logoalt Hacker News

superkuhyesterday at 11:55 PM5 repliesview on HN

HTTP is incomparibly less fragile than HTTPS which is why HTTP+HTTPS is such a great solution for websites made by human persons for human persons. Lets be clear, corporate or institutional persons using HTTPS alone is fine and reasonable. But for human use cases HTTP+HTTPS gets you the best of both worlds. No HTTPS cert system ever survives longer than a few years without human input/maintainence. There's just too much changing and too much complexity. From the software of the user to the software of the webserver.

Which is to say, HTTP is not some "ancient" tech like an analog television. It is a modern technology used today doing things that HTTPS can't.


Replies

tryauuumyesterday at 11:57 PM

I'd rather have some expired cert than http

I saw once my ISP injecting javascript ads into http traffic and the horror is with me forever

show 4 replies
Ferret7446today at 1:48 AM

This is such a weird framing. HTTPS is HTTP. TLS is at a different layer of the network stack. You may as well say HTTP through a proxy is better or worse than HTTP through a VPN; all of those statements are equally nonsensical.

You are simply arguing that insecure network requests require less work. Which is obviously true. TLS did not appear out of nothing. Much effort was expended to create it, and there's a reason

show 1 reply
cellularmitosistoday at 3:16 AM

Any fans of retrocomputing will certainly agree. Much of the plain-HTTP internet that's left is there by them and for them.

forgotmypw17today at 4:11 AM

Agree 100%. HTTP is much more accessible, and HTTPS has more failure modes. When I want to ensure that someone can read my content, I offer both.

Gigachadtoday at 3:25 AM

If you don't care about security, you could just use a browser which ignores invalid certificates.

show 1 reply