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

On 2014-12 -19, at 16:18, Tim Berners-Lee <timbl@w3.org> wrote:

> 
> 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.

 You [Henri and Mark] make fun of these "people" on their hobbyhorses as a way of discounting their argument, which is not constrictive.

As it happens I just talked to someone who runs a small remote island with about 400 people.
I didn't ask but he brought it up of his own accord, that with everyone on wifi and a (17Mb/s ?17MB/s ? he wasn't sure) link supporting everyone, he had been recommended and was planning to install a commercial island-wide web proxy cache product, as he felt a lot of people watched the same movies.

His concern about bandwidth and response time was paramount. He wasn't primarily, as far as I could see, concerned about the privacy of the folks being invaded by foreign power and the extent to which that was affected as he made the decision as to how to balance running a proxy with getting more bandwidth.

If the videos are all https: then he won't be able to cache them, except --  not to worry, the tools he buys will probably include MITM attack tools, so in fact he *will* be able to cache things after all. But it is ironic that the only thing would drive him in that scenario to install MITM attack system, which makes the whole operation much less secure in many ways, is the trend toward https: for movies.    If people were happy to have the movies they watch spied on, then they would retain the ability to have end-end secure communications across the net for other things.

Just saying that the economics of this and the balance between the various concerns are not to be understood well with a few anecdotes and some bar BOFs.

> 
>> The previous hobbyhorse of this kind
>> was "transcoding proxies".

[irrelevant mildly disrespectful argument deleted]
>> [...]
>> -- 
>> Henri Sivonen
>> hsivonen@hsivonen.fi
>> https://hsivonen.fi/
>> 
>> 
> 

timbl
director hat off