Another point that you missed completely is that your targeting assumption is wrong. If you're doing a MITM against a banking site, you DON'T need to target them. Not with SSL. You can compromise instead any one of the thousands of certificate authorities in the world. Any single successful compromise of any of these unrelated third parties gives you free rein to MITM any banking site in the world. From the point of view of the server administrator, this is absolutely insane. No matter how good my own security is, an attacker can MITM me by compromising any single one of any of thousands of unrelated CAs, 99.99% of which I as a server administrator have never done business with. At least with SSH if my own server keys get compromised it's my own damn fault. Not so with SSL.

Your argument remains completely nonsensical for one very basic and unavoidable reason: SSL is also equally vulnerable to stolen keys. There is no way in which SSH is worse than SSL.

Of the MITM attacks against SSL actually deployed in the wild, what proportion rely on stolen keys compared to compromised certs? Answer that question, and you'll see that my "most attacks" claim is fully valid.

Yeah great. This kind of SSH compromise requires a targeted attack, and will only work on that one server. By contrast, with SSL, a single DigiNotar stunt allows you to attack thousands of servers and millions of users all at once. See the difference? SSL is great in theory, horrible in practice. Anyone claiming otherwise is willfully blind of real-world considerations. This includes most cryptography researchers.

Mobile apps can and do use key pinning, but certificates are not necessary for that. They can just pin individual self-signed public keys. For that matter, they don't even need SSL; they could just use SSH.

It's possible, but useless, to implemet public-key TOFU in web browsers. Almost all web sites rotate keys too fast for the pin to be useful.

Certificate pinning is not possible in any real-world scenario. The problem is that certificates change too often. Certificate authorities are part of the problem: they encourage high turnover, because it increases their profits. Certificate pinning only works in situations where you have inside knowledge of a company's certificate policies. Google implements certificate pinning on their own Google properties in Chrome in this way. There is nothing in SSL that technically prevents certificate pinning, but the design of SSL has inevitably led to non-technical economic incentives that indirectly make certificate pinning impossible.

SSH essentially relies exclusively on key pinning (not certificate pinning) for authentication, and it works beautifully. SSH has no certificates, and yet has a higher market share in the shell connection market than SSL has in the http connection market. SSL should become more like SSH, but this is impossible to achieve, because CAs are already economically entrenched.

WRONG. Provably wrong.

There exists an extremely widely-used crypto protocol which uses no certificate validation and yet prevents almost all MITM attacks. It's called SSH. In fact SSH has done something that SSL will never do: it has completely replaced the corresponding unencrypted protocol, to the point where no one, I mean no one, uses telnet anymore.

How does this magic work? SSH performs key validation. It performs this validation without requiring certificates. The validation model is very simple: trust on first use (TOFU). Although TOFU on paper is theoretically inferior to CA validation in every way, real life does not take place on paper. In the real world, TOFU is far superior to CA validation. It prevents the kinds of attacks that actually matter, while ignoring the kinds of attacks that look great on paper but aren't really a big deal in practice.

Oh good! A substantive response for once. Let's discuss the points you raised.

I admit I made up the 1% figure, but I believe it is a reasonable estimate. Would you like to challenge the accuracy of the number? If anything, I am convinced that closer scrutiny would reveal it to be too high of an estimate. 2013 US GDP was 17 trillion dollars. Microsoft's 2013 revenue was 77 billion dollars, about 0.5% of GDP. Of course, Microsoft is not a pure software company; some portion of that revenue is hardware, services, and so on. There are other software companies, of course. I have never heard anyone reasonably justify a much higher cost than 1%.

It is true that the benefits of commercial software far exceed its costs, but from a public policy perspective that's completely irrelevant. The cost of producing this software is ~1% of the economy. If commercial software did not exist, the government or any public body could (provably) replicate the exact same benefits at the exact same cost. Government support for something on this scale is not a ridiculous idea; it's exactly how most basic research in science is actually done in the US. Hence 1% (or less, if I'm overestimating the cost) is the correct figure to use for policy prescrptions.

Right, attack the messenger. Do you have any substantive arguments? Didn't think so.

In a world lacking music, the human species can survive. In a world lacking free sharing of knowledge, the human species is doomed to die. Take your pick.

Yes, absolutely. Commercial software represents about 1% of our economy, even under the current copyright regime which artificially tilts the market in favor of the software sector. It's absolutely, criminally insane from a policy perspective to hold the other 99% of our economy hostage to this special interest. Lifting the artificial technological restrictions imposed by copyright would grow our economy by much more than 1%, every single year.

To take just one example, if not for copyright restrictions, Google Books would provably be willing to make available for free to every human on the planet the entire contents of the Library of Congress. You're telling me that the future potential growth from making this knowledge available isn't worth trading 1% of our economy on a one-time basis?

THIS.

Restrictions on computing or copying are unacceptable. Full stop. This is not negotiable. Copying is as natural as breathing in the digital age. Everything else, without exception, has to start from this premise and work around it. Nothing else is compatible with technological progress. Nothing else is compatible with free society.

If artists cannot sustainably produce music under this constraint, then so be it. Better to have no music at all than no freedom of computing.

If you invoke GPLv3 for your copy of the code, then you can stop other people from using your copy under LGPLv2. If you made modifications to your copy, then GPLv3 applies to your modifications. Of course, other copies of the code are licensed independently of your copy. I never claimed otherwise.

If you like the GPLv3 so much, no problem. Any copy of LGPLv2 software can be converted to GPLv3 at will. The text of the LGPL itself states:

Free tools are an absolute must. No matter what you think of Microsoft, or how much you like their products, nothing beats open source for learning. I mean, this is almost a tautology: to learn about computers, programming, or anything related, you're far, far better off learning from something where you have access to source code.

The free tools have more rough edges than the Microsoft software you're used to. For learning purposes, this is an advantage. By the time you master sendmail configuration or mod_rewrite rules, you'll also have learned the m4 programming language and regular expressions. Clicking on graphical configuration wizards does not make you learn anything like what you naturally have to learn just to set up a Unix server.

Microsoft certainly makes some world-class software. Visual Studio is unmatched by anything in the open source world. But Visual Studio is not really that useful until you've actually learned how to code. Open source and free software will get you there.

The people behind Mt. Gox might kill him just to save their business from bankruptcy. It would nicely cover the bitcoins that they lost. There are many ways to make use of bitcoins without cashing them.

I agree, OS X is a unix, as much as Android is Linux. There are still some differences between the two; as pointed out in another reply, you can install Google Play Services on top of an AOSP-built Android, but there is no way to install the OS X UI on top of an open-source build of Darwin.

However, if you compare iOS and Android, which is the proper comparison, then there is one other major important difference: Lots of Android hardware is capable of running open-source Android builds, but there is no iOS hardware at all that can run open-source builds of Darwin. I don't consider iOS "open" if you can't run it on any actual hardware.