Given that hardly anyone checks the signatures, it's fair to say downloads aren't protected by anything at the moment. SSL for downloads can only raise the bar, never lower it, and if the NSA want to kick off the process of revoking some of the big CA's then I'm game (assuming anyone detects it of course) :)

Anyway, nobody is dragging feet, the problem is right now we get what is effectively a huge free subsidy from github and SourceForge for site hosting. The cost is no SSL. So getting SSL would require that "we" pay for it ourselves, but the primary method we have for funding public goods/infrastructure (the Foundation) which is the subject of various conspiracy theories. Jeremy has made a generous offer further up the thread, the issue being I guess none of us know how much traffic we actually get :( I remember suggesting that we whack Google Analytics or some other statistics package on when the new website design was done and that was rejected for similar reasons ("organisations are bad").

So we are in a position where we get a subsidy of large but unknown size from various existing US corporations, but moving to different ones is controversial, hence no progress :)



On Tue, Dec 31, 2013 at 1:48 PM, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell@gmail.com> wrote:
On Tue, Dec 31, 2013 at 5:39 AM, Drak <drak@zikula.org> wrote:
> The NSA has the ability, right now to change every download of bitcoin-qt,
> on the fly and the only cure is encryption.

Please cut it out with the snake oil pedaling. This is really over the
top. You're invoking the NSA as the threat here? Okay. The NSA can
trivially compromise an HTTPS download site: even ignoring the CA
insecurity, and government run CAs certificate authorities issue CA
certs to random governments and corporations for dataloss prevention
purposes. Not to mention unparalleled access to exploits.

The downloads are protected by something far stronger than SSL
already, which might even have a chance against the NSA. Actual
signatures of the downloads with offline keys.

I'm all pro-SSL and all that, but you are— piece by piece— really
convincing me that it produces an entirely false sense of security
which is entirely unjustified.

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