HTTPS and IPv6

By webmaster

6-3-2020 M/D/Y

As you can see in the corner of your browser, I have set up HTTPS support for this website so that you can connect to it securely. Tsimerekis.com has always had HTTPS however there was some complications that I fixed today which might have stopped users from connecting to this page securely. Precisely what was happening was is if someone typed in “https://tsimerekis.com” into their browser, the certificate provided to them would be for “www.tsimerekis.com”, not “tsimerekis.com” causing what is known as a certificate mismatch. Connecting to “http(or s)://www.tsimerekis.com” or even “http://tsimerekis.com” had no issues. Not many users I imagine had issues with this, however in the event that someone using the HTTPS everywhere browser plugin typed in “tsimerekis.com”, Firefox would error. I thought I had resolved this issue long ago, however when I tried to go on to the web page today on another computer through Firefox, it gave me an HTTPS error. I want to say that I apologize for that, and I will make sure that my website is properly set up. Every website needs to use proper HTTPS. It should be (and in my opinion is) fundamental. We should not let internet snoopers see our traffic, even if it is not something you need to hide. We have to protect our privacy today so that we have it tomorrow. This is old news to a lot of people, however I still see many websites with outdated certificates and no HTTPS support AT ALL. With free services like Let’sEncrypt and Certbot there should be no excuses really.

I want to thank Firefox for actually not allowing the user to go onto website with a certificate mismatch. This is crucial to make sure that users can not be man in the Middle Attacked and have their information stolen. Chrome does not warn users about certificate mismatches if the mismatch happens to be on the same domain (this is what I have observed), probably because dealing with them is “inconvenient” to the user. I strongly suggest that users use the HTTPS everywhere plugin, and to not go on websites that do not use HTTPS, even if it is inconvenient.

As for ipv6. The adoption of ipv6 is not something needed to be done out of security, rather it is purely technological. Ipv6 simply solves the problem of there not being enough IP addresses and eventually we will all transfer to it. However I do believe that websites should make it a priority to future proof themselves and to use the best protocols possible as this is in the best interest of the internet as a whole. I am proud to say that tsimerekis.com has always supported ipv6. I want to thank Digital Ocean for making that extremely easy! Setting up ipv6 for AWS is not as easy, however I believe any system administrator with a brain and thirty minutes might be able to figure it out. Of course, that depends on how many servers are being ran. But seriously consider it!

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License