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> It sounds like the perfect thing to bring modern content to vintage computers, except that its protocol requires all content to be transferred over TLS 1.2 or
by shakna 6y ago
> It sounds like the perfect thing to bring modern content to vintage computers, except that its protocol requires all content to be transferred over TLS 1.2 or higher which makes it nearly impossible to access from a vintage computer or even a modern embedded system with limited CPU power.
A modern embedded system with limited CPU power that can't do TLS 1.2? An ESP8266, one of the cheapest modern embedded systems can do TLS without problems. Heck, I've seen one or two ATTiny85's doing TLS (with some stability problems... But they're not called tiny for nothing).
If the AmigaOS project can do TLS (builtin since a decade ago) with less than half of the resources that the authour says results in an unreasonable wait time (their System6), maybe it isn't actually the hardware that is the problem.
- anthk 6y agoMaybe he means an old m68k or some z80 speccy opening Gopher sites.
- shakna 6y ago> But if your [computer’s CPU][0] is so slow that a modern TLS negotiation would take so long as to be unusable The author is actually pretty explicit that they're talking about a System 6 Mac, which has all the hardware necessary not to be too slow for TLS. It's just that it's so old that finding a working SSL library for it is difficult, which on some fronts I can sympathise with... But SSL should still be a requirement to prevent your users from having crap injected by whoever the hell is between you and them. [0] https://jcs.org/system6c https://jcs.org/system6c
- anthk 6y ago> System 6 Mac, which has all the hardware necessary not to be too slow for TLS. Eh, maybe not CPU wise, but 4MB of RAM are a bit shortish.
- shakna 6y agoAmigaOS manages it with 512Kb of RAM.
- anthk 6y agoI know Amiga has modern SSL libraries, but with just 512kb of RAM to run iBrowse? Sure? I tried to emulate some m68k macs, and definitely, as the PC, 8MB are the minimum enough (with paging) to browse without issues with an old Netscape release, or icab. PC's have it easier because a stripped Minix2 with Lynx and some light SSL library could do that with ease on a high 486/Pentium and 4MB of RAM. One day I'll compile a modern Dillo with mbedtls for a virtual 486 with 4-8MB under Qemu.
- megous 6y agoATTiny85 - I doubt it. With 8k program memory and 512B data RAM you will have trouble fitting in a single cipher and hash function, let alone the TLS + TCP stack. And ESP has HW acceleration for crypto.
- shakna 6y ago> ATTiny85 - I doubt it. With 8k program memory and 512B data RAM you will have trouble fitting in a single cipher and hash function It paged to disk. Including dropping functions in and out of flash to disk. I did mention it was unstable, right? But it's still doable.
- megous 6y agoThat must have been quite something.