SHA1 certificates for secure SSL/TLS communications are deprecated due to known computational vulnerabilities. To ensure secure communications, a forced deprecation sounds reasonable (i.e. refuse to connect to these). That has the side effect that it will lock out many users who are unable to use stronger hashes such as SHA256. However, if a fallback to SHA1 is provided (as Facebook is proposing), everyone will be vulnerable to SHA1 downgrade man-in-the-middle attacks.
What to do?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 11 2015, @10:10PM
You may be interested in Gopher. Browser support has been removed over the years, rather than maintained, however.
I have interest in (but have not tired) CJDNS, but that does not meet your "cleartext" criteria. Gopher should work fine over it though (If you have an IPv6 aware gopher host)
(Score: 2) by Hyperturtle on Monday December 14 2015, @12:37AM
I'll give that a shot. I still like to stumble across telnet BBS's -- some that are in ANSI are a rare treat to behold.