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.

some of us voluntarily mitm ourselves via cloudflare ;)

Not without leaving potential proof that it happened behind

metadata is juicier anyway.

> I also believe many of our current "allies" in the region should face similar sanctions in case you are wondering.

Interesting take, coming from a nation that has caused:

- 210,296 violent civilian deaths in IRAQ

- 500,000 civilians killed om Japan

- 70,000 civilians killed in Vietnam

- 46,000 civilians killed in Afghanistan

- 3,000 civilians killed in IRAN

- Threatened to exterminate Persians civilization, blown up bridges, killed children and destroyed civilian infrastructure

I think United States should be sanctioned.

I don't disagree, but that's not why they're being sanctioned

The US itself should be sanctioned by your listed metric.

Sanctions for human rights violations would be justified only if they would be applied equally towards any country where certain human rights violations happen.

Unfortunately, USA has never applied any sanctions equally against countries with equivalent human rights violations, which proves that "human rights violations" have never been the true reason for those sanctions, but only a cover story.

When I was young and I was listening the US propaganda emitted through "Voice of America", I actually believed a good part of it. Unfortunately, history has proven that practically none of it was true and many listeners like myself were too naive if they believed any of it.

Moreover, the so-called "sanctions" of USA are not true sanctions. True sanctions would identify a precise behavior of the sanctioned country that is the cause of the sanctions and USA would promise that the sanctions would be terminated whenever the sanctioned country would stop those actions. Those would be true "sanctions" because they would have a chance to alter the behavior of the sanctioned countries.

As it is now, no sanctioned country would change anything in what they do, even when they are "sanctioned", because they know very well that the official reasons for the sanctions are not the true reasons and whatever they do about "human rights violations" and the like will not influence in any way whether the sanctions will be terminated or not.

Many of the official reasons for various US sanctions are so ridiculous that I wonder how the US politicians are able to utter them with a straight face.

For instance, there are many Chinese companies which are sanctioned because they might provide services or products for the Chinese Army or for the Chinese government.

??? Of course they do that. Any US company that makes anything of value will also provide services or products to the US military and government. The same will do any company in any country for their military and government.

In reality, the sanctioned Chinese companies have always been those which make consumer products that provided too much competition for US companies, like those that make DRAM modules and SSDs, so we have to thank the US sanctions for the huge price increases that have stolen money from people all over the world.

Regarding "sponsorship of extremism abroad", that is also questionable. Iran has supported various organizations which want to fight against Israel, but Israel has remained at war since its creation and the reason why they are still at war and they have never made peace with their enemies is because this was the wish of the Israeli government, who prefers to be at war than at peace.

There have existed opportunities of peace for Israel, but whenever there were chances for peace the forces within Israel that are against peace have prevented it, e.g. by the murder of the prime-minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995 or by the sabotage of the prime-minister Ehud Barak by Ariel Sharon and Likud in 2000.

As long as Israel will not implement an acceptable closure for the events from its creation and for their consequences, there will be people willing to fight against it, and because Israel has a crushing military superiority, the only form of fight are the "terrorist" actions. The existence of the "terrorists" is a choice made by Israel, more precisely by certain elites from Israel, for whom the continuous state of never-ending war has been extremely profitable.

I have worked for many years in Israel and more than 90% of the people that I encountered there were very nice people, but I have also seen some very bad people, who of course, like in any country, were concentrated in the government and in the management of companies, so they had much more influence than the majority.

I pitied a lot my Israeli co-workers, because they were exploited to a degree that would not be possible in most countries. Only USA might come close with its "employment at will", which gives disproportionate power to the employer.

In Israel, employees have to work much harder than in most other countries and nobody could protest against that, because that would be considered as unpatriotic, i.e. the priority for everybody is to work as hard as possible, to maintain the technological and military superiority of Israel, for fear that otherwise their neighbors would come and cut their throats. This kind of work discipline is of course very desirable for the owners of the companies, so for them it is good that Israel is permanently at war and under the menace of "terrorist" attacks.

The term "terrorist" is just an euphemism for enemies with which Israel is at war and with which it desires no peace. Moreover, even if there have been a lot of more or less innocent Israeli victims (but all have chosen willingly to be part of a military conflict), Israel has always succeeded to kill a much greater number of "terrorists" or persons related to them or persons who just happened to be close to them. Israel does not want to make any concessions for peace, because it reckons that peace will be obtained eventually, over the dead bodies of all enemies, but there is no hurry for that, because war is good for the economy.

In these circumstances, applying "sanctions" against countries who "support terrorists" has no legal basis, but it is just joining the conflict between Israel and its enemies, as an ally of Israel.

Of course any sovereign country may do this, but they should present it as what it is, i.e. as taking sides in a conflict, and not as something which has any legal or ethical reasons.

> For human rights violations at home

reddit.com/r/2020PoliceBrutality

reddit.com/r/PoliceBrutality

Oh yeah sorry this is "wHaTaBoUtIsM" so it makes our shit okay

Your comment is so bizarre I don’t know quite how to respond and I’m left wondering what your news feed looks like.

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?

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.

China doesn’t seem interested in becoming a unipolar hegemon, at least based on public statements and openly published policy/position papers, so perhaps they have learned that it’s bad to be the hegemon from watching both the UK and the US take it on the chin. Rather than the Yuan becoming the default international currency, it’s possible that Keynes’s Bancor (or something like it) may finally replace the notion of a singular reserve currency, which always fails in predictable ways.

It's not "their" president, Iranians didn't elect him. Khomeini was a religious extremist who only months ago presided over the murder of ten thousand protesters and we should shed not one tear.

s/mullah/American/

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.

Isn't Brazil in South America?

> BRICS begs to dffer.

Why would that matter?

The average person is available, helpless and most importantly - their suffering is clearly visible to the voters.

Do you not believe the rest of the world will not move in this direction to decouple from the US? If not, you should consider it is more likely than before. Countries will mandate it if they want it done badly enough, and there is enough open source to own the entire stack (OS, browser, CLIs, etc). It is simply a matter of will, resources, and time, in that order. "You eat an elephant one bite at a time" as the saying goes. Can it be done? Yes. Will it be done? We can only watch to find out.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49225112 (citations)

(sysadmin/network admin/devops/infra engineer a lifetime ago, mostly familiar with what bootstrapping this looks like)

I guess now would be a great time for browsers/OSes to ship a "trust this CA, but only for this TLD/list of domains" feature.

That's great for people that don't have any online-capable payment method, but I'd consider it a huge step backwards for those that do and are comfortable using it.

There are so many valid criticisms of crypto, but transaction confirmation time has been solved a long time ago.

It does work for groceries, although not at a physical store, because the store is controlled by government henchmen wrt to their payments. Fwiw, one can trivially by an Amazon gift card using cryptocurrency, using which one can then pay for online groceries.

As for transaction confirmation times, there are cryptocurrencies in common use that confirm nearly immediately. The lack of your knowledge shows.

It's not a joke. It's 100% true. People tend to be extremely uneducated wrt crypto, also favoring to dwell in their ignorance.

People don't really know how to install SSL certs, it's intentionally not easy especially on phones, and it's not clear that what they're installing only affects the bank. But yeah, the industry could make this semi-easy if there were a real need.

So, you're right that this does work in theory, but it obviously doesn't scale, right? We can't have every person physically go to every storefront they want to purchase something from and then drive home with a USB stick. What if I in Minnesota want to buy something from Florida or France?

The role CAs play is to be a trusted identity verifier so we don't have to have millions of people driving around to do key exchanges in person.

You can go look at them. In Firefox, head to "about:certificate" and click the Authorities tab.

How do I know that the DNS record is owned by the entity they are claiming to be? CAs have nothing to do with caching.

DNS can be trivially MITM'd as well, it's certainly not a secure mechanism for distributing keys.

I don't care what Iran, Iranians, or Israel wants. I'm American. The fact is, Israel somehow pushed our executive branch to start a war over there.

> These remarks are antisemitic

So it would be fine if they were against any other country engaged in genocide, but not against Israel because it's Jewish? Is that your defense of Israel?

> We want to live like ordinary people in the U.S., Europe, and Israel, and be allied with them

You want to be allied with a genocidal state and the country that has forced you into poverty for the last decades?

[dead]

And why is that?

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.

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!

That’s fair as a very troubling threat. So far it hasn’t materialized. Seems to be the boy who cried wolf.