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Google Joins Mozilla, Microsoft In Pushing For Early SHA-1 Crypto Cutoff (blogspot.com)
itwbennett writes: Due to recent research showing that SHA-1 is weaker than previously believed, Mozilla, Microsoft and now Google are all considering bringing the deadline forward by six months to July 1, 2016. Websites like Facebook and those protected by CloudFlare have implemented a SHA-1 fallback mechanism. Both companies have argued that there are millions of people in developing countries that still use browsers and operating systems that do not support SHA-2, the replacement function for SHA-1, and will therefore be cut off from encrypted websites that move to SHA-2 certificates.
Since when has Slashdot become a Luddite websites for those that fear change?
XP is 15 years old! Things move on. We are tired of turning down 2008 era html 5 and leaving our phones with a better browser experience because of XP IE 6/8 compatibility from a different era. If the hardware is from 2008 or earlier you can install Linux for free?
Do you not change your oil and timing belts either
you're applying a first-world technically-literate engineering mind-set to a developing-world, mostly-technically-illiterate set of people [albeit desperate and highly creative as a result, it has to be said]. these are people that have been abandoned by profit-maximising corporations that prey and depend on you and people like you to feed the cycle of environmentally-irresponsible manufacturing.
there's not enough profit to justify selling product to them, so they're left with our discarded electronics, shipped in huge containers and either coaxed into life [or melted down in open-air no-safety acid baths].
you've also assumed that the older hardware - which is quite likely to have only 128mb or 256mb of RAM - is *capable* of running a modern version even of the GNU/Linux OS. did you check the resident-RAM and virtual memory of firefox recently? i just ran "top" right now, and firefox says it's consuming 2.4 GIGABYTES of resident memory and SIXTEEN gigabytes of virtual memory.
if you genuinely believe that a machine from 2008 is capable of reasonable resource consumption and reasonable response time running the latest version of firefox - even under a GNU/Linux OS - you are genuinely deluding yourself and are doing absolutely noone any favours.
please think a little bit outside of the box of your own environment, and act responsibly.