The fact that Google has so much power over how people run their websites is nothing short of a travesty to the very nature of the world wide web. They, in effect, strong arm website authors and administrators into using various techniques and standards or face some kind of search or display penalty, even if those functions are, for all intents and purposes, pointless, or at the very least overkill, for a particular site.
In this case, I’m speaking of the much-hated by me policy that Google has put into place where, if my understanding is correct, web sites that are not set up to use TLS and HTTPS get penalized in search results — that, and / or the ever present spyware… I mean, browser, Google Chrome, will display a very bold “this site is not secure” warning.
Not to say other browsers don’t use that same warning – Firefox does, but it’s much less direct and, honestly, misleading there. My contention has always been two fold that, for one, this makes a site not look safe to visit at all, even though the “security” only matters to sensitive information being put in by the visitor of the site – you visiting isn’t going to funnel credit card numbers to the dark web, for example. That Chrome warning, however, to the average person, makes it seem like such, and I’ve never been a fan of that.
This has been the case for a while now, and for the past few years (since the Chrome update which introduced the more prominent warning) I’ve used a plugin to force HTTPS on Xadara and taken advantage of a security certificate provided by my hosting company – it’s basic, but it got the job done, and the latter half – the certificate – is still active here. You can visit Xadara via HTTPS and have a secure connection if you wish. No problem, and for a modern system it’s certainly the way you’d want to visit!
However, what if you’re visiting from an older computer? Those browsers won’t be compatible with the security algorithm in use and the end result is an older browser can’t in any practical way visit this site, even though the odds are good that a subject being discussed here may well be one of those old computers! I always found it ironic and while sure, WordPress is a bit heavy and many old computers choke loading Xadara, the fact is if one was to use a more stripped down browser, like a text mode only one to read the core articles, an old computer makes a perfect reading base for my website. Thing is, with forced HTTPS you can’t get an old mid 90’s text mode browser to actually load a page, meaning you’re still out of luck.
I’ve tried in the past to disable this, or make it something “optional” while still forcing it on anything modern, but it never worked out. While I could likely figure it all out, I honestly don’t care enough to make ti happen and since in the past few weeks I’ve been really using many of my vintage computers I’ve decided I’d almost do better to just disable mandatory HTTPS again and see what happens.
As it turns out, so long as I fix some URL’s and update my browser settings, things are going fine. Any old machine will load up HTTP only, text mode browsers like Lynx can access the site just fine, and for the most part things seem to be working fine on systems in-between. Well, so far as they can manage to load the full page, but hey, one could just use the RSS feed as their source if they wanted to. It’s not my job to tell you how to use my website.
I honestly feel the effective lockout being forced, if incidentally, by Google putting web admins in a situation where they feel they must force HTTPS does an incredible amount of damage to the vintage computer scene by making web usage, already tricky on these machines, nearly impossible in some cases when it shouldn’t be.
I’m not selling anything from xadara.com. I’m not collecting sensitive information that someone else on a Starbucks network might want to snoop on if someone wants to comment here. Why in the fuck do I NEED to force my readers to use HTTPS?
I shouldn’t have to be, and I won’t be forcing it anymore.Fuck that shit, fuck mandatory HTTPS, and fuck Google on this one.
That also means, yes old computers, Xadara is, once again, available for you! Enjoy!
….and yes, I’m well aware of the irony and hypocrisy that I use Google ads on here. Don’t like it? Support me on Patreon then and help make those ads go away!