this post was submitted on 02 Oct 2024
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Privacy
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Not exactly. They are pointing out that HTTPS assumes all is well if it sees a certificate from any "trusted" certificate authority. Browsers typically trust dozens of CAs (nearly 80 for Firefox) from jurisdictions all over the world. Anyone with sufficient access to any of them can forge a certificate. That access might come from a hack, a rogue employee, government pressure, a bug, improperly handled backups, or various other means. It can happen, has happened, and will happen again.
HTTPS is kind of mostly good enough for general use, since exploits are not so common as to make it useless, but if a government sees it as an obstacle, all bets are off. It is not comparable to a trustworthy VPN hosted outside of the government's reach.
Also, HTTPS doesn't cover all traffic like a properly configured VPN does. Even where it is used and not compromised, it's not difficult for a well positioned snooper (like an internet provider that has to answer to government) to follow your traffic on the net and deduce what you're doing.
Great thing, that you can remove them and only trust those you trust.
Pls explain what https is not covered? The SNI on tbe first visit? A VPN just moves the "exit point" of your traffic. Now the Datacentef and VPN provider sees what you ISP saw.
No. I never said otherwise. But they cannot spy on the traffic. And since the SNI is not encrypted anyway they do not even nerd to "follow the traffic". But what sites you are visiting and what you are doing on them are 2 different things.
Lol OK. Every US company has to legally provide their private keys (or a subordinate CA) to the US government if asked, due to NSL laws. We have examples of the US doing this historically, only because some companies broke the law and spoke out publicly.
So go ahead and remove all CAs issued from US companies. Verisign, cloudflare, akamai, Microsoft, Amazon, etc.
Now 80% of the Internet is broke.
And? If you cannot trust then you should not use them when you want to do something that is private and should not get looked on.
And if there were signs of misuse of the trust, then they would get removed.
It is actually really easy to monitor thanks to CT.