Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


Via Tyler Cowen, this comes from a Microsoft Research paper about why ordinary people are probably justified in ignoring most security advice on the internet:

Browser vendors have invested considerable effort in making it harder to ignore certificate errors. In Firefox version 3, when encountering an expired, invalid or self-signed certificate the user sees an interrupt page explaining that the SSL connection failed. If he chooses to add an exception he sees another interrupt page with more warnings and a choice to add an exception or “get me out of here.” If he elects (again) to add an exception he must click to get the certificate, view the certificate, and then add the exception. Internet Explorer 8 is somewhat less intrusive, but the procedure also seems designed to suggest that adding exceptions is very risky. Is it? Ironically, one place a user will almost certainly never see a certificate error is on a phishing or malware hosting site. That is, using certificates is almost unknown among the reported phishing sites in PhishTank. The rare cases that employ certificates use valid ones. The same is true of sites that host malicious content. Attackers wisely calculate that it is far better to go without a certificate than risk the warning. In fact, as far as we can determine, there is no evidence of a single user being saved from harm by a certificate error, anywhere, ever.

I’ve long wondered about those certificate errors I get from time to time, but apparently they’re just that: errors. Now I know I can just ignore them and still sleep soundly at night.

WE CAME UP SHORT.

We just wrapped up a shorter-than-normal, urgent-as-ever fundraising drive and we came up about $45,000 short of our $300,000 goal.

That means we're going to have upwards of $350,000, maybe more, to raise in online donations between now and June 30, when our fiscal year ends and we have to get to break-even. And even though there's zero cushion to miss the mark, we won't be all that in your face about our fundraising again until June.

So we urgently need this specific ask, what you're reading right now, to start bringing in more donations than it ever has. The reality, for these next few months and next few years, is that we have to start finding ways to grow our online supporter base in a big way—and we're optimistic we can keep making real headway by being real with you about this.

Because the bottom line: Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism Mother Jones exists to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. We really need to see if we'll be able to raise more with this real estate on a daily basis than we have been, so we're hoping to see a promising start.

payment methods

WE CAME UP SHORT.

We just wrapped up a shorter-than-normal, urgent-as-ever fundraising drive and we came up about $45,000 short of our $300,000 goal.

That means we're going to have upwards of $350,000, maybe more, to raise in online donations between now and June 30, when our fiscal year ends and we have to get to break-even. And even though there's zero cushion to miss the mark, we won't be all that in your face about our fundraising again until June.

So we urgently need this specific ask, what you're reading right now, to start bringing in more donations than it ever has. The reality, for these next few months and next few years, is that we have to start finding ways to grow our online supporter base in a big way—and we're optimistic we can keep making real headway by being real with you about this.

Because the bottom line: Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism Mother Jones exists to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. We really need to see if we'll be able to raise more with this real estate on a daily basis than we have been, so we're hoping to see a promising start.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate