[ih] deterioration of email (was Re: clever usc creation)

[Karl Auerbach]

I was reading this thread while I was at a car dealership waiting for 
new software to be loaded into some ECUs.

I decided to comment on one of the items in the thread.

When I hit "send" I got bounced.  Turns out that the dealer's wifi 
intercepts TLS connections at a proxy.  Grrrrr.  And the email tools did 
a validity check of the TLS certificates and did not like the 
authority-chain of the one inserted by the proxy.

The point is that the net is eroding in some places - things that used 
to work no longer work.

(I really got clobbered on this with some of my old and expensive lab 
equipment.  That gear was old, but useful, and still worth a few hundred 
$k.  But it did not have means to update the software, even if the 
vendor had created updates.  The old software did TLS but used a digest 
algorithm that the IETF had "deprecated". Because of the IETF's actions 
browser makers dropped that algorithm.  That left me with the only way 
to operate this gear was to preserve a laptop (or VM) with Windows 2000 
and Internet Exploder from that era.  It sure would have been nice had 
the browser makers not panic-removed that digest algorithm but, instead 
had a pop-up that asked "do you want to use this?")

Back when I was at Interactive Systems (first Unix company) we created a 
story line that seems relevant to some of what is happening on the 
Internet.  The story begins with a message received from an unknown 
source out in deep space.  That message says:

    "Life version 1.0 has been found to have a fatal, but uncorrectable 
flaw.  Therefore we are replacing Life version 1.0 with version 2.0.  
Version 2.0 is not compatible with Life Version 1.0, therefore all users 
of Life 1.0 are required to discontinue all use of Life 1.0 and to 
destroy all instances."

         --karl--