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.
Go ahead, submit your credit card details in plain text. I’m sure nothing bad will happen.
All I see is **** **** **** ****
But 99% of us with websites don’t take credit card numbers.
Do you take login credentials that could be skimmed and used for identity theft?
Maybe this one will strike home for people who think it’s a scam by The Man:
With no HTTPS, every single thing you do on the web can be monitored by your ISP’s automated tracking system and sold to data warehouses that then sell the data on to AI aggregators who can profile your activity to figure out how to shape your future behaviour based on how you responded in the past.
And HTTPS isn’t just about protecting secrets, it’s about validating the communication channel hasn’t been tampered with. Without it, anyone between you and your destination could be modifying what actually gets sent back to you, injecting anything from malware to slight changes in text content based on the above profiling info.
HTTPS is part of what keeps the web free and federated.
Yes, security. We love security now. The argument is well known.
But now you need permission from an official to have a web site. That’s bad, right?
What? I’ve got all sorts of self hosted websites. Encrypted by HTTPS. No permission needed. If Let’s Encrypt vanished, I’d just switch to self-signing my certificates and using a pinning service.
Doesn’t chrome flag self-signed certificates?
Ok, I didn’t know that was a thing. Thanks
You should probably be more concerned about DNS than HTTPS. DNS is a point where government censors actually do go after web sites they don’t like.