Don't you think, revoking SSL cert for some Russian banks was too much?

> Do we really need organisations like Thawte to be a moral judge of what website deserves to be visited securely?

I'm not sure how you got to that question from Thawte establishing they can't legally do business with a given customer. There's lots of other providers, many of them domestic for that bank - there's nothing about them "deserving" secure connections.

One of the CAB rules for revocation seems to apply perfectly too:

> The CA is made aware that a Subscriber has violated one or more of its material obligations under the Subscriber Agreement or Terms of Use

I'm sure "legally can work with you" is one of conditions listed in those two. (Or will be soon)

Edit: I realised there's also a practical reason why the bank would want the revocation - if Thawte can't work with them anymore, they could have issues reporting a key compromise / triggering revocation themselves.

> We are required to comply with applicable laws and industry standards, including international sanctions and export controls. Your certificate was flagged as not being compliant with current trade sanctions. As such, we have revoked your certificate.

Did you even read your articles?

Generically, yes. (So - ignoring details of Thawte's legal situation, etc.)

Sanctions, supporting Ukraine in various ways, etc. should be intelligently used tools, with an informed, competent, long-term strategy behind their use.

A lot of what's happening now feels more like "millions of 3-year-olds are really mad at Russia, so they each scream loudly, grab whatever thingie is close at hand, and bash really hard on Russia". Great for venting and follow-the-crowd virtue signaling. Probably far less useful for achieving reasonable strategic goals.

It is hypocritical to claim that a client (the bank) should have protected speech at the expense of the provider.

A company choosing not to do business with someone seems to be a much strong free speech claim in my opinion. So if free speech is the hill you want to die on, you need to support Thawte.

I’m against web censorship wholesale. Registrars and hosts and certificate authorities shouldn’t have revoked any existing contracts. But they would be within their rights to disallow renewal. And I hope to see people like “NameCheap CEO” who cancelled .RU domains on short notice without giving users enough time to transfer their domains-pulling the rug out from under them..sued for criminal contract breach.

> this is an attack on the freedom of speech

Freedom of Speech is not universal in every country. People are jailed for speaking against their government in some countries.

The Terms of Service agreement, which nobody reads, probably has some legal mumbo jumbo in there that lets the provider terminate services on moral/ethical grounds as they see fit. So like if someone gets a cert for an illegal gambling website they can terminate it at will. They may also have clauses related to encryption levels and should there be sanctions on software encryption for certain countries they could be forced to revoke services.

Keep in mind that, while you're comparing this to nothing (the way things were a month ago), most of the rest of the world is comparing this to a war between Russia and multiple nuclear-armed nations.

Re-frame things around war as an alternative, like "The CA revoked our cert, but at least nobody is dropping bombs on us." The negatives will be easier to understand and accept.

I do. There's a difference between refusing to further conduct business and sabotaging existing business.

I don't think it matters whether this or anything else is an attack of "freedom of speech" in this war. These arguments might be right but it will take a lot of time to change someone's mind when they already decided Russia is the bad guy. This war moves much faster than this kind of precise dialog, which means faster strategies like "get as much hate towards the opponent as fast as possible" is going to be more fruitful. So things like propaganda, fake news, fake videos and photos, etc.

Artillery just isn't as effective as convincing people, and companies, to fight your side on the war.

Now, if you just want to debate what is right or wrong, then I agree, it's an attack of freedom of speech, especially if it was done without warning.

This was a stupid decision. Thawte is helping Russian government here and gives them a valid excuse to force switching Russian internet to national-issued certificates. It won't hurt Russian economy or Russian army.

Too much compared to what? Surely not to killing thousands of innocent people?

It's a bit much in terms of... feigned malice.

What I mean by that is, it should be trivial for these organizations to both find an in-country vendor, but also rotate a certificate/keypair.

It's entirely punitive yet (I imagine) ineffective.

I understand halting business with a region given they probably aren't sure they'd be paid with the ever-growing sanctions

Sanction works over long term, so while this will definitely help bring down Putin's regime, it won't have any impact to this war which hopefully will end soon with some sort of treaty.

If it turns out like that, I hope that western countries learn the lesson next time and don't do such abrupt sanctions (because it won't work right away anyway). We have not heard much from inside Russia but they sure causes a lot of chaos that I think is unnecessary.

Some people even think it's OK to cut Internet, DNS and other critical services, you understand that emergency services and hospitals need them and that could cost human lives?

Compared to bombing super markets?

Noe