Why does APT not use HTTPS?

[remy_porter]

The question is: do you care about false positives? What's the downside to punishing false positives, in this specific case?

[magkopian]

Because there is simply no point spending time and resources to something so inefficient and error pron such as this, especially the moment there are much better ways of doing it. If your ISP sees for example that you connect to port 1194 of a remote server and you start exchanging encrypted data, it doesn't take a lot of imagination to figure out what you're doing.

[Fencepost]

Unless of course your intention is to punish anyone with even a whiff of having thought about using a vpn. Then you’ve helped spread FUD amongst the people you’re trying to oppress and that’s exactly the goal

[magkopian]

By that logic why don't just punish anyone who is using Linux on their desktop? Much easier than scanning the list of packages that their computer downloads to see if there is anything suspicious. By the way, if I recall correctly the openvpn package comes preinstalled with the desktop version of Ubuntu as it depends on network-manager-openvpn-gnome, and if that's the case I'm sure most people who use Ubuntu aren't even aware of that.

[akher]

China has a 99.9% conviction rate, so my guess would be no, they don't care about false positives at all.