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Comment by forgotmypw17 | Hacker News Reader

I literally never update anything unless it is not working. Quite happy here with Firefox 66.x on Ubuntu LXDE 14.x, which is what happened to come with this particular device.

I have an iPad running iOS 8.x, which I'm also happy with, especially when I do testing on the clusterfucks that are later iOS and Firefox releases.

Browsing a handful of reputable text-based websites from behind a NAT, I don't see the problem. (And I feel the same way about HTTP, which is faster, more compatible, and more accessible.)

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I really appreciate people like you reminding most everyone that new != better. I live in Japan which people usually mock for still using fax machines, or keeping "the old ways" in many aspect of society.

There are important positive things that people don't realize are lost as we "modernize" society.

For example, these days the TV spies on my usage and sends that data back to the maker company; they will then sell it to advertisers. Every update is aggressively pushed to me, and after i accept it, i notice more ads (rebranded "you may enjoy" or "now trending") on the home screen.

Another example would be how awesome paper is. It displays information without requiring an energy source. It can be folded and unfolded. May not impress you until your phone battery dies on a trip or at the airport/stadium where you need to present your e-ticket

>For example, these days the TV spies on my usage and sends that data back to the maker company; they will then sell it to advertisers. Every update is aggressively pushed to me, and after i accept it, i notice more ads (rebranded "you may enjoy" or "now trending") on the home screen.

Have you considered getting rid of that TV and TV in general?

> I live in Japan which people usually mock for still using fax machines

Greetings from Germany as well...

This works at small scale (read: a small startup or for your own machine). It begins to fall apart once you have dozens of services each deployed at some time in the past 5 years, and no clue whether any of them are safe to update, or even validate.

Yeah, anything at scale I build with a bare minimum toolkit, and only use conservative tools in the process.

By conservative, I mean something which would still work today if I wrote a script for it 10 or 20 years go.

How do you make sure these are the reputable websites and not some interceptor, when using plaintext protocol?

I'm lucky/blessed/fortunate enough to live in a place where it is unlikely and use reputable ISPs.

Jesus, you are technically illiterate if you use that old version of a web browser, I’m sorry.

This is Hacker News - someone here is probably reading this on a PDP-11.

The thing is, it’s not that old to be so obsolete to not be a pile of vulnerabilities/lack of advanced feature that actually provide an attack surface, but it is old enough that one should simply not run it.

I have nothing against running lynx where you don’t even have js support.

Do you have any actual arguments to back up your opinion?

Copying my previous answer to a similarly bad idea:

“ Browsers run untrusted code 0-24, which get JIT compiled to machine code through a very complex and bug-prone process. Add to that that desktop OSs are quite lacking when it comes to sandboxes, so even with browser sandboxes, the potential for serious damage is quire big. So, staying ahead of bugs is a must.”

It's impossible to stay ahead of the bugs, because they appear ahead of the patches, and there are undoubtedly many unpatched bugs out there.

But if I only visit sites where this is unlikely (and don't allow JavaScript, which you seem to have missed) I am much safer than when browsing willy-nilly with the latest patches.

Browsing the web with JS disabled on an up-to-date browser is still much safer. But you do you.

It's safer if it is an option.

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