On Sun, 28 Aug 2011, sawyer x wrote:
You clearly misunderstood Aristotle. He doesn't care about a comment against
Google, and I'm sure he has no special affinity towards it. He simply had a
good remark on a discussion of the effectiveness and CPU costs of SSL
encryption and it was ignored with a completely irrelevant comment.
Google might be another Microsoft, it might be worse, but it is *irrelevant*
to the question of SSL security and the costs of enabling it by default.
My humor was perhaps too subtle, since you didn't get the relevance of my
reply. Google switching to SSL by default is as pointless as metacpan. In
the former case it's the "protection" of delivery to/from an entity that
not only doesn't have your best interest at heart, but has a business built
on exploiting *your* information for *its* benefit. Utterly pointless.
In the latter case you have a search engine whose use is basically the
retrieval of information based on *published* open source software, and
highly published at that, given the world-wide replication of CPAN itself.
What exactly is metacpan protecting? Is it that embarrasing that programmer
Joe can't remember what module function foo was defined in? Can someone
really derive significant benefit from witnessing Harry browse the API for
WWW:Retrieval::LOLCats or what have you?
So, regardless of the incremental costs of implementing SSL, *why* is the
mandatory use of SSL even considered intelligent, rational, or any other
way beneficial? I wasn't going to get involved in this thread, but the
Google bait was too spot on to ignore.
--Arthur Corliss
Live Free or Die
