judge2020 5 hours ago

What???

The internet is only more concentrated because most people choose price and convenience over a foolproof level of security. The cost/effort required to surveil traffic in coordination with TLS-terminating CDNs is multiple orders of magnitude higher than the effort needed to throw some high-Tbps middlebox in an IX rack to siphon every packet passing through it.

▲ Lammy 4 hours ago | parent [-]

> in coordination with TLS-terminating CDNs

Not what I'm saying. No coordination is necessary. I'm talking about metadata, not encrypted contents — just the fact that you made some number of connections, at a certain time, from a certain network, to a certain network, in a certain order, with requests and responses of a certain size. It really doesn't matter what's inside.

- https://kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2013/06/09/using-metad...

- https://youtu.be/kV2HDM86XgI?t=1072 “First of all, David's description of what you can do with metadata […] is absolutely correct. We kill people based on metadata.” ― Former NSA and CIA director General Michael Hayden (2014)

▲ nl 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Sure, but hiding the contents provides a lot more value than hiding some parts of metadata.

It's ridiculous to argue otherwise.

It's true that general resources could be cached in some cases, but personalized information couldn't be (and yes was served over HTTP, not just HTTPS).

> It really doesn't matter what's inside

It certainly does matter what is inside, and it's trivial to think of cases where it does. Hiding that content is much much more valuable.

> We kill people based on metadata.

Sure, but they also kill people based on content.

▲ Lammy 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> It's ridiculous to argue otherwise.

I wholeheartedly disagree :)

If you will refer to the “survivability onion”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivability#/media/File:Surv...

                 Don't be there
     I am here → Don't be seen
                 Don't be acquired
  You are here → Don't be hit
                 Don't be penetrated
                 Don't be killed

One will note that it's called ‘HTTPS’ and not ‘HTTPP’ lol

▲

nl 4 hours ago | parent [-]

> If you will refer to the “survivability onion”

> I am here → Don't be seen

My point is that you aren't. For example under the old HTTP only internet they could see you were visiting HN, who you were and what you published.

Under HTTPS they see you are visting HN.

It's strictly better except in cases of visiting highly popular data which was cached in public caches. These public caches were much less wide spread than you appear to believe (for example in Australia the Internode ISP tried one for a little while but abandoned it because of the problems with it serving info one logged in person to another - cache invalidation was frequently buggy)

> One will note that it's called ‘HTTPS’ and not ‘HTTPP’

Not sure who that is aimed at but I didn't write HTTPP, and yours is the only mention of it on this page.

> lol

If you are going to lol you had better make sure you are correct about what you are laughing about....

▲

Lammy 3 hours ago | parent [-]

> These public caches were much less wide spread than you appear to believe

You can keep your belief or disbelief. I ran my own, transparently with Squid on my FreeBSD PF gateway box back in The Day when we had a cable ISP with a restrictive data cap. I could send my roommate a link, or reload a link myself any number of times, and it never left the edge of my network after the first. It was really cool.

These days you don't even need to actively do anything for most operating systems' default configurations to loudly announce your presence and behavior to the ‘Room 641A’s of the world:

- Join any Wi-Fi network and your OS or browser (or both!) will automatically hit a well-known captive portal test URI.

- Most OSes will hit an NTP server that reveals the OS maker (depending on if it's Google's or Apple's or Microsoft's or the NTP-dot-org pool) as well as providing a heartbeat to tell the network you're still physically present when you make subsequent requests every ${default-periodicity} minutes following the first time sync following the captive portal check.

- Then once TLS' regressive dependency on synchronized time is satisfied, many default OS installs will hit a weather API whose transport layer is “secure” but whose response size is, if not unique among all possible geolocations that could be requested at the same timestamp, at least a piece of identifying information to combine with others. If I were NSA I would be making requests to APIs like Foreca for every possible geolocation at every ${change-frequency} seconds and storing every bit of sidechannel metadata about them forever for comparison with other recorded traffic.

- And most people's machines will announce their unique collection of software to the world through the act of making network connections to the known networks for the background update checks and “““telemetry””” (remember when the term was “spyware” for anything that remotely reported user behavior?) that have sadly become normalized in modern software.

	▲	nl 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I too ran Squid. It was more annoying than not (except for images, where I do think it was quite useful) It seem you concede the point about survivability though? Those other things that seem unrelated to the utility of HTTP vs HTTPS.

▲ ShinyLeftPad 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

if you visit wikipedia.org/whistleblowing, what exactly value is there from hiding content but force revealing you visited it, making sure it can't be retrieved from a cache within your organization/school network?

and doesn't pervasive tls termination mean that Cloudflare/etc sees plaintext anyway? do we really believe that palantir isn't tapping into that?

i can imagine just a few scenarios where hiding content on the web actually achieves something. mainly stuff like webmail, web chats, banking.

	▲	nl 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> if you visit wikipedia.org/whistleblowing Just visiting, sure but if you edit it to leak a secret the protection is everything. Say you are on your school network and leak something damaging about the school on Wikipedia. Prior to Wikpedia switching to HTTPS, both the school and any intermediate network could see `- you visited Wikipedia - you edited Wikipedia - what you wrote on Wikipedia` After HTTPS, your school could see `- you visited Wikipedia` That's strictly better in every way.

▲ Melatonic 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Doesn't encrypted DNS make a lot of that metadata moot ?

And of course the additional options available

	▲	jeltz an hour ago \| parent [-]
		No, it doesn't. You still see the domain name in the TLS headers.