Granted, that scenario may seem far-fetched, but it's not unreasonable to suppose that some unscrupulous person might have motive to do something of the sort. Rather than deal with the fallout if it does occur, why not simply allow people the option of having a secure login? If they choose not to use it, that's their prerogative.
HN is not the small and unfamous news site it was 2 years ago anymore.
As evidence for my point of view (and, you can say "you're welcome" if my brinkmanship with this sentence is paid off by Graham promptly enabling SSL, which he could easily do in the process of fixing the far-more-important bug of this site not being served through a front-end proxy), note that next week SSL will in all likelihood not have SSL enabled. That request --- provide SSL --- has been outstanding forever. Does Graham also share my cavalier attitude towards the site?
But remember that this is also the YC application system. A lot of alumni help read apps, probably just by getting a permission added to their account. So a lucky firesheep-er can probably read every application to YC. And mess up people's applications (if they get the account of an applicant before the deadline). And may reject people/delete apps if they were to get, say, pg's or harj's account.
And possibly other stuff. I don't know what all YC uses it for, but I get the impression that they continue to use it for various things (signing up for office hours?), some of which may be sensitive, once teams are accepted.
Plus it's never optimal, even for a bs written-in-a-weekend app, to send passwords in the clear, given how many people use the same password on multiple sites. And even though HN isn't that important, we'd certainly prefer to avoid the headache that would result from someone getting a mod's account, banning a bunch of high-karma people, deleting a ton of stuff, etc.
So SSL is a good solution because a) It could be deployed today. b) It's preferable anyway. But I agree that if they decoupled HN from all the other YC stuff, I'd be a lot less concerned.
I do care about identity usurpation.
SSL is a giant waste of time for Hacker News, modulo the fact that people might be crazy enough to use a shared password here.
It's a fallacious argument in my book. Like comparing apples and oranges.
Say I run a bakery. What I care the most about is the quality of my bread. So much, I spend all my time working on that and only that. So much, I didn't ever bother to have a lock at the door. But it's not even a big deal if someone comes in and poisons one of the bread, as long as the overall quality is increasing!
> SSL is a giant waste of time for Hacker News
Yes, if by "giant" you mean that it takes like 2 hours to set-up, and a small payload for each negociation. But concerning the payload, Arc is not especially fast, so there is room for improvements there to compensate, if needed.
> modulo the fact that people might be crazy enough to use a shared password here.
Not the point, the point is HTTP sniffing.
And anyway, people could use a shared password, making it easier for them (don't overestimate human memory), if HN used (HTTPS and) a "real" password encryption scheme (bcrypt or the like). Why put the burden on the user when you can put it on the computer?
Waste of time in what sense? The time it takes to set up SSL?
If this was a real product, this would clearly not be my advice. But it's not. It's just HN. The worst case to an attack here is not all that bad.
There's some goofy YC stuff that happens through this site. If asked, my advice regarding security and YC would not be "make HN more secure so the YC stuff is safer". It would be "get the YC stuff the hell off HN."
</really really dumb question>
Thanks in advance.
This is not to say that I agree with him - the worst-case scenario isn't that bad, but setting up SSL is easy and the right thing - but he's not babbling nonsense or anything.
Not surprised. Just trying to verify if he had the subject matter expertise I thought he had or not so I can better understand the discussion. Since I am a member here, security of the site does matter to me as it potentially directly impacts me. But I lack your depth of knowledge of the subject. So the credentials of different speakers matters to my understanding. For someone like me, whether he is being downvoted because he has no clue what he is talking about or for some other reason entirely makes a significant impact on my understanding of the situation.
Thank you for your helpful reply.
Fifty bucks worth of work, once, which pays a dividend each and every time a security conscious user visits the site. That's not a waste of time, that's a no-brainer.
He took a lot of flack for, what was surely just a 2 minute job editing some html template, but I can kind of see that logic now.
When you add the link, it signals that you deem "Searching Archives" as an important feature of the site and then it's suddenly no longer just a simple href= entry in a text file somewhere.
Dealing with SSL could be in the same boat. By adding it, you're implicitly saying that 'this site is serious enough to warrant proper security measures' and then that's another rabbit hole that's difficult to get out of.