XPost: microsoft.public.windowsxp.general   
   From: mayayana@invalid.nospam   
      
   "Steve Hayes"  wrote   
      
   | But sometimes it will not let me override it, and the site itself   
   | blocked me. I informed the owner of the site, swho suggested that I   
   | try this Windows patch, so I asked if anyone else had tried it.   
      
     I think that's a red herring. Your Firefox supports TLS 1.2.   
   If you're getting an https connection then it's working. I'm   
   surprised that you do as well as you do. I use Firefox and   
   Pale Moon, but I also generally disable script and have other   
   privacy controls in place. A growing number of sites won't   
   work for me, even if I enable script. The only thing close to   
   social media that I use is Reddit. That works for me, but only   
   the old version that they've been nice enough to leave up.   
   My own doctor's website is completely broken no matter   
   what I do. I have to use Win7 or 10. It's using some kind   
   of script or JSON code that older browsers don't recognize.   
      
     Most of the problem seems to be "cutting edge" pages,   
   composed almost entirely of script, created by automated   
   software. There's no one minding the store. They just get   
   software to write their webpages and if it malfunctions they'll   
   often tell people to "update your Chrome". That's the other   
   big problem. Chrome is becoming the default, and I suspect   
   Google tries to make it unique, just as MS did with IE, 20   
   years ago. So much of geekdom are now servants of Google,   
   living in the Googleverse, and very few actually know how to   
   write webpage code. Take a look at the source code. It's a   
   bloated mess, spat out by server-side software on-call.   
      
     I often can't go to Home Depot or Lowes at all. But the   
   symptom is interesting. If I try in Pale Moon, which has better   
   privacy and a Secret Agent extension, I get a denial   
   webpage. "You don't have permission..." If I try in Firefox   
   it works, though the page is mostly useless.   
      
      Increasingly, there's privacy evasion designed into pages.   
   Many pages now are designed to break if you're not loading their   
   ads and allowing spying. Many are actually putting the entire   
   HTML into script variables, so there's no page until you run the   
   script! Or they use CSS to hide the page and then script is needed   
   to unhide it... The commercial aspect has taken over.   
      
     I've got a Win7 box and a Win10 laptop, with less privacy and   
   security, that I use now if I have to access the newer webpages.   
      
    | That   
   | registry patch thing looks scary to me.   
   |   
      
     Nothing scary. It just tells updaters that you're running embedded   
   XP, so that you can get the patches. And it officially records the   
   supported level of TLS to allow TLS 1.1 and 1.2. But that only applies   
   to Windows itself and MS software.   
      
      As I mentioned, I updated my XP and Win7 computers   
   to support TLS 1.2, but that's only because I'm using winhttp.dll in   
   my own software. Winhttp.dll is a Windows library for simplified   
   downloading of files. If you make the change it might make some   
   MS software more secure, but it won't help with your browsers.   
   Though Maxthon is partly IE, right? It could possibly improve   
   IE security, but I'm not sure about that.   
      
   | if it hits sites with   
   | security certificate problems, it tells me that Avast has blocked   
   | access to those sites, and there's no override for that, as there is   
   | for Firefox and Opera.   
   |   
      
     That's a whole other can of worms. I haven't used AV software   
   for 20+ years, but I know it's gotten increasingly intrusive. That's   
   always something to consider when you have problems.   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)