this post was submitted on 14 Feb 2024
-62 points (14.0% liked)

No Stupid Questions

35772 readers
1190 users here now

No such thing. Ask away!

!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.

The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:

Rules (interactive)


Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.

All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.



Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.

Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.



Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.

Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.



Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.

That's it.



Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.

Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.



Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.

Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.

On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.

If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.



Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.

If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.

Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.



Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.



Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.

Let everyone have their own content.



Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.



Credits

Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!

The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

Like the TSA at the airport.

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

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

Free, for now.

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

top 50 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] cali_ash@lemmy.wtf 55 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (29 children)

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.

[–] nxdefiant@startrek.website 11 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

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

load more comments (28 replies)
[–] toasteecup@lemmy.world 35 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (10 children)

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

[–] oleorun@real.lemmy.fan 8 points 9 months ago

All I see is **** **** **** ****

load more comments (9 replies)
[–] bloopernova@programming.dev 26 points 9 months ago
[–] dhork@lemmy.world 20 points 9 months ago (10 children)

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.

load more comments (10 replies)
[–] Nemo@midwest.social 12 points 9 months ago

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

That's too long a run-up for a scam.

[–] ted@sh.itjust.works 12 points 9 months ago

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.

[–] amio@kbin.social 12 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

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@sh.itjust.works 5 points 9 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] amio@kbin.social 4 points 9 months ago

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

[–] r00ty@kbin.life 8 points 9 months ago

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.

[–] Ziggurat@sh.itjust.works 7 points 9 months ago (2 children)

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

load more comments (2 replies)
[–] thisfro@slrpnk.net 7 points 9 months ago

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@midwest.social 6 points 9 months ago

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.

[–] Rentlar@lemmy.ca 5 points 9 months ago

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.

[–] HubertManne@kbin.social 3 points 9 months ago
[–] squid_slime@lemmy.world 2 points 9 months ago

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

load more comments
view more: next ›