Re: don't follow the https'ers off the cliff... ;-)

Lew Wolfgang <[email protected]> Sun, 18 Dec 2016 17:09:59 -0800
Newsgroups gmane.linux.suse.security
Message-ID <[email protected]>
On 12/18/2016 04:20 PM, L.A. Walsh wrote:
> Other than obedience to google, what purpose does encrypting open source linux
> distro binaries & source serve?
>
> https makes most content uncacheable, and I know I've saved 700MB in
> Suse disc images in my cache that wouldn't have been saved with https
> for most people.  On top of that, https slows down transfer and raises
> latencies.
> Please reconsider whether https is really needed for "download" or
> "software".  It's not like either is serving sensitive information
> and I really hate to see another sheep march to google's tune (when
> they  want it to prevent you from selective ad filtering. 

How about this one:  I've been unable to update flash-player on several Leap 42.2
boxes for more than a week.  Zypper/Yast2 trys to download 
flash-player-24.0.0.186-2.2.x86_64.rpm
from pacman.inode.at, they get to 99%, then the connection is closed by
the peer.  I've resorted to locking the existing flash-player rpm so that I can
complete the other updates.

Since no one else is reporting similar issues, my latest hypothesis is that a
deep-packet-inspection intrusion prevention device somewhere on my connection
path is finding a false-positive hit in the binary and force-closing the
connection.  I've checked on our local IPS (Tippingpoint) and don't see
any hits, but there might be others farther upstream.  This is a very large
organization.

So if my hypothesis is correct, a TLS connection to pacman would allow
the updates to complete.

Regards,
Lew

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