(More broadly though the operational overhead of software is really high these days in a lot of ways. I think that's true of anything, not just HTTPS, but there are a lot of other historical factors leading to that.)
I think it's a bit of a leap to suggest that just doing things like banning mass surveillance would magically make systems more stable or make 15yo operating systems suddenly relevant on the net again. We'd probably still need a lot of the stuff we have in place already. However, I suggest we try it anyway because there's only one way to find out and oh well we won't lose anything valuable anyway.
Mass surveillance is not the only reason to have HTTPS everywhere. It protects not just from snoopers, but from MITM attacks.
I'm sorry but you're not thinking this through very carefully. People still care about authentication of read-only stuff, in the same way much (and it should be all) open source software, particularly from repositories, is signed these days. A great deal of mischief can be done by modifying info in flight, even ignoring privacy concerns entirely. Plenty of not just governmental but corporate bodies could benefit by being able to trivially rewrite whatever populations (or targeted segments of populations) read. Even ignoring what a vector it could be for other attacks. In principle, we could have some universal standard for signing and authenticating as unaltered websites without bothering to encrypt them. But frankly that seems pointless vs just having encryption as well.
Further, like all practical public crypto use in the face of adversaries, there is a lot of benefit from using it universally and thus "hiding in the herd". Otherwise, the mere usage of crypto itself is a signal, and also easier to target and block (not just technically but via laws). Whereas when it's just baked into literally everything that's much harder to outright infeasible, and also destroys that extra bit of signal.
This was all debated and considered extensively while the moves to universal HTTPS were happening. People moved read-only sites as well for a reason.
And the entire discussion was primarily motivated by pervasive surveillance. Which is the point I was making that we're living in a bad equilibrium (low trust society) where there is an attacker and there is a costly defense against the attacker that demonstrates that this particular kind of attack can be rendered useless but we cannot stop paying for the defense because as soon as we do the attacks would resume. If we could instead solve the regulatory problem and forbid surveillance then we would not have to pay that price.
> Further, like all practical public crypto use in the face of adversaries, there is a lot of benefit from using it universally and thus "hiding in the herd". Otherwise, the mere usage of crypto itself is a signal, and also easier to target and block (not just technically but via laws). Whereas when it's just baked into literally everything that's much harder to outright infeasible, and also destroys that extra bit of signal.
That's just a different angle on the surveillance, no? If we had no surveillance then nobody would be there to observe those bits of information you would leak by using or not using encryption.
> In principle, we could have some universal standard for signing and authenticating as unaltered websites without bothering to encrypt them. But frankly that seems pointless vs just having encryption as well.
There are plenty of benefits such as lower latency, much simpler zero-copy IO on the server side (sendfile), improved caching, less energy and silicon area wasted on encryption, less technological obsolescence, a smaller your-ciphersuite/OpenSSL-has-flaws maintenance treadmill. To some extent we could even do without CAs (via content-addressable data).
These may all be papercuts, but we're still getting cut because we can't collectively just tell the NSA to get off our lawn even though we have the means to keep them out anyway.
Your banks support numbers, election poll information, binary downloads/checksums are some really critical ones but the list is really endless given the wide range of possible adversaries and their motives.
One big advantage to pushing HTTPS everywhere is that we don't have to trust people to be able to correctly predict which read only content is sensitive.
I do wish browsers handled expired certs for longstanding sites in a way that was clearer to nontechnical people. We should have the ability to look at a project like the Internet Archive to know the history of a site in terms of both content and the certs it was served under.
HTTPS is wonderful because it offers a guarantee that the data isn’t tampered with (except with corporate root CAs, but that is fuckery).
But LE doesn't remove the compatability challenges. If you needed to ship a device today that would sit in a box for 10 years and then get online and get an update via https, that's really hard to do. TLS protocols sometimes get discouraged, and CA changes happen, etc.
I'm a web programmer and I have no idea how the law enforcement could in any way help. Nor do I want them to. The idea that I have to cooperate with law enforcement to put a site online is absurd.
See "Tech support scams" on YouTube to see what's being done today. We're talking about billion-dollar crime organizations.
You're updating the firmware on a server. The firmware is signed, so the attacker cannot outright put their own firmware on your system. The version you're using currently is secure, and the version you want to go to is secure, but there are versions in between that are insecure. All an attacker needs to do is modify the DNS and http stream to feed the firmware with an RCE to you, and then they can directly take over your server.
Can you provide a source, or even just reasoning, to why this would be true? In my experience, MiTM is a common enough attack vector used by criminals.
Sorry, but this argument doesn't hold water
And this coming from someone who supports systems still running NT 4
I have fallback rules enabled on all of my domains - TLS 1.3 is preferred, but older editions will be supported if the need arises (1.2, 1.1, and 1.0 (on a single domain))
