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Re:Life Is About to Get Harder for Websites Without HTTPS by jaas on Wednesday July 12, 2017 @01:03AM (#14750224)
You won't have confidence that your visitors see the content you serve as you intend because it can be modified in transit. Your visitors will be broadcasting at least the exact address of the pages they read on your blog, and are vulnerable to anything that gets injected into your traffic in transit (e.g. malicious script).

Every website should use HTTPS. It's the right thing to do. It's not hard to do these days.

Re:Life Is About to Get Harder for Websites Without HTTPS by reustle on Wednesday July 12, 2017 @01:06AM (#14750235)
> Every website should use HTTPS. It's the right thing to do. It's not hard to do these days.

Unless you use simple tools like GitHub pages. I have a bunch of tiny JS heavy static projects on Pages that I can't easily add HTTPS to.

Re:Life Is About to Get Harder for Websites Without HTTPS by jopsen on Wednesday July 12, 2017 @01:33AM (#14750316)
Github pages has https, see: https://github.com/blog/2186-https-for-github-pages

There are legacy setups like S3 with custom domains, probably github pages with custom domain. But in both cases there is no reason not to be using cloudfront or cloudflare.

Re:Life Is About to Get Harder for Websites Without HTTPS by anilgulecha on Wednesday July 12, 2017 @03:38AM (#14750811)
I am hopeful github/tumblr and other static hosting services will add in letsenrypt setup once browsers start showing these as "not secure". There will be a dip in user engagement otherwise, as the main article points out.
Re:Life Is About to Get Harder for Websites Without HTTPS by kiliankoe on Wednesday July 12, 2017 @04:26AM (#14750983)
I'm using gh pages for my site, on a custom domain. I really don't want to use cloudflare or similar services for personal reasons. Afaict there's not really any other option though :/ I'd love it if GitHub were able to provide me with a LetsEncrypt cert. I've written to them about this before, but they said there was nothing planned yet.
Re:Life Is About to Get Harder for Websites Without HTTPS by lucideer on Wednesday July 12, 2017 @08:31AM (#14751916)
FWIW, I use Gitlab Pages for the same, and they allow you to provide your own cert (be it LetsEncrypt or otherwise). This has become a good bit easier to administer since LE added support for DNS verification, bit you're right, it would be cool to see these providers adding in built LE automated certs.
Re:Life Is About to Get Harder for Websites Without HTTPS by bikebilly on Wednesday July 12, 2017 @12:53PM (#14754168)
Thanks for the feedback, there is actually an issue regarding this topic: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/28996. Feel free to contribute to it!
Re:Life Is About to Get Harder for Websites Without HTTPS by james-skemp on Wednesday July 12, 2017 @11:35AM (#14753411)
I've been doing the same. Unfortunately, it seems that if I want to update my cert I have to remove the domain and then add it back in.

Are you aware of a workaround? Otherwise, I agree with the ease now that LE supports DNS verification. I just wish we could edit existing domains in Gitlab.

Re:Life Is About to Get Harder for Websites Without HTTPS by bikebilly on Wednesday July 12, 2017 @12:54PM (#14754174)
It's a good point, I just opened an issue about that, feel free to add more context on it: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/35022
Re:Life Is About to Get Harder for Websites Without HTTPS by kiliankoe on Wednesday July 12, 2017 @08:36AM (#14751941)
That's pretty cool and interesting, thanks for the tip! :)
Re:Life Is About to Get Harder for Websites Without HTTPS by nothrabannosir on Wednesday July 12, 2017 @01:53AM (#14750407)
Tumblr with custom domain doesn't allow cloud flare. No way to enable https.

I understand that's not technically "your problem", but since you mentioned it, just thought I'd let you know :)

It's unfortunate, because tumblr really is a great blog hosting software and service, if you don't use the social aspects of it.

Re:Life Is About to Get Harder for Websites Without HTTPS by jopsen on Saturday July 15, 2017 @01:55AM (#14775212)
You could plausibly use cloudfront, I don't know what tumblr's policies are.

But these aren't technical limitations! I don't know why Tumblr retricts you from using cloudflare, presumably because they want to control your content.

My two cents, don't use a free hosting service. S3+cloudfront is dirt cheap and will do the trick.

Re:Life Is About to Get Harder for Websites Without HTTPS by archagon on Wednesday July 12, 2017 @07:05AM (#14751520)
That is only a facade of security, since you have to assume trustworthy behavior on the part of Cloudfront and Cloudflare.

I'd rather deal with the very occasional “why not secure?” e-mail rather than pretend my site is actually secure. (I only serve static pages, not forms.)

Re:Life Is About to Get Harder for Websites Without HTTPS by jopsen on Wednesday July 12, 2017 @03:20PM (#14755697)
Yes and no, if the github pages is served from S3 or other resource inside AWS network, then cloudfront would be safe.

And regardless of that it offers privacy for your users.

Beyond privacy it also vastly improve security too, since users are most likely to have malware and ads injected by an infected wifi router.

It also increases complexity of an attacker that has control of the local machine, since they'll now have to install a custom root certificate.

Nothing is perfectly safe, all we can do is raise the bar.

Re:Life Is About to Get Harder for Websites Without HTTPS by ehnto on Wednesday July 12, 2017 @01:24AM (#14750282)
That doesn't really change the parent comment. Just because it's harder sometimes doesn't mean it shouldn't be done.

A current project of mine has some usability issues because it accepts external API requests but I won't allow non HTTPS. It would give me great pleasure to accept all possible APIs, but it's just not right to open users to that risk.

Re:Life Is About to Get Harder for Websites Without HTTPS by MBlume on Wednesday July 12, 2017 @01:31AM (#14750309)
I'm probably misreading you somehow -- if your site is hosted by Github isn't it already HTTPS?
Re:Life Is About to Get Harder for Websites Without HTTPS by Santosh83 on Wednesday July 12, 2017 @02:11AM (#14750476)
It is, unless you want to use a custom domain with it. With the latter case your only choice to retain some semblance of HTTPS is to put it behind a CDN, but that still breaks end-to-end HTTPS. The problem really has to solved at Github's end, by allowing users to upload their own certs.
Re:Life Is About to Get Harder for Websites Without HTTPS by agrajag on Wednesday July 12, 2017 @03:11AM (#14750697)
You can set your own cert on the CDN though, and have the CDN request origin objects over https from the github domain. Since the CDN is the endpoint for your domain, you'll still be presenting a custom domain to your users.
Re:Life Is About to Get Harder for Websites Without HTTPS by icebraining on Wednesday July 12, 2017 @05:19AM (#14751150)
Which CDNs support that kind of domain translation?
Re:Life Is About to Get Harder for Websites Without HTTPS by teraflop on Wednesday July 12, 2017 @02:21AM (#14750516)
Wait, how is serving your content through Github's servers using your own certificate any more secure than letting GitHub or CloudFlare provide the cert?
Re:Life Is About to Get Harder for Websites Without HTTPS by IanCal on Wednesday July 12, 2017 @03:46AM (#14750846)
It's arguably more secure than letting cloudflare do it (adding a new party doesn't make the chain more secure) but it doesn't have to be more secure than using githubs cert. It's just that you can't use githubs cert with your own custom domain.
Re:Life Is About to Get Harder for Websites Without HTTPS by clfougner on Wednesday July 12, 2017 @01:30AM (#14750304)
Route your page through Cloudflare (or presumably any other CDN) and you can get HTTPS set up on your Github Pages hosted static site quite trivially.
Re:Life Is About to Get Harder for Websites Without HTTPS by busterarm on Wednesday July 12, 2017 @01:32AM (#14750314)
For $5 month you could through up what is likely to be an adequate nginx proxy on Lightsail or similar and serve letsencrypt certs for all of your projects/domains.

It's not really that hard. Set up auto-renew, make sure the box is up to date and properly firewalled. You won't really have to think much about it.

Re:Life Is About to Get Harder for Websites Without HTTPS by rzzzt on Wednesday July 12, 2017 @01:48AM (#14750380)
Re:Life Is About to Get Harder for Websites Without HTTPS by djsumdog on Wednesday July 12, 2017 @01:41AM (#14750354)
Exactly. I remember viewing my website over a mobile connection in the UK and getting an ISP banner at the top of the page! Injected right into my HTML!