses HTTP to connect to your website before caching the content. I’ve always found it highly insecure. You could have HTTPS with Letsencrypt, but you need to deactivate Cloudflare when you want to renew (or use the other validation that is complex enough that I didn’t succeed to do it).

Don't pick on this particular SSL requirement, pick on the deluge of requirements that only make sense for a site that sells something or handles personal data (i.e. has accounts). They get extended to $RANDOM_SITE that only serves static text and the occasional cat photo for no good reason except "your cats will be more secure!".

GP: At least on business plans this is incorrect, it defaults to (last time I checked) accepting any SSL certificate including self signed from edge to origin and it’s a low friction option to enforce either valid or provided CA/PubKey certs for the same path.

Parent: those innocuous cat photos are fine in the current political climate… “First they came for the cat pic viewers, but I did not speak up…”

Wrong metaphor though?

How does SSL on a -ing public site protect you from being arrested by miniluv?

It’s public, you want everyone to see the cat photos, that’s why you set up the site. On the contrary, SSL certs mean another party through which miniluv can track you. They prove or are supposed to prove identity not hide it.

Sorry that wasn’t particularly clear, I was taking more about the general advantageous nature of normalising encryption.

WRT to another party to track you, one of the benefits of LE is that you only need to provide proof of domain ownership (eg dns txt) so the only tie back to you is whatever information you give to the registrar that you have to provide anyway.

The statement that Cloudflare uses HTTP to connect to your website can be false depending on how you configure it. For years, I have had personal websites with Cloudflare as the CDN and with Let’s Encrypt providing certificates on the web server. All I do is choose Full (Strict) in the TLS settings on Cloudflare. So the connection between the end user to Cloudflare and from Cloudflare to my web server are on HTTPS. No deactivation of Cloudflare required on my end during renewal (my web host, like many others, has the certificate generation automated and getting a TLS certificate just a toggle on my admin dashboard).

TLS only takes a few minutes to add to a self hosted solution, just plop caddy in front of your server

> That is why people are so pissed, there is absolutely zero control over what the large browser manufacturers decide on a whim. It's one thing if banks or Facebook or other truly large entities get to do work... but personal blogs and the likes?

Yep. There are plenty of things on the Internet for which TLS provides zero value. It is absolutely nonsensical to try to force them into using it, but the browser community is hell bent on making that bad decision. It is what it is.

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