A Rebuttal of Some Shill's Blind Worship

I came across ``Why even a little plaintext matters'' by chance and, without any other idea to write
sans something concerning TCP, have decided to rebut that article out of both boredom and amusement:
https://emilymstark.com/2024/06/07/why-even-a-little-plaintext-matters.html

The article seriously and unfairly points at the following website in its criticism: http://shrug.io

This silly second domain, returning a few characters of text, has no need for encryption, which rots
everything on the WWW owing to its design, but the entire article is spent poorly arguing otherwise.

A nebulous other, the evil attacker with intimate access to the network, supposedly delivers malware
and other nasty things through unencrypted channels.  The common existence of such through encrypted
channels is apparently unworthy of note.  The fact that an item on the WWW can be actively malicious
is also apparently something which can't be helped, readily accepted and apparently not the problem.

Unsurprisingly, I looked at the author's website to notice she's a Google employee.  Surprisingly, I
found a picture of Emily who, despite working for Google, appears to be a woman and not a man poorly
pretending to be one.  She seriously maligns spyware, while working for the largest spyware producer
in history, which is probably also the largest malware delivery network ever designed, uncritically.

Pilpul over the meaning of the word ``sensitive'' is employed next.  The fact that the website which
does naught but provide a constant string of data can hide things when pasted into a ``terminal'' is
evidence that it should be encrypted, not that the piss-poor design of what passes for ``terminals''
nowadays should be corrected.  All manner of nasty things can happen, until unencrypted websites are
entirely stomped out by Google, the article explains in other words, and the topic's too complex for
an average user to decide any of these things by himself, which is why everyone else should instead.

The article concludes by explaining the power of defaults, something her employer well knows, and by
describing a bright future where ``the need to keep plaintext a first-class citizen diminishes''.  A
future in which unencrypted websites are even more disadvantaged by the WWW browser is only possible
if webmasters keep heeding Google's commands to encrypt what has no need whatsoever to be encrypted.

My website isn't encrypted, originally because I was lazy, and I've written about the value of sloth
in a previous article.  Only years later did I learn that encryption provided to the WWW to be fake.
The ``certificate authorities'' and the heavy-handed eradication of ``self-signed certificates'' are
to blame for the most part; I've read of grave flaws in the encryption algorithms chosen themselves,
but such is unnecessary to criticize the model.  If parties A and B want to communicate ``securely''
over the WWW, well then they must involve party C, that's just obvious; when phrased so clearly, the
entire thing is clearly fucking retarded.  Furthermore, I've grown to enjoy, well enough, and expect
that I may run my website without begging on a regular schedule.  If the unencrypted WWW disappears,
I know the screws will be tightened on what the ``certificate authorities'' may do, and they will be
a mechanism for censorship.  Google pushes for encryption, purely to protect its advertising racket.

I reasonably like early unencrypted protocols like Gopher, and have no intention to stop using them.

I'll admit, were I running a business or a forum or something similar over the WWW, I'd need to give
in and change my tune, having no better option, but I don't and won't; the dearth of good options is
a very good reason to avoid the WWW whenever possible.  My website is one that won't rot constantly.
.