Re: Draft finding - "Transitioning the Web to HTTPS"

On 2014-12 -11, at 07:46, Henri Sivonen <hsivonen@hsivonen.fi> wrote:

> On Tue, Dec 9, 2014 at 1:28 AM, Mark Nottingham <mnot@mnot.net> wrote:
>> * The example of a village with poor access (e.g., in Africa) has regularly been
>> brought up in the IETF as an example of a population who want shared
>> caching, rather than encryption. The (very strong) response from folks
>> who
>> have actually worked with and surveyed such people has just as regularly
>> been that many of these people value security and privacy more.


That's interesting.  Data?  (((The school I remember in Rwanda which ran of one VSAT 128k link I think we just interested in getting some connectivity for their class and caching was crucial.  They used a custom router/cache which was designed for that situation. I don't think they were concerned about people spying on or falsifying the wikipedia pages they were reading in the class.  But maybe I missed that.  Maybe they now have fibre. Or maybe in general the switch from wifi  to mobile 3g data  where there is not real opportunity for people to push in a community cache. )))

But to argue about this without data is not forward progress.


> 
> Thank you for bringing this up.
> 
> It seems to me that there is a pattern that people find the theory of
> forward proxies architecturally appealing and then try to find use
> cases that fit the architecture.

I don't see a pattern.

> The previous hobbyhorse of this kind
> was "transcoding proxies". No one had really seen one (*reverse*
> proxies and origin servers don't count) or had a personal need for one
> but they were believed to exist Over There in Russia and it was
> supposedly important to design protocols and formats to cater to them
> (even though the more reasonable protocol design choice was for
> everyone to use UTF-8 and not transcode anything--and even failing
> that, browsers have built-in support for a whole bunch of Cyrillic
> legacy encodings, so there is no need for intermediaries to transcode
> anyway). People making this argument weren't themselves from Russia,
> of course. Hence, "Over There".
> 
> It seems that Africa has taken Russia's place as Over There where
> theoretical use cases for the pre-supposed proxy architecture might
> lurk.

But do you have any more basis for your beliefs than they do for theirs?
.
> [...]
> -- 
> Henri Sivonen
> hsivonen@hsivonen.fi
> https://hsivonen.fi/
> 
>