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Notes -
Is pki the next part of the global internet censorship regime?
In a previous post, we discussed the takedown of a foreign website that violated texas laws. I argued that domain takedowns are unlikely to be used for global censorship. But these days https certificates are becoming nearly obligatory, and the system around them is much more haphazard.
As a sideshow on the iran situation, the pgsa dot ir website is trying to stay up in the face of the sanctions. The website originally had a letsencrypt certificate, but obviously the US was able to get that yanked. After a week, they managed to get their hands on a chinese certificate. But surprisingly, only a few days later, the certificate was revoked, making the https site unviewable on certain browsers. I'm not certain exactly why the chinese issuer revoked it, but it could likely be due to pressure from above.
Unlike the internet, Google, Apple, and Mozilla pretty much control almost every browser in the world. And for an issuer it seems that there are no rules when it comes to having your certificates accepted on those browsers, simply beg and kiss ass to each of them until they decide to let you in the club. This means that anywhere, having an https website happens at the whim of these 3 American companies, and each one pretty much has a veto over the process. It's no wonder that they all go to lengths to put up big warnings and gimp functionality on http websites.
Of course it remains to be seen whether or not this lever of censorship will be used in the future and for what purposes. Can an SF judge order Mozilla to start rejecting certain certificates? Not sure. Right now there's also the escape hatch of simply using http, but browser makers will continue to push more and more invasive warnings about it.
Http is not ideal unless the website is purely static. Even then... Web3 is likely the solution. Domain ownership and https cert should be on a blockchain, not at the discretion of 4 hiveminds.
Sure, why not. So if you connect to some website, your browser will simply fetch the latest blocks and compute which address currently owns that domain. After all, you would not want to trust any single third party (which could just decline requests for particular domains).
Keeping your phone synced with a blockchain seems doable, but will likely require a lot of storage and computation effort. Bad if you care about battery life.
It could be done by proxy. Just query another server that stores an up to date copy of it. Advanced users could roll their own by doing it on a home server and making their phone query that.
The problem with the proxy approach is that you then need to trust that proxy. Say I buy a new Pixel phone. Now, Google wants to sell these to normies, so "please give me the IP address of your trusted blockchain DNS/CA host" is not going to be part of the setup process. Instead, they would all point to the same central server offering DNS/CA services, and if the USG does not want them to resolve a certain website, it simply won't.
So the end result is not that different from the status quo: people who care enough to ask an LLM for help and nerds will be able to access Iranian sites, and everyone else won't.
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