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The US just revoked the SSL certificates of Iranian banks to enforce sanctions. It feels like a tactical win, but it’s a massive strategic blunder. By weaponizing the internet’s core infrastructure, the US is forcing nations to build independent networks, blinding US intelligence and fracturing the global internet forever.
You probably assume the encryption protecting your bank account is powered by flawless mathematics. It isn’t. It’s powered by hot wax and the chaotic bubbling of a 1970s novelty item. Computers can’t do random, and to secure the digital world, we have to beg the physical world for its chaos.
The fundamental assumptions about SSL/TLS that most developers learned are now obsolete. As Todd Gardner highlighted at NDC Toronto 2026, what was once considered secure is now deprecated. It’s not just about old ciphers; the entire mental model of trust and encryption has been overturned. If you’re still treating SSL as a checkbox, your systems are exposed.
The domain hackerne.ws exists to make it easier to reach Hacker News, but it’s served over plain HTTP—meaning anyone on an open network can intercept your traffic before you even get to the front page. For a community that prides itself on technical rigor, this is a glaring blind spot that undermines the very trust the web depends on.
A single security score from 0-100 feels reassuring — and that’s exactly why it’s dangerous. Your domain’s real risk lives in the weakest of seven independent modules, not the aggregate. Attackers don’t target your strongest defense; they exploit the one module you neglected. SSL certificates get all the attention, but misconfigured DNS, missing security headers, and broken email authentication are the open windows nobody checks.
MakeMKV has been down for two days, and the internet suspects a hack. But a single Cloudflare error 525, combined with the use of deprecated TLS 1.0/1.1 protocols, reveals a far more uncomfortable truth: technical debt. This outage is a confession of neglected infrastructure, and a warning for anyone running legacy systems.