I suggest watching the video, https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=QkC1aK7jfLo but the article has an OK summary.
Also a Mastodon shout-out in the video.
I suggest watching the video, https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=QkC1aK7jfLo but the article has an OK summary.
Also a Mastodon shout-out in the video.
Pushing SSL was probably the last big tech effort/push that actually benefited users. Sure it made self hosting a little harder, and probably consolidated some tracking behind bigger players, but overall end users did benefit.
Most of what I see now is purely for their benefit and users don’t benefit.
Yeah, rallying against SSL is a weird way to go about it. SSL is one of the biggest and most meaningful changes to come about as a result of the Snowden leaks. The leaks were literally what prompted http to shift towards https instead, because it shined a bright spotlight on how insecure http truly is.
In the short term, it made self-hosting more difficult. But nowadays, with things like nginx and Let’s Encrypt, enabling SSL on your self-hosted site is as simple as selecting a few drop-down boxes, pasting an API key, and automating a cert refresh.
The true “has the potential to gatekeep the entire internet” existential threat is when a company like Meta or Google becomes the authority for things like ID verification or SSO.
Add Cloudflare hosting everything to that list.
A big man in the middle attack service, operating in a hostile nation? What could go wrong?
But it’s so cheeeeeep! My website (continuously hosted since 1996) used to cost me $15 per month, since I migrated it to Cloudfare they’re charging $0.01 ro $0.02 per month for the same hosting services - it’s been about 18 months now, I think - I just got last months “bill” - I now owe them $0.25, but they won’t charge me until it hits $1.00.
Free service? YOU are the product.
I’m not rallying against SSL. Just an example of browser warnings.