Donald Trump as Censor in Chief Can Now Leverage Censorship Companies and Fake Protection Disguised as 'Security'
Centralised CAs were trouble all along
THE last short article said that social control media is not a substitute for journalism and "[i]t'll get even worse with Donald Trump as president of the principal superpower."
We published that after we had explained "Centralised CAs and Why Their Demise Should be a Goal" (encryption is good, but not this way).
Ryan has since then commented in IRC: "The centralized CA thing will definitely be used by the Trump Administration to effectively knock sites they don't like off the Web as most people can access it. Firefox doesn't matter anymore and Google will soon force https on sites or they just won't load. It's sort of a security issue, but not really. Unless it's a bank or a shopping site or something like that, it doesn't matter much usually. For a while I used HTTPS Everywhere to stop my ISP from hijacking pages and putting announcement banners in them."
Time will tell if the "Trump Administration" as Ryan calls it will resort to using technology mostly promoted by left-leaning techies to basically silence the left. Can the Trump Administration do this? Definitely! It has the powers or it can give itself the relevant power/s under the guise of "national security".
Some media that covers Russia meanwhile publishes a poor article about Cloudflare (Clownflare). "Wrongly frames Cloudflare as anti-censorship," an associate notes, but in practice Cloudflare is itself a censorship company. It censors both readers and publishers, but what else to expect from a publisher that bought Cloudflare? Cloudflare is both a privacy threat and a free speech threat, not to mention an interceptor at CA level.
Cloudflare should not even exist on the Web. If some Web sites say they cannot exist without Cloudflare, then there's something wrong with their technical staff or something fatally wrong with the Web.
Either way, Cloudflare is connected to the US military and - if put under pressure - it'll do what Trump demands. Get away from Cloudflare. █