Originally posted on Tails-dev by Jacob Appelbaum. Interesting, important topic. Thanks! I took the freedom to forward it to liberationtech, since one of the topics lately was "the tool doesn't exist". Just as reference.
-------- Original Message -------- Subject: [Tails-dev] download over http by default? Date: Sun, 30 Jun 2013 00:46:27 +0000 From: Jacob Appelbaum <[email protected]> Reply-To: The Tails public development discussion list <[email protected]> To: The Tails public development discussion list <[email protected]> Hi, When upgrading a tails machine today, I noticed that the default download link is HTTP. We've done some statistics on the number of users that actually bother to download signatures - it basically borders on none for some software. Does Tails find that for every ISO, users download the signature? Ten to one? Perhaps one out of ever thousand downloads? I really strongly encourage that the default download link should be secure - if there was a tool to download updates and it automatically checked the signatures, I'd think it was perhaps OK to use HTTP. Probably not but well, I could at least believe that someone might complete both steps. Without such a tool, I think this is merely a recipe for disaster. We carry a secure mirror here: https://archive.torproject.org/amnesia.boum.org/tails/stable/ If you guys can't handle HTTPS traffic, I really encourage you to link to our HTTPS site as the default. If nothing else, I believe that some browsers also pin our certs. That at least changes the game to something a bit harder. All the best, Jacob _______________________________________________ tails-dev mailing list [email protected] https://mailman.boum.org/listinfo/tails-dev -- Too many emails? Unsubscribe, change to digest, or change password by emailing moderator at [email protected] or changing your settings at https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/liberationtech
