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

On 12/18/2016 05:09 PM, Lew Wolfgang wrote:
> 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.

BTW, I should have mentioned that I haven't had a chance to confirm my
hypothesis with tcpdump yet, maybe I can get to that tomorrow.

Regards,
Lew

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