Related to this: one of the very few good reasons to offer unencrypted HTTP is that in some parts of the world, old devices are in widespread use, and support for modern HTTPS cannot be taken for granted.
And older phones might have certificate stores that can't be upgraded and have already expired.
It’s kinda annoying that I can barely use my 2013 iPad Mini because of this kind of issue, even though I absolutely love that thing (I even used it as my primary smartphone using voip for a few years!).
Technically, couldn't he install a very lightweight Linux distribution. I have a few Raspberry Pi zeros and I actually enjoy coding within the limitations of said hardware, when you know you only have 500 megs of RAM on the device you have to solve problems differently
I like how cushy we have it when 500Megs are considered 'only'. I appreciate nowadays even tetris runs on 6GB but if the software is written well, 500MB is a lot of memory to use.
Modern hardware has allowed us to ignore bad/inefficient coding. That aside from the need to compute larger data sets is the ONLY reason we keep needing more RAM and CPU with every coming year. If software companies would stop rebuilding everything from scratch as a product model and instead do it only when absolutely necessary and just work on improving the EXISTING software, most things could run on an OS with 2G of ram. There is no good reason for needing to continually upgrade hardware just to browse the internet. The reason it’s needed is because each year developers and designers assume that their userbase has better hardware so they can be wasteful with resources and not optimize.
Technically, couldn't he install a very lightweight Linux distribution. I have a few Raspberry Pi zeros and I actually enjoy coding within the limitations of said hardware, when you know you only have 500 megs of RAM on the device you have to solve problems differently
"Only"... My first Linux system had 3 megabytes of RAM! I was running SLS Linux on a 386SX/20.
And older phones might have certificate stores that can't be upgraded and have already expired.
It’s kinda annoying that I can barely use my 2013 iPad Mini because of this kind of issue, even though I absolutely love that thing (I even used it as my primary smartphone using voip for a few years!).
I know Google tried to address this by giving Chrome its own independently upgradable certificate store and thought Apple would do something similar, especially since they don't have to rely on OEMs to push system updates.
A reason to use old computers that I don't see mentioned here has to do with accessibility. People in the US usually have current hardware such as the latest Mac laptop, but that is not the case in all other countries. Current hardware is a bit of a luxury that we don't fully appreciate. I have an open source project with global users, and one person in Mexico contacted me looking for help. He was trying to create 3D…
Related to this: one of the very few good reasons to offer unencrypted HTTP is that in some parts of the world, old devices are in widespread use, and support for modern HTTPS cannot be taken for granted.
I’ve heard this complaint before, but couldn’t you just put an HTTPS to HTTP proxy somewhere with good bandwidth to cut out the latency without hurting the security of people with good bandwidth/devices? Sure, a proxy costs money, but it’s not much compared to other infrastructure costs and it could be shared.
A reason to use old computers that I don't see mentioned here has to do with accessibility. People in the US usually have current hardware such as the latest Mac laptop, but that is not the case in all other countries. Current hardware is a bit of a luxury that we don't fully appreciate. I have an open source project with global users, and one person in Mexico contacted me looking for help. He was trying to create 3D…
Related to this: one of the very few good reasons to offer unencrypted HTTP is that in some parts of the world, old devices are in widespread use, and support for modern HTTPS cannot be taken for granted.
How many of those are old enough that they can't download firefox?
(I realize this sounds snobby. I'm mostly just actually curious how much that is a viable option)
Sometimes I used old computers because they appeared functional enough. Not so long ago I used a computer from late 2000s and it was a quite normal user experience on Linux (on lightweight window manager of course) with a small exception of web browser. Amount of scripts and data on modern sites caused problems, made whole OS hang often. If only JS was turned off, no problem.
Coincidentally i'm writing this from my late 2009 iMac. It is already more than a decade old but i think it is a perfectly fine computer. With the latest version of Firefox every site works. The main issue it has is that it is a bit sluggish but i think an additional 8GB of RAM (it has 4GB) and perhaps an SSD would make it feel perfectly fine. Sadly Apple doesn't seem to agree and the last version of macOS to support…
I'm using an early 2008 MBP with Debian Buster with 6GB of RAM and SSD. The nvidia-340 driver is still supported so Youtube works nicely. With mbpfan it does not overheat. Touchpad and suspend are working pretty well. The Amazon website with Firefox is where I get warnings about a script taking too long.
I have an old Win2K box with a P3-450 with a SB-Live! soundcard which has some nice environmental effects such as reverb that I use for recording. I haven't used it much in the past few years because I need to clone the two drives, which are close to 20 years old. Rebuilding the system from scratch would be a nightmare.
And older phones might have certificate stores that can't be upgraded and have already expired.
It’s kinda annoying that I can barely use my 2013 iPad Mini because of this kind of issue, even though I absolutely love that thing (I even used it as my primary smartphone using voip for a few years!).
Are you sure that's the issue, and not cipher/protocol support? The root CA needed for lets encrypt is "DST Root CA X3" which is supported by iOS 7 https://support.apple.com/en-ca/HT203065 (and has a validity start date in 2000, so i imagine goes earlier). Now there are lots of other CAs, but lets encrypt is probably the most popular, i would be kind of surprised that the root certificate store is the limiting factor as opposed to not supporting any GCM ciphers
It’s kinda annoying that I can barely use my 2013 iPad Mini because of this kind of issue, even though I absolutely love that thing (I even used it as my primary smartphone using voip for a few years!).
I know Google tried to address this by giving Chrome its own independently upgradable certificate store and thought Apple would do something similar, especially since they don't have to rely on OEMs to push system updates.