Techrights

A Migration to Centralised Certificate Authorities (CAs) Has Betrayed LXer

Posted by Roy Schestowitz on Sep 23, 2024,

updated Sep 23, 2024

After taking over 20 years to gain modest following over their popular RSS feed (many people working hard around the clock to keep people abreast of news) things went wrong.

This is how it started:

Was the culprit identified? This is the latest:

RSS feeds are the lifeblood of many sites such as LXer, which hardly rely on social control media; a loyal base of readers keeps the site going. It keeps the editors motivated.

I already know from experience (and we covered this before) that Wget and Curl have swallowed the CA bait fully (bait, hook and sinker) and so did many libraries in ubiquitous languages/frameworks, including Perl and Python.

Suffocating oneself is never a good option. As I noted on September 4th (see above), making a site HTTPS-only (or even by default) risks introducing compatibility problems for/with older devices, such as "smart" TVs or "old" phones that lack support for the latest TLS version. They cannot be updated either (never mind whose fault). Saying to people who are affected "just buy a new one" is a "yuppie" GIAFAM (IBM included) canard.

As always, reject the mundane fallacy that newer is necessarily better. Make things that work. Be inclusive. Be accessible. █