They could stand up their own version of Let's Encrypt with less than 20 people and $5M/year. It is inevitable. Let's Encrypt had a budget of $3.6M and 13 employees as of 2019, but I don't have recent figures as of this comment. Probably spread the cost across the BRICS to make it US sanction resistant.
It’s not merely about setting up a CA. The CA certificates would have to be added to the trust stores of every operating system, browser, framework, and application, creating a sea of security risks for the public. It’s an isolated, privacy-invasive process.
> The CA certificates would have to be added to the trust stores of every operating system, browser, framework, and application, creating a sea of security risks for the public
I mean if you have ever tried to get Code signing certificate, it is absurd theater to get it working and your choice is like 3 different US certificate authorities.
It already was. Stuxnet used trusted, signed Windows drivers to destroy Iran’s centrifuges back in 2010 and afaik we still don’t know exactly how the attackers did this.
Targeting civilians, hospitals, and food distribution networks is just normal warfare! Israel has a right to defend itself! Their land was promised to us thousands of years ago, and they have no right living on it!
It is a reminder to go back to cash, ATMs and machines where you can enter you transactions instead of using the Internet.
There is no reason to give money to US middlemen for everything you do.
The whole of the EU should do this, too. I stopped using Internet banking after my bank moved from SMS Tan to hardware Tan generator (one of which didn't work) to forced mobile app. No thanks.
Wait but...if you use an ATM, you're going to be hit by ATM (read: middleman) fees every single time. Also, you massively increase your risk of getting hit by identity theft via compromised ATM.
> you're going to be hit by ATM (read: middleman) fees every single time.
This is highly country specific. In many countries, (at least domestic) ATM withdrawals are still free.
> you massively increase your risk of getting hit by identity theft via compromised ATM.
What exactly does a compromised ATM do in terms of identity theft that a POS terminal can't do? Both can read your card, which today is not a big problem anymore, and certainly not yours or your bank's.
Utterly moronic. We support the freedom of the Iranian people by forcing them to install a local government root CA in every browser. I mean at this rate they won't even have to buy their monitoring tech from China any more, just an old PC and a late 90s tarball of Squid
I mean, we very clearly do not support the freedom of the Iranian people. We deposed their democratically-elected leader in the 50s in favor of someone more pliable to Western interests, and when they rose up against their current government early in the year we went "Good luck! We're with you all the way!" and then stood there when 30,000 of them were massacred. The well-being of ordinary Iranians has never been part of the equation here, so there's not really any actual hypocrisy.
Forcing their customers to install government-affiliated alternative CAs, in turn allowing the government to spy on its citizens more easily via mis-issued certs? Great, that'll show them.
> Forcing their customers to install government-affiliated alternative CAs, in turn allowing the government to spy on its citizens more easily via mis-issued certs?
How's the support for X.509 "Name Constraints" these days:
This is super-dumb. The same thing is happening with Russian banks.
Their answer? They're now asking users to install root certs from the Russian ministry of communications. So it can now MITM all the encrypted traffic in Russia.
Sanctions on Iran are justified. But I worry this kind of action will just lead to the eventual rise of an alternative tech ecosystem in the long term, probably led by china and Russia. It will be bad for us, bad for people living under those regimes, but good for the regimes themselves because they will have the fullest control over their technology, without having to compromise with the West.
Another example of why maximalist political hostility can be counterproductive. Leave an olive branch in sight, and you may work towards a mutually beneficial resolution, like the previous Iran nuclear deals. If push your opponent into a corner, then don't get upset when they jump over the wall into the wild where you can't catch them anymore. See also Chinese chips and AI.
This is not a good question to ask. It's not for what. It's to prevent what.
Even if you don't care about how Iran treats its own population, you should care about how it treats others because one day it might be you.
Iran's ideology is expansionalist. They want to export their ideas far and wide. While also physically suppressing their opponents.
Since the emergence of two global superpowers after WW2, most armed conflicts were, essentially, between those two. Directly or indirectly. If the two could find a peaceful solution, the world at large had a good day. And for a while it seemed like we might be left with just one superpower, and so no conflicts at all. Only policing.
The whole "multipolar" spiel you might hear from powers that challenge this policing is what is going to result in a long and bloody struggle for world domination. It won't be like the world wars we remember, where most of the world had to choose one of the two sides. It will be a quagmire of more local conflicts with very volatile alliances and a lot more casualties overall. More like Italian city states.
It's necessary to police Iran and similar bad countries because if their challenge of the power monopoly succeeds, the world will be hurled into anarchy equipped with very deadly weapons...
Multipolarity is inevitable. You can’t forcefully hold most of the world’s population down, especially when you already shipped off your manufacturing capacity to earn a few bucks.
As always, the question for the declining hegemon is whether a new order can arise peacefully or not. The UK managed to go peacefully in the end, but only after two brutal and deadly world wars sapped them of their remaining strength. Still, their acquiescence allowed them to retain an outsized seat at the table.
Well, if it's inevitable, then we are facing a long stretch of history when everybody is having a bad time... And by that I mean that it's going to be worse than it is today. War will become a new normal for most people in the world, just like it was before the world wars.
War is the historical norm. The relative quiet of the Cold War across Western Eurasia, Japan, and Anglo nations was an aberration. Most of the world still experienced major conflicts during and after this period, including Africa, South America, Southeast Asia, Central and South Asia, the Philippines and Indonesia, and of course the Middle East. After the Cold War, conflict spread into Russia and Eastern Europe.
The false “norm” of peace and quiet in Western suburbs will finally be ending, that’s all. We may even have our own Yugoslav moment, although I hope that’s not the case.
I'm not disagreeing with you. I just don't like where this is going :)
Oh, and I have an anecdote, somewhat relevant to the situation.
So, my grandma lived through the Nazi occupation of the Western Ukraine. She died in the early 90s, so, the events I'm describing must've happened some time between the Chernobyl disaster and the fall of the Soviet Union. I was an elementary school student and had a very simple picture of the Great Patriotic War: Nazis were bad, we were all around good, and we showed them...
One day she took me to the local farmers' market. On our way there we had to come by a liquor store, and there was, prostrated on the ground alcoholic who must've fallen asleep waiting for the store to open.
Holding her nose, my grandma uttered "had Germans been here, this would never have happened!"
Her admiration for Nazis came to me as a bit of a shock, but I made this mental trick, explaining it away by describing my grandma as "strict and law-abiding" and didn't think much of the incident until much, much later. Eventually, by talking to others who lived through the occupation and trying to understand what was so attractive about the Nazis that a lot of people welcomed them with open arms, I realized that the Nazis, beside the bad things they are known for today, leaned heavily into upholding law and order. In a Doctor Doom sort of way, but still. A lot of people were willing to give away their freedoms in exchange for the very "radical" law enforcement... And this is the aspect that doesn't get a lot of attention when the Nazis are mentioned in the history class...
So, there's a part of me that wants law and order at any cost, be it the US bombing the shit out of some country (it could be my country, if necessary! although, understandably, I'd rather it be some other country, better yet none at all). Just so that, by and large, there'd be peace and stability... On the other hand: fairness and all that... :)
I live (with a short intermission when I lived in the EU) in the Middle East, so, outside of reading the local news, sometimes I can just look out of the window.
I don't understand the question about Russia vs China: bigger in what sense? Geographically, it surely is, but that's not likely what you were going for.
To comment on expansionism: there are several ideologies in the region that seek to establish some sort of a "center of gravity" to attach more territory / resources to it. Islamic Revolutionary Guards is one of them, it's been "copied" by others s.a. various Hezballah organizations in different countries or Ansarallah. If eg. Hezballah wins in Lebanon, they will become a sort of a copy of Iran. Think like Warsaw Pact countries were "copies" of the Soviet Union.
Another such ideology / force is Muslim Brotherhood. Broadly, any Al-Qaeda affiliates belong there. This is a more popular / organic Arab thing as opposed to Islamic Guards, who are a foreign influence. They, however, lack a "center of gravity", but, potentially, they can take over Egypt as the current government is unpopular, while Muslim Brotherhood is. Eventually, there might be a popular revolt that will topple the current military government and then it's very likely that Egypt will try to expand its influence over the Middle East by violent means.
And there's a list of failures / non-threats, s.a. BAAS (Arab Communists, essentially): they used to be popular during the Cold War but now nobody cares about them. Wahhabi ideology that was propped by Saudis for a while, but now it's basically forgotten. Western liberal news like to mention "Greater Israel": this idea is about as popular in Israel as Scientology is in the US. It does exist in some form in the very fringe part of Israeli society, but it has zero chance of having a popular support. It makes the news domestically mostly because of how unrealistic and out of touch it is. It has about as much influence on Israeli foreign policy as Scientology does in the US.
> Your comment is so bizarre I don’t know quite how to respond and I’m left wondering what your news feed looks like.
I keep hearing from consumers of Islamofascist narratives about the “aggressive expansionism” of Israel. Can you tell me by how many square miles Israel expanded control over in total in the past 50 years?
Human rights violations, violations of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, violations of related UNSC Resolutions, sponsorship of terrorism, and many others.
We can wholeheartedly disagree with the US's war on Iran without pretending Iran is a 'good' international actor. It's a rogue state and has been for decades.
They can only do that through an "SSL added and removed here ;-)"-like 'cooperation' and not through passive listening because with forward secrecy a certificate key doesn't secure the transport encryption directly. They could actively MITM outside the perimeter of the target by issuing a new certificate, but that would show up on CT logs.
tls1.3 you can fully mitm with nice green padlock, its much easier if you have access to CAs where most big 'trusted' are US based. that being said a lot of govt for their services use their own ones and what is trusted and not trusted in CA land is highly dubious at best. try looking at all those weird nooneheardofthem names in the CA bundles on modern systems.
besides that its quite likely they will have intercepted most key exchanges since thats still a problem and pretty easy to see happening if you say, tap the backbone -_-.
US and few other have really futuristic capabilities here. its hard to imagine snowden was 14 years of secret innovation ago... it has only gotten much worse friend.
> But I worry this kind of action will just lead to the eventual rise of an alternative tech ecosystem in the long term, probably led by china and Russia. It will be bad for us, bad for people living under those regimes, but good for the regimes themselves because they will have the fullest control over their technology, without having to compromise with the West.
I'm not sure that isolating Iran in particular has much of an effect because countries don't want to be in Russia's orbit, China's orbit is Only Good for China, and so aside from a European-only/led system the best option would still be the current state/system.
The best solution to all of these problems is for Iran to just behave like pretty much all other countries, but in lieu of that and in lieu of us having a desire to really go to war in Iran, we're just going to have to take actions like this because we can't have this regime opposed to us and western values and pursuing nuclear weapons (prior to, during, and after JCPOA) but then enjoying the benefits of the American-led financial system.
If Iran, China, North Korea, and Russia want to get together and create their own crappy Intranet that nobody uses, well, more power to them. Hope they have fun.
> If push your opponent into a corner, then don't get upset when they jump over the wall into the wild where you can't catch them anymore. See also Chinese chips and AI.
I think this is a gross mischaracterization of the evolution of these arrangements. There's a lot of nuance here, but the United States helped get China into the WTO based on the premise that they'd liberalize and then what happened? State-directed investment, banning of competitor products, subsidized over-capacity to deindustrialize other countries, artificially cheap currency to boost exports. Russia? They were part of the The NATO-Russia Founding Act and then decided they'd rather do war and stuff. Iran? Won't stop pursuing nuclear weapons for no reason (among other things), so now their economy is going to tank. So it's really the opposite. Even when you think about the JCPOA, let's say it wasn't torn up. Why was/is Iran still funding militant groups that are destabilizing other countries in the region? The west, not just the US mind you, did its damned best to include these specific countries into the western rules-based order, allowed gross injustices and breaches of good conduct, and still tried only to now itself be backed into a corner (Iran, Russia invading Ukraine, Chinese economic destruction) and has to finally respond.
As a civilization, and yes that includes folks in the EU even if you are mad at the current president, we need to stop assuming we're the problem or we're the bad guys by default and start holding other countries to account.
> As a civilization, and yes that includes folks in the EU even if you are mad at the current president, we need to stop assuming we're the problem or we're the bad guys by default and start holding other countries to account.
I remember your handle, ericmay, because you have been showing up in almost every thread about the tariffs or Iran and following this logic. Something Must Be Done, therefore Anything That Is Being Done Is Good. How dare you question if the Thing Being Done is actually against our interests? Do you not feel the warm fuzzy feeling of Something Being Done?
It's a frankly childish view of politics where virtue is all you need no matter the outcome. Time to grow up.
I'm highly interested in the topic, and folks continue to write and respond to things that I disagree with. That's why you see my posts. This site (and life) shouldn't be an echo chamber.
Much worse, this will greatly improve their position with regards to wiretapping their own citizens.
Depending on who you are, Western CAs can come with some availability problems, but thanks to certificate transparency, you don't even have to trust the CA if you mostly care about security. Take a wild guess as to whether an Iranian CA will support that...
I doubt Iranians needed sanctions as an excuse to install their own CAs and require their citizens to use them. Many authoritarian regimes require their citizens to use domestically produced networking software that is different degrees of compromised.
The main problem with sanctions is that it's the wrong people on the receiving end. Russian oligarchs and military businessmen have exactly zero problems managing their money, while ordinary people who flew russia into the EU - they face unsurmountable piles of unsolvable problems due to sanctions.
No disagreement. It is very unfortunate that our policymakers seem to like the spectacle hurting the average person who happened to have been born in the wrong country more than going after the ones actually holding power.
Yes, Russian oligarchs use London and Dubai for laundering. Ironically, Iranians elites use Dubai, too while launching occasional missiles at UAE.
The only thing that would work is bribing the Iranian military (perhaps the non-IRGC part) like they did in Syria. Exile Iranians of course won't fight but they rather talk and demand that others fight.
Is the implication that those who impose these sanctions can MITM anybody in the world except for countries under sanctions (which have to use their own root CAs)?
the whole point of economic sanctions, as besset himself said, is to make people frustrated in order to create chaos and uprisings, people fighting each other, having a failed nation, and ready to be targeted by US/israel to turn it into all other israel neighbors. since israel existence is only through killing and destruction. stealing its oil like Venezuela is another goal.
human rights is just an excuse. how many millions US has killed in west asia you think?
good news is that nothing last forever. one day it gets back to you.
The governments may have, but I can assure you the average citizen of those countries haven't, as they still have morals and haven't got US funding to buy their morals.
No one is claiming that there isn’t plenty of hate for Israel in the Middle East. Those citizens, OP, and you buy the Islamofascist narrative of “Israel attacks all its neighbors” when in reality Israel has had peace with half its neighbors for decades - the neighbors who have agreed not to attack Israel and handle their own terrorists themselves.
The point of economic sanctions is to act like a several % ball and chain around economic growth so over a generation or two whoever you've applied them to is impoverished, relatively speaking, and don't have much of a surplus to spend really resisting whatever you (or your regional buddies) are trying to do that they wouldn't like.
US sanctions alone are responsible for nearly 565,000 deaths/year around the world.[1]
The UN Human Rights Council just confirmed US blockade against Cuba violates human rights and international law, citing Article 33 of Fourth Geneva Convention, which prohibits collective punishment.[2]
I may speak from ignorance, but why do SSL certificates depend on centralized CA?
If I'm an entity such as a bank, I should be able to sign my own certificate and provide the public keys to my clients which then can use it to both encrypt communications and to make sure you are talking with the entity you want to talk to. Am I missing anything?
I think it would be a good idea. TLS and X.509 would work better that way. Actually, both sides should have a certificate (the bank might issue a certificate to the customer).
It won't do for all circumstances (as some other comments mention), but when it is possible, it would be a good idea.
It doesn't load for me, but I have read the other comments.
There is the problem of TLS and X.509 being used with centralized authorities like this, even though it is not inherent to TLS nor to X.509 (although they were designed to be used in this way). In some circumstances, you can get a copy of the certificate (which might be self-signed) from somewhere else and then check that it matches in this circumstances. In other circumstances there are other things that can be done (e.g. TOFU, which has a different set of problems). What the security requirements are will depend on the circumstances, which can also depend on the user's intentions; they should not have to depend on a centralized authority.
(There is the issue that a single X.509 certificate cannot have multiple issuers, though. There is also the issue that X.509 certificates cannot contain unsigned extensions (they could be added after the signature, but an implementation might check for additional fields after the signature and reject a certificate that has any). Although an alternative schema can be made (I have done so), it would not work with the existing protocols.)
93 comments
[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 75.1 ms ] threadIt is clearly bad if the whole of Iran gets their own CA infrastructure which the NSA can't as easily spy on.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24085559 (citations)
Finaly one that acknowledges...
As just one example, you can take a guess as to whether such a CA will support certificate transparency...
I guess you could say a loss is a loss ...
Another win for the US.
There is no reason to give money to US middlemen for everything you do.
The whole of the EU should do this, too. I stopped using Internet banking after my bank moved from SMS Tan to hardware Tan generator (one of which didn't work) to forced mobile app. No thanks.
Accounting cash is extremely complicated and whether you like it or not, you will be forced to do an online transaction at some point.
Are you going to be wiring money across the country to buy stuff?
Instead of going back we should stop centralizing everything.
We are centralizing the internet with Cloudfare. We are centralizing mobile compute with Android/Apple
I don't want to be dependent on any of those platforms to access my bank
This is highly country specific. In many countries, (at least domestic) ATM withdrawals are still free.
> you massively increase your risk of getting hit by identity theft via compromised ATM.
What exactly does a compromised ATM do in terms of identity theft that a POS terminal can't do? Both can read your card, which today is not a big problem anymore, and certainly not yours or your bank's.
I feel like not being able to use US CAs is just a cheap excuse to enact what they've wanted for a while. Same in Russia.
How's the support for X.509 "Name Constraints" these days:
* https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc5280#section-4.2.1....
Would restricting it to only dot-ir domains be a mitigation?
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.ir
Their answer? They're now asking users to install root certs from the Russian ministry of communications. So it can now MITM all the encrypted traffic in Russia.
It's not that hard to find a CA in a more aligned regime.
Rolling your own MITM CA as a replacement just looks like something that was waiting for an excuse.
Another example of why maximalist political hostility can be counterproductive. Leave an olive branch in sight, and you may work towards a mutually beneficial resolution, like the previous Iran nuclear deals. If push your opponent into a corner, then don't get upset when they jump over the wall into the wild where you can't catch them anymore. See also Chinese chips and AI.
For what?
Even if you don't care about how Iran treats its own population, you should care about how it treats others because one day it might be you.
Iran's ideology is expansionalist. They want to export their ideas far and wide. While also physically suppressing their opponents.
Since the emergence of two global superpowers after WW2, most armed conflicts were, essentially, between those two. Directly or indirectly. If the two could find a peaceful solution, the world at large had a good day. And for a while it seemed like we might be left with just one superpower, and so no conflicts at all. Only policing.
The whole "multipolar" spiel you might hear from powers that challenge this policing is what is going to result in a long and bloody struggle for world domination. It won't be like the world wars we remember, where most of the world had to choose one of the two sides. It will be a quagmire of more local conflicts with very volatile alliances and a lot more casualties overall. More like Italian city states.
It's necessary to police Iran and similar bad countries because if their challenge of the power monopoly succeeds, the world will be hurled into anarchy equipped with very deadly weapons...
As always, the question for the declining hegemon is whether a new order can arise peacefully or not. The UK managed to go peacefully in the end, but only after two brutal and deadly world wars sapped them of their remaining strength. Still, their acquiescence allowed them to retain an outsized seat at the table.
The false “norm” of peace and quiet in Western suburbs will finally be ending, that’s all. We may even have our own Yugoslav moment, although I hope that’s not the case.
Oh, and I have an anecdote, somewhat relevant to the situation.
So, my grandma lived through the Nazi occupation of the Western Ukraine. She died in the early 90s, so, the events I'm describing must've happened some time between the Chernobyl disaster and the fall of the Soviet Union. I was an elementary school student and had a very simple picture of the Great Patriotic War: Nazis were bad, we were all around good, and we showed them...
One day she took me to the local farmers' market. On our way there we had to come by a liquor store, and there was, prostrated on the ground alcoholic who must've fallen asleep waiting for the store to open.
Holding her nose, my grandma uttered "had Germans been here, this would never have happened!"
Her admiration for Nazis came to me as a bit of a shock, but I made this mental trick, explaining it away by describing my grandma as "strict and law-abiding" and didn't think much of the incident until much, much later. Eventually, by talking to others who lived through the occupation and trying to understand what was so attractive about the Nazis that a lot of people welcomed them with open arms, I realized that the Nazis, beside the bad things they are known for today, leaned heavily into upholding law and order. In a Doctor Doom sort of way, but still. A lot of people were willing to give away their freedoms in exchange for the very "radical" law enforcement... And this is the aspect that doesn't get a lot of attention when the Nazis are mentioned in the history class...
So, there's a part of me that wants law and order at any cost, be it the US bombing the shit out of some country (it could be my country, if necessary! although, understandably, I'd rather it be some other country, better yet none at all). Just so that, by and large, there'd be peace and stability... On the other hand: fairness and all that... :)
There is only one country in the Middle East with an aggressive expansionist mentality, and it’s not Iran.
And what’s with the superpower commentary, you neglected to connect it to Iran and are you saying Russia is bigger than China?
I don't understand the question about Russia vs China: bigger in what sense? Geographically, it surely is, but that's not likely what you were going for.
To comment on expansionism: there are several ideologies in the region that seek to establish some sort of a "center of gravity" to attach more territory / resources to it. Islamic Revolutionary Guards is one of them, it's been "copied" by others s.a. various Hezballah organizations in different countries or Ansarallah. If eg. Hezballah wins in Lebanon, they will become a sort of a copy of Iran. Think like Warsaw Pact countries were "copies" of the Soviet Union.
Another such ideology / force is Muslim Brotherhood. Broadly, any Al-Qaeda affiliates belong there. This is a more popular / organic Arab thing as opposed to Islamic Guards, who are a foreign influence. They, however, lack a "center of gravity", but, potentially, they can take over Egypt as the current government is unpopular, while Muslim Brotherhood is. Eventually, there might be a popular revolt that will topple the current military government and then it's very likely that Egypt will try to expand its influence over the Middle East by violent means.
And there's a list of failures / non-threats, s.a. BAAS (Arab Communists, essentially): they used to be popular during the Cold War but now nobody cares about them. Wahhabi ideology that was propped by Saudis for a while, but now it's basically forgotten. Western liberal news like to mention "Greater Israel": this idea is about as popular in Israel as Scientology is in the US. It does exist in some form in the very fringe part of Israeli society, but it has zero chance of having a popular support. It makes the news domestically mostly because of how unrealistic and out of touch it is. It has about as much influence on Israeli foreign policy as Scientology does in the US.
I keep hearing from consumers of Islamofascist narratives about the “aggressive expansionism” of Israel. Can you tell me by how many square miles Israel expanded control over in total in the past 50 years?
We can wholeheartedly disagree with the US's war on Iran without pretending Iran is a 'good' international actor. It's a rogue state and has been for decades.
besides that its quite likely they will have intercepted most key exchanges since thats still a problem and pretty easy to see happening if you say, tap the backbone -_-.
US and few other have really futuristic capabilities here. its hard to imagine snowden was 14 years of secret innovation ago... it has only gotten much worse friend.
I'm not sure that isolating Iran in particular has much of an effect because countries don't want to be in Russia's orbit, China's orbit is Only Good for China, and so aside from a European-only/led system the best option would still be the current state/system.
The best solution to all of these problems is for Iran to just behave like pretty much all other countries, but in lieu of that and in lieu of us having a desire to really go to war in Iran, we're just going to have to take actions like this because we can't have this regime opposed to us and western values and pursuing nuclear weapons (prior to, during, and after JCPOA) but then enjoying the benefits of the American-led financial system.
If Iran, China, North Korea, and Russia want to get together and create their own crappy Intranet that nobody uses, well, more power to them. Hope they have fun.
> If push your opponent into a corner, then don't get upset when they jump over the wall into the wild where you can't catch them anymore. See also Chinese chips and AI.
I think this is a gross mischaracterization of the evolution of these arrangements. There's a lot of nuance here, but the United States helped get China into the WTO based on the premise that they'd liberalize and then what happened? State-directed investment, banning of competitor products, subsidized over-capacity to deindustrialize other countries, artificially cheap currency to boost exports. Russia? They were part of the The NATO-Russia Founding Act and then decided they'd rather do war and stuff. Iran? Won't stop pursuing nuclear weapons for no reason (among other things), so now their economy is going to tank. So it's really the opposite. Even when you think about the JCPOA, let's say it wasn't torn up. Why was/is Iran still funding militant groups that are destabilizing other countries in the region? The west, not just the US mind you, did its damned best to include these specific countries into the western rules-based order, allowed gross injustices and breaches of good conduct, and still tried only to now itself be backed into a corner (Iran, Russia invading Ukraine, Chinese economic destruction) and has to finally respond.
As a civilization, and yes that includes folks in the EU even if you are mad at the current president, we need to stop assuming we're the problem or we're the bad guys by default and start holding other countries to account.
I remember your handle, ericmay, because you have been showing up in almost every thread about the tariffs or Iran and following this logic. Something Must Be Done, therefore Anything That Is Being Done Is Good. How dare you question if the Thing Being Done is actually against our interests? Do you not feel the warm fuzzy feeling of Something Being Done?
It's a frankly childish view of politics where virtue is all you need no matter the outcome. Time to grow up.
Depending on who you are, Western CAs can come with some availability problems, but thanks to certificate transparency, you don't even have to trust the CA if you mostly care about security. Take a wild guess as to whether an Iranian CA will support that...
The main problem with sanctions is that it's the wrong people on the receiving end. Russian oligarchs and military businessmen have exactly zero problems managing their money, while ordinary people who flew russia into the EU - they face unsurmountable piles of unsolvable problems due to sanctions.
The only thing that would work is bribing the Iranian military (perhaps the non-IRGC part) like they did in Syria. Exile Iranians of course won't fight but they rather talk and demand that others fight.
Israel’s neighbors Jordan and Egypt have made peace with Israel and have had no issues since then.
You may have been misled by anti-Israel propaganda.
The governments may have, but I can assure you the average citizen of those countries haven't, as they still have morals and haven't got US funding to buy their morals.
The UN Human Rights Council just confirmed US blockade against Cuba violates human rights and international law, citing Article 33 of Fourth Geneva Convention, which prohibits collective punishment.[2]
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/langlo/article/PIIS2214-1...
https://x.com/mhdksafa/status/2098058012145389602
Trump is intentionally playing into Chinese, Russian Noth Korean, Iranian hands
They must be impeached/removed regardless of intent
Nobody voted for this
https://crt.sh/?id=22899279066 (Revoked: privilegeWithdrawn)
If I'm an entity such as a bank, I should be able to sign my own certificate and provide the public keys to my clients which then can use it to both encrypt communications and to make sure you are talking with the entity you want to talk to. Am I missing anything?
It won't do for all circumstances (as some other comments mention), but when it is possible, it would be a good idea.
There is the problem of TLS and X.509 being used with centralized authorities like this, even though it is not inherent to TLS nor to X.509 (although they were designed to be used in this way). In some circumstances, you can get a copy of the certificate (which might be self-signed) from somewhere else and then check that it matches in this circumstances. In other circumstances there are other things that can be done (e.g. TOFU, which has a different set of problems). What the security requirements are will depend on the circumstances, which can also depend on the user's intentions; they should not have to depend on a centralized authority.
(There is the issue that a single X.509 certificate cannot have multiple issuers, though. There is also the issue that X.509 certificates cannot contain unsigned extensions (they could be added after the signature, but an implementation might check for additional fields after the signature and reject a certificate that has any). Although an alternative schema can be made (I have done so), it would not work with the existing protocols.)