Why are we moving to HTTP2.0 otherwise? For a 5 percent increase in speed? The big selling point of HTTP2.0 from my perspective was the "always-on encryption".
Sadly he now seems to have changed his mind about the validity of this approach, mostly because users and devs alike dislike complexity in their decision process as to what is secure and what is merely obscured.
Any situation in which someone can force your machine to trust one of these proxies is a situation when they had administrator access to your machine anyway, and in that situation you're already screwed.
Would it kill HN to actually read one of these specs instead of just whining about it?
It's also worth noting that this is a proposal. You didn't actually make this mistake yourself but I do want to highlight it: the HTTP WG is not yet discussing this as anything more than a suggestion (see http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/ietf-http-wg/2014JanMar/... ). If you are worried about this sort of proposal becoming a draft, I highly recommend you join the working group and keep an eye on the proxy discussions.
This will easily allow the carriers to perform their duty of Lawful Interception
Even they don't want to, they will probably have to after a subpoena. While if you don't implement this and other backdoors to the protocol, you won't be able to do it. At least not transparently.
"What they propose for the new HTTP/2.0 protocol is nothing short of officially sanctioned snooping."
I have no illusion that NSA can be stopped if they target someone, but it should be possible to make it impractical to just tap plaintext from the internet backbone as they do today. If data generally is encrypted _unless_ they do MITM attack it will be too expensive to just collect everything.
This is of cause not enough in itself, but it is certainly a step in the right direction.
Thankfully, it seems fairly unlikely that the trusted proxy thing is going to get anywhere: It serves the interests of Ericsson and AT&T, but not those of the HTTP/2.0 spec authors (who are from Google and Mozilla) or server and browser vendors that will have to implement HTTP/2.0.
In Russia, for example, there are explicit regulations which says that no telecom company can operate unless it provides "monitoring and law-enforcement facilities".
My guess is that each country nowadays has regulations of this sort, so telecom equipment manufactures are forced to "add required functionality". Of course, US has such "secret" regulations.)
So, it is much better to face the reality and to standardize this shit to reduce the pain of telecom "workers".)
