From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
From: krewat@kilonet.net (Arthur Krewat)
Date: Tue, 8 May 2018 12:18:02 -0400
Subject: [TUHS] unix "awesome list"
In-Reply-To: <20180508151722.49CFC18C079@mercury.lcs.mit.edu>
References: <20180508151722.49CFC18C079@mercury.lcs.mit.edu>
Message-ID: <92064c68-1ab9-085f-3259-10efdf94da11@kilonet.net>



On 5/8/2018 11:17 AM, Noel Chiappa wrote:
>    
> There's a certain irony in people complaining that ukernel's have more
> overhead - while at the same time time mindlessly, and almost universally,
> propogating such pinheaded computing hogs as '_mandating_ https for everything
> under the sun' (even things as utterly pointless to protect as looking at
> Wikipedia articles on mathematics), while simultaneously letting
> Amazon/Facebook/Google do the 'all your data are belong to us' number; the
> piling of Pelion upon Ossa in all the active content (page after page of
> JavaScript, etc) in many (most?) modern Web sites that does nothing more than
> 'eye candy'; etc, etc.
>

Part of the https wave is the fact that the Tin Foil Hat Society thinks 
they are being maliciously monitored by the gov't. The move towards 
privacy on the Internet is fostered by this conspiracy-minded 
thoughtlessness. Meanwhile, it just adds another step to any entity 
wanting to figure out what you've been doing online. Either monitor your 
browser (ala telemetry), or the websites themselves. If one were to see 
https traffic to a website that's known for it's racist content, then 
that pretty much defines what you've been doing without having to 
decrypt the actual packets. Much less get your search history from 
Google in the first place.

I've heard this very same privacy concern from what I consider 
moderately intelligent people I associate with.

I have a (very) small website in http that has a few TOPS-10 items for 
download. That doesn't need to be https, but for some reason, I've heard 
that Google will lower my rankings because I'm not using https. What 
tomfoolery is this?

ak