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

[vinton cerf]

recent linked in message:
"Hello, if you're an ultra exceptional AI researcher/engineer and want to
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please send me a DM. We may be hiring."

note use of "DM" vs "email" or "text" or....

vint


On Wed, Jul 29, 2026 at 8:27 PM Karl Auerbach via Internet-history <
internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:

> 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--
>
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