Mercury

[solderpunk]

On Fri, Jun 26, 2020 at 07:51:05AM -0400, Jason McBrayer wrote:
 
> One argument that I often see is that TLS makes it impossible to use
> Gemini with retrocomputing setups (i.e. computers older than about
> 2005 in this case). I've encountered this also with brutaldon, my static HTML
> front-end for the Fediverse; people want to connect to it from Windows
> 3.1 or Mac System 7, and can't use anything newer than SSLv2, which a
> modern server will reject.

I see it too.  I love retrocomputing!  Honestly.  But it's insane to say
that 99.9% of the world should sacrifice important privacy protections so
that the geekiest 0.1% can play with very old computers.  I am kind of
dubious that it's impossible to compile a modern TLS library on a
computer from 2005, but I'll admit I haven't tried it recently (up until
approximatey 3 or 4 years ago I occasionally used a Thinkpad X60s (from
2006) and I don't remember having any TLS issues).
 
> My general recommendation for this case is to run a proxy (e.g. stunnel)
> on your own LAN, on something like a Raspberry Pi or a cellphone, and
> let it handle the encryption. This would work for Gemini as well. You'd
> need a cleartext client, but only for retro devices.

This is a really solid suggestion and I may well add it to the FAQ in
the retrocomputing sections.

Cheers,
Solderpunk