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FTP,HTTP → HTTPS in Emacs doc and code


From: Paul Eggert
Subject: FTP,HTTP → HTTPS in Emacs doc and code
Date: Wed, 13 Sep 2017 16:58:44 -0700
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:52.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/52.3.0

Inspired by the impending decommissioning of ftp://ftp.gnu.org due to security concerns, I went through the Emacs master branch and changed these FTP URLs to https://ftp.gnu.org. While I was at it, I did the much-bigger task of changing http: to https: for most gnu.org and fsf.org URLs. (I ran out of energy before doing the MS-Windows files, and I hope someone else can take up the slack there.)

Although the web pages in question are not secret, plain HTTP is vulnerable to malicious routers that tamper with responses from GNU servers, and this sort of thing is all too common when people in some other countries browse US-based websites. See, for example:

Aceto G, Botta A, Pescapé A, Awan MF, Ahmad T, Qaisar S. Analyzing internet censorship in Pakistan. RTSI 2016. https://dx.doi.org/10.1109/RTSI.2016.7740626

HTTPS is not a complete solution here, but it can be a significant help. The GNU project regularly serves up code to users, so we should take some care here.




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