General > General Technical Chat
Looking for a site that will reduce HTML or make compatible with older browsers
<< < (3/6) > >>
cdev:
Janoc,

You have a right to your opinion, but I have a right to mine. That information they collect is intended for commercial use in the future. It wont always be the way it is now. Companies see it as a huge race for all the money in the world, they want to get their share before its gone. Everybody else is. They are making all this into their entitlements. 

Consider I was just speculating as to how he could update the core cryptographic libraries in his old computer. So your argument doesnt make sense - Maybe he just wants to be able to use the web to look up the occasional datasheet.

Thats what has happened. Zap, cant use web at all. Nor can people without specialized technical knowledge fix it.

Thank God for Linux. I saw this coming so switched to Linux years ago.


--- Quote from: janoc on December 22, 2020, 04:05:32 pm ---
--- Quote from: cdev on December 22, 2020, 02:34:38 pm ---What about all the backend chatter?

They have intentionally made it so older browsers break in order to make it nearly impossible to be anonymous on the web.

This is because they sell that information.

--- End quote ---

Did you consider in your paranoia that maintaining sites working for old browsers that don't support modern standards and are full of security holes which have been patched since can be actually an issue? It costs resources and money, you know?

And what for? So that someone can look at your website in an old version of Internet Explorer or Mozilla and possibly get their data stolen due to a browser exploit that has been patched years ago?

This has absolute zilch with "being anonymous" on the web. First the idea that you can be anonymous online is a dangerous myth. If nothing else, unless you are using something like Tor you are leaving you IP address and browser identification behind. And even Tor can and has been de-anonymized.

The fact is that the older browsers were orders of magnitude worse in this regard because there was no separation between scripts (one tab could spy on every other tab), there were no anti-tracking nor anti-fingerprinting features in the browsers, there was little to no sandboxing of the browser extensions (ever heard about drive-by downloads installing malware and extensions onto your computer? Internet Explorer was notorious for this), etc.

I suggest you put away your tinfoil hat and try to do a bit of research about what and how browsers do instead of spreading this nonsense. Yes, tracking, spying and selling your data is real. However it has absolutely nothing to do with the problem the OP has.

--- End quote ---


Chromium is a mess as far as privacy is concerned. Firefox is too.

Have you ever built either of them from source?


I think simpler is often much more secure. 
janoc:

--- Quote from: Nominal Animal on December 22, 2020, 04:36:37 pm ---
--- Quote from: janoc on December 22, 2020, 04:13:49 pm ---
--- Quote from: Nominal Animal on December 22, 2020, 03:33:59 pm ---Spammers will celebrate the second such a website is published, especially if it executes JavaScript, and only provides the rendered page to the client.  You see, that neatly sidesteps all email scraping protections.  Spammers only need to suck the pages they are interested in through your converter site, and they'll be able to scrape all emails ever published on the web.

--- End quote ---
That's by far the least of the problem. If you are publishing e-mail address on your website and are relying on javascript obfuscation to "protect it", you are only deluding yourself.
--- End quote ---
Those who use leaked database addresses risk a liability. 

--- End quote ---

Since when a criminal cares about a (I assume criminal) liability? 90+% of spam are various scams.


--- Quote from: Nominal Animal on December 22, 2020, 04:36:37 pm ---Fact is, phishing and scamming emails are deliberately full of typos and errors, because they are not interested in those who notice those; they are interested in those who do not, and are therefore easier targets. 

--- End quote ---

That is an interesting theory - in other words, with this strategy you would be intentionally seeding your mail with keywords that are very unlikely to occur in legitimate mail of your target and thus they make wonderful "spamminess" indicators for various filters. Even the ancient SpamAssassin used this, almost twenty years ago. Makes total sense ...  :palm:

Not to mention that most people these days are trained to treat the mail as suspicious/scam when it is full of typos and errors, regardless of whether it is actually one. It is such a tell-tale sign.

I think that:

a) You are giving way too much credit to scammers who are most often not native speakers of the language of the targeted population and thus use weird and wonderful linguistical constructions and typos most people wouldn't make. A lot of spam is even machine translated.

b) You have never had to actually administer a larger e-mail system and deal with both web scraping and spam ... I did, for many years.

janoc:

--- Quote from: cdev link=topic=264266.msg3381 ---
Consider I was just speculating as to how he could update the core cryptographic libraries in his old computer. So your argument doesnt make sense - Maybe he just wants to be able to use the web to look up the occasional datasheet.

--- End quote ---

But fixing his cryptographic libraries won't help him squat when the library is built into an old browser! You can't just swap DLLs around and expect things to work. And how is he going to update e.g. Microsoft's crypto built into something like Windows XP? Because that is what e.g. Internet Explorer uses.

Furthermore, it is a complete red herring - if a root certificate is not being recognized or is expired and the browser is (correctly) refusing to load the site, then what needs to be done is importing of a new certificate and not messing with any crypto libraries (and likely breaking your OS in the process)!


--- Quote from: cdev link=topic=264266.msg3381 ---Thats what has happened. Zap, cant use web at all. Nor can people without specialized technical knowledge fix it.

--- End quote ---

He should install a more modern browser on the machine (if possible) or use another machine to browse web. He obviously has some available when he posted on this forum. What you are proposing is a good way to get your computer hijacked - and still won't solve his problems.


--- Quote from: cdev link=topic=264266.msg3381 ---Thank God for Linux. I saw this coming so switched to Linux years ago.

--- End quote ---

I am writing this from a Linux machine myself. I guess you don't realize that Linux uses the exactly same browsers as Windows does these days (not counting Internet Explorer). Try to browse current web with a 20 years old Mozilla Suite and you will see how broken things will be. The choice of the operating system plays little to no role there.



--- Quote from: cdev link=topic=264266.msg3381 ---Chromium is a mess as far as privacy is concerned. Firefox is too.

Have you ever built either of them from source?

I think simpler is often much more secure.

--- End quote ---

Not quite sure what your point here is. If you don't like bundled telemetry in Chrome or Firefox then use versions without it - e.g. Chromium or Brave or whatever else. You have a choice there.

However compiling something from source will still not make Facebook or Google or whatever other website work with an old browser that doesn't support current javascript and web standards. Good luck browsing internet with Lynx then. Or NCSA Mosaic. You will need it.

Simpler is indeed more secure - as long as it a) works b) doesn't re-introduce a ton of security holes that have been long fixed in more recent versions.
edy:

--- Quote from: Syntax Error on December 22, 2020, 06:12:10 pm ---@edy What is your baseline browser? IE3, Netscape Navigator, MOSIAC, AoL, Compuserve... etc... or even the ancient text only Lynx (my first WWW experience). Or which HTML version are you targetting, before HTML 4?

--- End quote ---

Wow, I didn't realize how deep down the rabbit hole modern browsers have taken us. Reading up on it, I see that if you aren't keeping up with compatibility even a few years out or less, your site may break. I remember coding a webapp that used JQuery for some features and after an OS update on the phone, some of my app features didn't work. I then had to go back and figure out if it was JQuery, the update to the webkit engine, some function name/parameter changes that caused it. What a nightmare, and only so I could upload a "new" version of the same free app so that users wouldn't complain (not to mention having an old version still there for users who were still on the old OS version).  |O

Anyways, back to the question...

Let's say I have an old Ubuntu 6 (dapper drake) Linux machine running some 11 year old version of Mozilla Firefox, or I have an old BlackBerry Curve phone I'm using to stream music (released on Rogers Wireless in Canada on Aug 4, 2010). Or even a BlackBerry Playbook tablet that was released 2011 and had the last OS update in 2012 which basically left it with a stale browser. Unfortunately I can't update these devices but they still operate perfectly fine and connect to the internet Wi-Fi no problem.

The goal is not to "scrape" sites. I understand most sites will not function properly. I just want a way to read a page and render it in a way that can be displayed on an old browser. Yes I can always use VNC on the device (like the Playbook) and just connect to a modern Linux machine with a VNC server and browser the internet that way. Perhaps the same for my old Ubuntu machine, if I can install an old version of VNC. However certain devices (especially "dead" ones without app support anymore) like phones would benefit from having an intermediary site that can render/reformat the page even in some way that lightens the bandwidth considerably and gets rid of much of the "bells and whistles" while still retaining at least the relevant information. That's the hard part.

For example, imagine I want to load up a news site. I could theoretically just grab the entire page, convert it to a static IMAGE and then just put interactive "hotspots" on the image where there are URL links, so that when hovered over it will allow you to click it and navigate. So the entire site isn't even text anymore... just graphical elements. But that wouldn't work for many other sites that do more complicated things. Obviously any kind of pop-up players wouldn't work, but I don't usually need them.

On the BlackBerry curve, I usually listen to music from internet radio stations. To get the IP address, I go to my favourite radio station on www.streema.com, click on a station and then open up the PAGE SOURCE and find the URL of the stream. I can browse to that directly in my BlackBerry Curve browser it will play the station. However, the phone fails completely when it comes to even loading up the Streema.com website!

I'll give you an example... on streema.com I can search for Top 40 hits and find the following website pop-up with an embedded player:

http://streema.com/radios/play/American_Top_40_AT40

Since none of this works on my BlackBerry Curve, I open source of that page and find the following URL in there:

<source src='http://stream.revma.ihrhls.com/zc4802' type='audio/mpeg' />

I type that link into my BlackBerry Curve browser and it will give me the option to OPEN or SAVE. If I save it, it will start writing an mp3 file to local storage which will go on indefinitely (basically saving the music stream which I can play back later). Or I can choose OPEN and it will start playing it... I connect to line-out phono jack and have internet radio stream to some speakers. So while streema.com fails to load at all on my BlackBerry Curve (complains about unable to connect using current security settings), if it was formatted another way it would still be useful.

I think the problem will be that in order to pull out useful information, the reformatting for each site has to be customized and that will be an impossible task to make for a single "pass-through" site. That's probably the crux of the problem.
james_s:
All this javascript and other similar garbage is the reason for the security holes in the first place. Almost none of it does anything worthwhile either, IMO 90% of the web would be vastly improved by a return to early 2000's website design consisting of mostly static html. One of my favorite examples of excellent web design is http://lamptech.co.uk, good information density, nice photos, logical layout, and it works nicely even on browsers that don't have javascrip and similar crap enabled. One of my favorite examples of absolutely *awful* web design is http://komonews.com, it is bloated, there is an auto-play video window that follows you around and pops up again every time you navigate back from an article, then the part that really baffles me is if you mouse over the upper area of the page a new menu page pops up over the whole page and sometimes it's hard to get out of it. I don't know what kind of crack smoking idiots they have designing their site but it has gotten steadily worse and more baffling with each update over the years.
Navigation
Message Index
Next page
Previous page
There was an error while thanking
Thanking...

Go to full version
Powered by SMFPacks Advanced Attachments Uploader Mod