[benterix]

> Somebody even created a website to facilitate conversion but unfortunately the TLS certificate has expired and Cloudflare now blocks access.

This is one of the main arguments I was using in discussions with people advocating unconditional use of HTTPS everywhere. Yes, in theory it's a good thing. Yes, in theory it should be a solved problem and you wouldn't see any broken websites anymore. In practice, we lost a small part of the Web.

[andai]

Yesterday I considered writing a web scraper completely from scratch (just sockets). Without HTTPS, this is trivial. Of course, you lose out on much (most?) of the web, but I have a feeling most small / interesting sites would still be accessible.

I have found that, given a random sampling of web content, an extremely small fraction of it is interesting or useful to me (nor indeed is hardly any of it what I would consider high quality enough to use as the basis for the future governors of mankind!)

[sneak]

Even if you moved the entire TLS web to non-TLS, this is no longer trivial. The web requires Javascript to render, full stop. Fetching and parsing HTML alone is totally insufficient.

[Am4TIfIsER0ppos]

> The web requires Javascript to render, full stop.

Then how the fuck am I reading this let alone replying?

[benterix]

> The web requires Javascript to render, full stop.

A small correction: some parts of the new web require JavaScript to render.

That's why on many websites teh experience is better without JS. To be more specific, several paywalled websites can be accessed just by turning the JS off. You could even say the opposite is true in these cases: JS is being used to prevent text rendering.

[andai]

A while back I disabled JS in my browser. I think I even disabled image loading. This resulted in a vastly improved experience. You'd think mere adblock would get you most of the way there, but the difference is staggering.

[fwsgonzo]

That's been my way of browsing for a while now and I agree it works for the most part. I have no intention of going back.

It's especially nice to have JavaScript disabled by default, so I can enable one script at a time until it becomes readable. But not so many scripts that it becomes unreadable again.

[Vampiero]

A small part of the web that was either archived already, or wasn't interesting enough to be archived in the first place.

I get your sentiment but at some point you have to let go. Many websites die every day not because of obsolescence but because the author eventually stops renewing the domain or paying their hosting provider.

It's just a part of life.

[sneak]

Do you still use telnet?

[benterix]

No, it's no longer practical for any purpose. I mostly use openssl instead, e.g. for testing if my SMTP server is up and has a valid cert:

openssl s_client -connect myhost.com:25 -starttls smtp

Telnet stopped being useful a long time ago, is no longer shipped by default, and there are better tools to do things it was used for decades ago.

[sneak]

Good, so you understand perfectly the reasons for us all attempting to abolish use of port 80.

[dvfjsdhgfv]

I think everybody understands the benefits of HTTPS, there is no need to discuss that. But the fact remains that forcing everybody to move, even old static websites where potential impersonation and MITM attacks matter little, turned out not so painless as the advocates had proclaimed.