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

On 01/05/2015 01:56 PM, Chris Palmer wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 5, 2015 at 3:04 AM, Tim Berners-Lee <timbl@w3.org> wrote:
>
>> 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.
>
> In this specific case, I don't see a problem. He can say, on a web
> page at https://small-island.org or in an email,
>
> """
> Hello, my fellow Small Islanders. So, as you know, we have a
> low-bandwidth link, and YouTube is getting slower now that our
> transparent cacheing proxy doesn't work as much. So, I'm going to
> install a non-transparent proxy that can proxy even the secure
> connections to sites like YouTube.
>
> In order for this to work, you'll have to explicitly set your browser
> to use my proxy, and you'll have to add its security certificate to
> your computer. The up-side of this is that you can get faster YouTube;
> the down-side of this is that you have to trust me not to spy on you.
>
> You might also like to install the proxy in 1 account or profile to
> get the speed benefits, and not install it in another account or
> profile to stay private. You could have a video profile and an email
> and banking profile, for example. If there's enough interest in that,
> I'll write up a tutorial.
>
> To make it easier to install the proxy, I've written a small .BAT file
> that automates setting the proxy and trusting the certificate. You can
> get it at https://small-island.org/install-proxy.bat.
>
> Let me know if you have any questions! Thanks,
> --- Al, your Small Island tech support friend
> """
>
> Obviously, the .BAT file should be distributed by secure means only. :)
>
> People can make a choice. It will require Al to write or find a
> script. A community of 400 people is small enough for this to be
> manageable.
>
> I'm approaching this problem in a utilitarian way: we need to make the
> web as safe as we can as often as we can for as many of the billions
> of people in the world as we can.  If 400 people have to consider
> running a shell script so that being safer can be easier for the other
> billions, that's an easy trade-off to make and this edge case should
> not loom large in our minds.

This is good stuff!

Stuff like this should either be a part of the finding or referenced by 
the finding.  This could be as easy as placing it on a wiki.  Better 
would finding a home on a StackOverflow like site.

- Sam Ruby

Received on Monday, 5 January 2015 19:51:13 UTC