[Polipo-users] Polipo web page updated

[hiro]

With sadness I read your declared defeat against the horrible web monstrosities.
I'm writing this from opera9, and lately the web has become unusable,
because certain ciphers are simply not implemented in this browser.
Not only are those sites not cached, they are completely unavailable
to me from my favorite browser.

I had a habit of switching to some old version of chrome in such
cases, but this also ceased to work lately, because yet another set of
ciphers stopped working. So now I really have to do something else.

Because I hate all modern web browsers I thought I could make opera
use polipo for caching (as i have in the past), but this would only
work with some kind of SSL mitm (I see there was some discussion about
this on the ml).

My idea: polipo could present two certificates to your web browser: a
known, trusted one as long as everything is all right with the web
site's certificate, or a bad one that is not trusted, with the ssl
error encoded into the certificate's name.

This way I could use opera forever and we'd just need to maintain
polipo's interface towards some ssl implementation. (seems like ssl
will keep on changing forever).

Perhaps something like stunnel can also be expended to provide this in
a transparent manner. Or even plain 'openssl s_client' (i use this for
an ssl'ed ppp tunnel to get out of horrible restricted networks that
block all other unknown encrypted protocols that don't run on https or
imaps port).

I know there are mitm proxies specifically for this, but they all
don't cache anything. I'd rather keep polipo for this :)

Is this in any way inspiring?
What do you do to cope with the horror of modern web? (I wish I had
never complained about IE4)

[xnoreq]

What horror are you talking about? People rejoice that "strong" encryption
is finally gaining widespread adoption for the benefit of everyone.

Opera 9? Why would you use this old, outdated and vulnerable piece of junk
to browse the www?

And why do you need to introduce an extra layer of caching anyway? Is Opera
9 unable to cache content?

[Stefan Monnier]

Post by xnoreq
What horror are you talking about? People rejoice that "strong" encryption
is finally gaining widespread adoption for the benefit of everyone.

It also means the end of caching proxies.


Stefan

[hiro]

Post by xnoreq
What horror are you talking about? People rejoice that "strong" encryption
is finally gaining widespread adoption for the benefit of everyone.

I don't care what people rejoice while my browsing experience gets
shittier and shittier. They seem not to experience my problems.

Look for example at those Grey on Grey fonts that max out all your cpu
cores while they wobble up and down and you're supposed to figure out
how to right-swipe with a trackpoint.

Look at those auto-playing videos, disturbing your concentration and
enjoyment of anything, they themselves completely uninteresting, but
still prefixed with a horrible loud advertisement of some product
nobody needs.

And most of all, I don't need encryption on the http layer for 99% of
my tasks. They force it down my throat, in the least acceptable way.

Meanwhile they didn't even manage to make a real transparent,
authenticated and encrypted session layer for the web: Cookies are
transferred inband http, encryption a layer below, authentication on
two different layers at the same time, one in-band (some horribly
broken javascript that complains when your password is too long,
sending json-rpcs to the horribly overloaded node.js server) and
another one a layer below together with the encryption, but also
requiring me to load hundreds of broken x.509 certificates and to
trust everyone and their dog even if all I wanted to access was my OWN
web platform (probably the only thing where i might care about the
level of security anyway).

Eavesdroppers commonly would sit inside the local network, or even
just sniff on the public wifi, for that i have an encrypted tunnel
that works just fine. Why should I be less worried now whether my ISP
or some transit can read my data? My browser already trusts their
certificates anyway.

Browsers actively prevent self-signed certificates by treating them
*worse* than sites with no encryption at all. And you're saying it's
ME who is against encryption?

What other effects does all this horror have?

Well, for example I can't update my web site passwords automatically,
because every website requires a different dance (and specific cipher
sets, browser and javascript versions, and possibly webgl and what
have you for the captcha).
I can't login, at all.
i can't block unsafe javascripts centrally, regardless of used browser
or device (Opera does this really nicely, but most other devices and
browsers don't do it at all, at least out of the box).
I can't have any *meaningful* level of security, so I won't use my
browser for really important things anyway.

Oh, and did anybody say semantic web? Clearly we need more
human-unreadable content, right? Captchas and javascript are too easy.

I could fix a selected number of frequently visited, important broken
web-sites on-the-fly by proxying them through my scripts, so that I
can remove CSS, javascript, other distracting crap, thus I could use
them without pain on any device and without specific SSL cipher
requirements.

Post by xnoreq
Opera 9? Why would you use this old, outdated and vulnerable piece of junk
to browse the www?

It's not outdated if you leave away the horrible vulnerable piece of
junk that is javascript.
I have even CSS disabled on most websites. And it's getting more and
more rewarding (as long as it works without ssl) as websites get less
and less usable on modern web browsers anyway.

Post by xnoreq
And why do you need to introduce an extra layer of caching anyway? Is Opera
9 unable to cache content?

Opera itself does caching just fine, probably the closest to polipo
that i've encountered yet.
I'm sometimes on slow 64kbit/s uplink while there are more than 1
users and devices.
Also, polipo gives more detailed control about the caching. I can save
a lot of traffic with polipo.
Also, I can pre-load common websites I frequent into the cache during
night hours. You can do that with wget for example.

I just don't want polipo to die. The web era has only really started now.