> HTTP got basic auth, which is crap because plaintext password transmission happens...
Plaintext submission happens with HTML forms too. The problem with Basic is the password goes with every request. That means you're exposing a long term credential to a higher risk. We want to exchange the long term credential for a short term one, ideally scope limited. That is far less catastrophic to revoke, and gives you some power of granularity (you can at the very least have some operations prompt for the password again). It also means you can limit risk on the server: only one page has access to the long term credentials, which can be more easily audited, or even hosted on dedicated servers.
WebAuthn has been the real savior here. Real cryptography has always been desirable for this, and removing per-site passwords is honestly just a bonus.
Pardon my ignorance, but why don't companies run their own nameservers?
I get why you don't want to run email - it's highly reputation driven. But as far as I can tell, running nameservers is no harder than running webservers or DB servers. HA is potentially even easier, because the system was designed that way from day zero.
I'm not suggesting I'd run one for my personal website, but twitter and github are already managing distributed networks for this. What are the services Dyn and others provide that are so invaluable?
> Also, what does that bit about "commercial-in-confidence" mean?
The AEC does conduct some elections on a fee-for-service basis - things like union elections. They use a version of the same system to tally votes in those elections too. They say that the two systems are totally inseparable, to the point where you can't just cut out the code used in industrial elections. They also say revealing the code (though keep in mind it would still be copyrighted, so couldn't be used by any other organisation) would cause them significant commercial disadvantage. Because they have particular efficiency in the way their software operates which causes them to be more competitive.
As you might suspect, I disagree with pretty much every part of what they claim there.
Plaintext submission happens with HTML forms too. The problem with Basic is the password goes with every request. That means you're exposing a long term credential to a higher risk. We want to exchange the long term credential for a short term one, ideally scope limited. That is far less catastrophic to revoke, and gives you some power of granularity (you can at the very least have some operations prompt for the password again). It also means you can limit risk on the server: only one page has access to the long term credentials, which can be more easily audited, or even hosted on dedicated servers.
WebAuthn has been the real savior here. Real cryptography has always been desirable for this, and removing per-site passwords is honestly just a bonus.