Re: https at ietf.org

[[e-mail]]

>     > From: [e-mail]

>     > In light of the sentiments expressed at the plenary and in perpass in
>     > regards to opportunistic encryptions, perhaps this is the dogfood we
>     > should be eating.

> Yes, encrypting publicly available documents will do so much to increase our
> privacy.

;-)

> Look, I've got nothing against increasing privacy, but encrypting everything
> is neither a privacy panacea, nor without costs/hassles.

I agree 100%.

> E.g. Wikipedia now insists on sending me to HTTPS: versions of _all_ their
> pages (I guess to protect against a MITM corrupting the content - since the
> content is totally public, I can't figure out what else good they think it
> does - although HTTPS doesn't really do that good a job at that).

Insisting on encryption != opportunistic encryption. And yes, if they require
it, that's bad for exactly the same reasons it would be bad for the IETF to do
so.

> Problem is
> that for one of my browsers, it somehow can't get the certificates right, so
> every time I go to Wikipedia I get a zillion pop-ups complaining about
> certificate problems. Irony is, of course, that in some counties the whole
> site is just plain totally blocked.

Exactly right. But if we can do it in a way that causes those with the ability
to upgrade to an encrypted connection to do so, that's not a bad thing.

				Ned