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TeMPOraLlast Monday at 7:38 PM1 replyview on HN

Yeah, this is the unspoken part about HTTPS: you enable it, you also announce to the entire world you're serving stuff from specific DNS names :).

(Which is why I hate it that it's so hard to test things locally without having to get a domain and a certificate. I don't want to buy domain names and announce them publicly for the sake of some random script that needs to offer a HTTP endpoint.)

Modern security is introducing a lot of unexpected couplings into software systems, including coupling to political, social and physical reality, which is surprising if you think in terms of programs you write, which most likely shouldn't have any such relationships.

My favorite example of such unexpected coupling, whose failures are still regularly experienced by users, is wall clock time. If your program touches anything related to certificates, even indirectly, suddenly it's coupled to actual real clock and your users better make sure their system time is in synch with the rest of the world, or else things will stop working.


Replies

imtringuedlast Tuesday at 2:33 PM

You do know that /etc/hosts is a file you can edit, right? You hopefully also know that you can create your own certificate authority or self signed certificates and add them to your CA store.