10.12.21
Gemini version available ♊︎Firefox 93 Disables Triple DES and Doesn’t Mention NSA Backdoors. Windows 11 Continues Degrading VPNs With It If They Use the Native APIs.
Guest post by Ryan, reprinted with permission from the original
Summary: Firefox 93 has finally disabled the NSA-backdoored and weak Triple DES encryption when you connect to “secure” websites.
In their blog post, Mozilla imply that all that’s wrong with it is that it’s obsolete and seen better days, however, the US National Security Agency was involved and weakened the entire scheme to the point where they could easily break it, but thought that nobody else could for a while.
Flash forward to today, and Triple DES can be easily attacked using many known weaknesses and, if you know the terrible security track record of the OpenSSL project, they dropped it by default (and you’d have to turn it back on) in 2016.
What’s amusing, is that Microsoft and their pet lap dogs over at the Linux (Destroying) Foundation, which has little to do with Linux anymore and more to do with producing mountains of whitepapers using indecipherable buzzwords, technobabble, and treknobabble that would probably make Laura Callahan blush, got together with other companies and poured money into OpenSSL. Lots of money.
And the result of this money is…….. that we’re still stuck with a bloated train wreck that has a lot of obsolete code and security issues.
Some GNU/Linux distros tried switching to LibreSSL, but that turned out to be an even bigger disaster in some ways because the OpenBSD people consider the Apache 2 license to be “non-Free” because it doesn’t allow patent trolls to give you a program and then sue you for using it, and since OpenSSL is now under that license, it means they can’t just pull code from it, and pretty much all hope of remaining API/ABI compatible or something close to it went out the window.
“Still, just one of the many lingering security problems regarding Triple DES is that the Windows 10 and now, “11” operating systems continue to use it despite it being known for years to be bugdoored by NSA and vulnerable to known attacks and providing weak security, if you use the built-in implementation of IKEv2 to connect to a virtual private network.”And although OpenSSL is a crucial component of every Windows OS out there, anything that goes wrong with it is a “Linux bug” in the media. That’s not an accident. It’s a deliberate red herring.
Still, just one of the many lingering security problems regarding Triple DES is that the Windows 10 and now, “11” operating systems continue to use it despite it being known for years to be bugdoored by NSA and vulnerable to known attacks and providing weak security, if you use the built-in implementation of IKEv2 to connect to a virtual private network. This is one reason why no decent VPN company will touch Windows’ included VPN services and usually bundle OpenVPN or, now, Wireguard.
Microsoft is still out there pretending to give a shit about security, when this is happening. Windows “11” has been a complete disaster of performance-killing bugs, especially for gamers and people who use the AMD Ryzen CPU platform, and that’s assuming folks can even get it to install in the first place.
Internally, Windows rots away and continues its ride into the sunset as a legacy platform, which oddly can now be used by only 15-20% of all PCs out there. Meaning, there’s never been a better time to get away from it.
Yes, that’s right, while the overwhelming majority of PCs out there can install GNU/Linux distributions, Microsoft has deliberately made most of them “incompatible” with a blacklist, or slowed them down with “bugs” so that users go “Welp, time to buy new stuff again!”.
“Microsoft usually sabotages their older products so that people holding out on them or trying to use them on newer computers to forestall having to deal with the latest bloat, bugs, backdoors, and other bullshit give up and throw in the towel.”There’s about to be a fire sale of cheap used computers that will run GNU/Linux fine. Many people fall for this old chestnut every few years and never learn.
Microsoft usually sabotages their older products so that people holding out on them or trying to use them on newer computers to forestall having to deal with the latest bloat, bugs, backdoors, and other bullshit give up and throw in the towel.
They talk about “new silicon” (CPUs) “being designed” for their latest OS, but people were installing Windows 7 on Skylake stuff that came with Windows 10, and the only thing that got in the way was Microsoft disabling Windows Update at a certain point if you did.
This goes way back, I’m told, to at least Windows 95.
Hey, Nathan Lineback would probably know. He was doing just about anything to keep Windows 95 trucking along, including figuring out how to use USB thumb drives on it and getting Seamonkey 2.0 to work. Which is oddly dedicated to a Microsoft OS from decades past (for a guy who otherwise seems to hate everything they’ve done), but oh well.
They are easily one of the most dishonest and disreputable companies on the planet. Why, oh why, do people insist on using this? █
ᶃ Gemini Space
This post is also available in 
Content is available under CC-BY-SA