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Comment by rollcat | Hacker News Reader

The idea of Uxn, or some other minimalistic computing platform really scratches my itch, but I'm afraid anything that can't handle modern TLS is pretty much DOA - getting online is 95% of the reason why you'd want to own a computer, and while there are certainly a lot of fun things to do with an air-gapped device, computing shouldn't end at "just fun".

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In my mind, this is more of a problem with TLS than it is a problem with older, slower, or simpler computers. Encypted, complex, and/or fast-churning protocols are sold as delivering security and efficiency, but in practice, for many applications, they primarily function as a ratchet to artificially induce obsolescence.

This. I tried spinning up a Win2k VM a few months back and was surprised to find that the web's now basically off limits to Win2K because of TLS. What's even more surprising is that the same barrier doesn't keep an Amiga[1] off the web. (Javascript is another matter, of course!)

[1] https://github.com/jens-maus/amissl

Install Legacy Update and Retrozilla.

Thanks, I'll check those out.

The main practical solution seems to be to use a http-to-https proxy. Inspired by nostalgia and stuff retrocomputing people were doing on the fediverse, I recently spun up a MacOS 8.1 VM. Getting online basically took installing such a proxy on the host, since there's no browser with modern TLS that will run on a 68040 Mac.

Well the alternatives are: to stay offline, proxy through a more powerful relay (e.g. with WireGuard, seems to be able to run on an ESP32, but that's just moving the problem around), or... convince the world that the most widely deployed encryption protocol needs radical change?

Getting online is not the true purpose of owning computer. You don't need TLS. you kind of already have all sorts of computers that can handle TLS, so why build another one?

UXN was developed out of necessity , because some software stopped working in certain environments. AFAIK author is living on a boat. and doesn't have unlimited electricity and internet access. Their electricity supply depends on weather.

When you look at it like that, information security is largely first world country problem. whilst 3rd world country is happy if it has internet and electricity at all.

I think there's a niche market to be had for offline/air-gapped computers, not only for security but for independent operability. If you're in BFE and have solar-powered computers running your AC you want something efficient and reliable, and everything in the hardware and software purpose-built.

This space is already saturated by a product class called a microcontroller. I'm specifically thinking personal/general purpose computing.

A two-magnitude slowdown by being too simple to make compilation/any form of not-naive interpretation possible, by preventing code from self-clobbering, isn't a great start either. The approach there is to write a faster "device" in the host language, which doesn't help portability.

i think you can implement a working subset of modern tls in a few thousand lines of code

Have you heard of wolfssl? But if your idea of reliabilty is network connected computers that must never fail fate has bad news coming for you. Better to engineer systems with the certain expectation everything fails at some point. So air gapped is the way to go!

It's not about the simplicity, it's about the CPU power required to keep the encrypted traffic flowing. I have a G4 TiBook for example (an insanely powerful machine, 20 years ago), and I can sense it struggle.

A forked up Dillo and Links+ would run perfectly well enough with mbedtls, at least under OpenBSD.

I don't think you can run Dillo in 64kb of RAM (see Uxn specs: https://wiki.xxiivv.com/site/uxn.html). It would be interesting to see if e.g. a GBA running Uxn could handle TLS at reasonable throughput.

On the G4 I meant. OpenBSD has a macppc port.

Oh that's correct, there's a bit too many contexts in this thread and I confused myself. Sorry, my bad.

You're right, OpenBSD with something like Dillo or NetSurf might go a very long way. I'm not sure though if I want to run OpenBSD on the TiBook, I have plenty of more powerful hardware for that, and running a modern, portable OS removes from the flavor of such retro hardware - e.g. it's the most modern/powerful laptop that can still run OS9. There still are people who maintain and write new software for the classic Macs (one of them, jcs, being an OpenBSD developer). I'll have to explore my options more thoroughly here, but either way, that machine struggles even with modern SSH, something you're used to being instant.

Ah ofc, Clazilla, SSH stacks and stuff for System6. But there isn't a lot more. OpenBSD can run scummvm, mplayer, openttd...

not because of tls, do the math

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