So, when are we going to just admit that apparently you must have an operating understanding of cryptography to warrant being able to host/view a resource on the Internet according to browser makers?<p>I'm of the controversial opinion that at this point, this we either have to solve the cryptography on-ramp problem by getting the primitive boiled down into an experience/management loop a 7-11 year old could understand. Ideally 5, but I'm not terribly optimistic the math can be sufficiently connected to something concrete enough to get across to someone that young or we really need to have a discussion on why it's become necessary for HTTPS to become ubiquitous.<p>The HTTP internet was functionally fine until you introduced the adversarial and large scale Hoovering up/record keeping of browsing data by ISP's incented by the monetizability of said data to advertising/marketing firms. At the moment that started, we stopped seeing ISP's as dumb pipes, and the Statelessness of a network call was essentially destroyed.<p>This includes:<p><pre><code> -Databases of customer DNS requests
-rewriting of unencrypted content to inject ads/unaudited potentially malicious scripts
-Large scale implementation/deployment of Deep Packet Inspection equipment, and traffic shaping by backbone ISP's
-Abuse of the Plaintext net by LE/Government actors.
</code></pre>
The common thread in all of these cases, is that it was <i>us</i>, the industry of paid Software Engineers, inflicting these implementations on the Internet at large. None of it would have been possible without our cooperation.<p>So we basically have gone from an Internetwork of trusted hosts, to one of untrusted hosts (fine); but we've not done a damn thing to render cryptography more cognitively accessible. Hell, even Web of Trust (TM) has fallen into the realm of security theater with the whole TrustCor debacle, and cryptography continues to be implemented at lower and lower points (firmware+hardware level) in order to thwart/limit the user with only grudging recognition by the actors doing it once somebody drives themselves mad enough to catch them in the act.<p>This is rapidly becoming a straight up social inequality problem.