Comment by stephenmac98
Comment by stephenmac98 2 days ago
You have to consider the rarity of your use case vs the use case they're defending against.
How often do you think someone tries to connect their gamepad to a local server? Not never, but the total amount of users doing it is probably high tens or low hundreds at most
Compare that to how often gamepad users try to connect to a malicious website - probably hundreds or ever thousands of times a day.
Loosening certificate validation further expose the many less than competent users to risk, and the potential impact both on the customer base and on the product's reputation are significantly higher than the risks of making it cost a couple bucks a year to allow your gamepad to connect to a local server.
For something like a computer, there is a legitimate argument for allowing the user to bypass SSL/TLS restrictions (after some resistance) because laptops are used for development.
I can almost guarantee that the gamepad developers had an options for certificate validation bypass in it's developer options, but they're not gonna expose that needlessly when it offers no benefit, but exposes their customers to additional risk. Your gamepad is likely not a development device after all
Any malicious website can access my gamepad, since it can trivially get a Letsencrypt certificate – the only requirement for getting "secure origin" API access.
What exactly is this restriction preventing me from, then? (And what does a malicious website do with my gamepad data anyway?)
> Not never, but the total amount of users doing it is probably high tens or low hundreds at most
Yes, I'm fully aware that local hosting is rare in the grand scheme of things, but I think you're vastly underestimating the potential. It's currently not even possible to do much better even as a commercial NAS provider, and these are somewhat popular.
A big part of that also seems like a chicken and egg problem: Fewer and fewer users do it because it's getting harder and harder, thanks to browser standards and OS defaults being largely driven by stakeholders that have no interest in it becoming easier.
Yes, none of this is an evil conspiracy; it's just a question of incentives and priorities in the end. I just find it so sad how willingly even a "hacker" audience here embraces the move towards more and more centralization, on more than one dimension. (Peer-to-peer vs. client-to-server, "trusted CA only" vs. trust on first use, cloud vs. self-hosting etc.)