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So, I know its been a bit quiet here, but we're working through getting through the last few items relating to cutting over to newer infrastructure. As such, its been working through the bug list, and there's one issue I want to get some feedback on.
Back in November when the infrastructure was upgraded to Ubuntu 22.04, a few users with older devices stopped being able to connect to SoylentNews. This confused me, since we've been using the same NGINX SSL termination setup that has been in use since at least 2016. Well, I finally found the root cause, and as it turns out, Canonical bumped up the minimum OpenSSL security level, which disabled several ciphers, and broke devices not supporting TLS 1.2 or later.
By testing the site with the SSL Labs site checker, it appears anything older than Android 4.0, or iOS 5 is broken. This mostly seems to be devices that are over a decade old at this point, and won't be able to browse the vast majority of sites on the Internet as is. We discussed this internally a bit, and I'm of the opinion that its not worth re-enabling the older ciphers to allow these devices to reconnect, especially since we're working to modernize the stack, and get it as up to date as we can get it. I also believe we had very few users who were actually affected by this, however, as the editors did get a few emails about SN breaking after the site upgrade, I wanted to poll the community, and make sure this is not a more widespread issue than initially believed.
Ultimately, this is going to be part of a broader discussion on what we will and won't support on SoylentNews going forward, and this seems as good of place as any to get the ball rolling.
~ NCommander
(Score: 5, Informative) by Rich on Wednesday July 05 2023, @10:20AM (4 children)
- Plain http rather than insecure old https
- No (out of principle), or optional JavaScript. The principle is that mere display shouldn't require a Turing-complete client. Also, there are no pictures here, so the site should work in lynx/links - which also makes sure that accessibility is in good order.
(Score: 2) by gnuman on Wednesday July 05 2023, @02:44PM (3 children)
But HTML + CSS is Turing complete ... so ...
https://accodeing.com/blog/2015/css3-proven-to-be-turing-complete [accodeing.com]
What JS allows for is single page applications and 3rd party apps. It decouples data from the presentation.
(Score: 2) by Rich on Wednesday July 05 2023, @05:45PM (1 child)
Sigh. Yes.
I thought that was the purpose of CSS?
It's been a while since I dealt with that stuff, and I've especially steered clear of web based widget frameworks...
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 05 2023, @10:48PM
One of the original ideas of HTML was to allow for the separation of content from presentation. Later, CSS was tacked on to allow for websites to describe presentation. JavaScript allows you to separate data from content through the use of tools like XHR or SSE. SPAs are just that idea taken to the extreme.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 06 2023, @10:30AM
I remember some years ago figuring out that Blogger templates were Turing complete. It seemed to be impossible to do the HTML I wanted, but I could totally compute a number that was equivalent to it.