Q&A on Non-Moderation Matters (Mechanics, How-To, etc.)

Ditto.
Calling @codinghorror or @orenwolf ?
Thanks.

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There’s not an easy way to do it, short of blocking all video autoplay in your browser. There are no specific settings you can set on the air dot tv page, and since those videos are served as an iframe embed, there’s no way for boingboing pages to alter the script because of the browser site sandbox principle.

Anyway, here’s your instructions, via The Verge:

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And @Jesse13927 - I’m pretty sure it’s 10 minutes now.
Signed,
A chronic copy editor of my posts.

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@orenwolf Is there some sort of major SSL problem today? It started with Discourse but I;m now finding it all over the place - i.e. not just BB.

Using Brave Browser (but same on Safari) on Mac I get either site fails to load or site not safe (SSL error) on all comments pages. Also happening on other websites, though.

Turned my date/time settings back 24 hours to 29 Sept, and all works again. Did many SSLs just expire somewhere?

Anyone else having such problems?

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Not that I am aware of. Does it happen with other browsers? Maybe a Brave thing?

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No - as stated, same on Safari. And on 2 different Macbooks, with both browsers.
All only work if clock turned back 24 hours. Maybe a UK provider problem. I guess I’ll have to wait and see…

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There was a potential chain certificate problem today with some letsencrypt certificates.

Can’t tell if that’s what you were seeing or not though.

ETA: more informative link:

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Thanks.

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It seems there is a Brave update dated 28/9 and this seems to work. Perhaps they had to do something related to the thing you linked to.

I’m on Safari 11.1.2 because I refuse to upgrade OS X beyond El Capitan. Have not yet found any Safari update, and maybe this ‘thing’ means Safari will no longer be a second option for me. Off to explore…

ETA Brave still saying some sites not private. Having posted above I had to reset clock to yesterday to add this ETA. Something kooky going on. I’m going to give up and come back later to see if things have changed.

And comments pages are loading with no images.

Thanks for the reply! I do have autoplay blocking enabled; the problem is after a video I’ve selected to watch is over the player will cycle through a number of other videos that are also embedded on BB.

Thanks!

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You have nine more minutes to add more glowing praise before the little pencil lights up :wink:

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This link is more specifically why Apple devices are having trouble:

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Or wait until someone else posts to add a reply extolling your splendiferousness!

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Thanks very much for that. This must be the source of my problems. I’ve read the stuff and am now going to embark on the perilous mission to fix it.

ETA Well that all went well, though the workaround is to change the defaults and “Always Trust” this certificate that expired yesterday. Probably not a perfectly healthy approach from a security perspective but short of finding out how to remove/replace/update a root certificate in the OS (I will be looking later - even though this is all Greek to me) this looks like the best I can get right now. If anyone else has a similar issue with El Capitan and cannot figure it out, PM me and I can point you to the steps to ‘fix’ it for yourself in the same way.

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@codinghorror

I use Brave Browser mostly but this whole root certificate expiring on 30 Sept problem (see the few posts above), to which I found a fix, had me also testing Safari.

Discourse is the only site I’ve come across, on Safari, which tells me this

As above, Mac OS X 10.11 (El Capitan), whose latest version of Safari is

Screen Shot 2021-10-01 at 13.24.06

…which I do not think I can update beyond unless I ditch El Capitan and upgrade the whole OS.

Why is Discourse objecting to this version of Safari?

ETA the presentation issue mostly seems to consist of not loading GIFs, but not being able to log in is more of a real problem

old-ass browsers don’t have support for things like CSS 3.x and often run a much older EMCAscript interpreter (JavaScript being the colloquial term) that lacks specific features used by newer dynamic sites. Background JavaScript worker threads being one of them.

Edit:
the last security update for El Cap was 2018. hope you’re running a modern browser that gets weekly patches because wewlad, old safari has more holes than my dad’s socks

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As I said previously, I use Brave Browser.

Safari is a rarely used backup (mostly to check sites if they do not work on Brave). But the root certificate palaver discussed above made me check Safari and so this came to light. Discourse is the only site I regularly use that gives this warning.

That basically just means other sites aren’t bothering to tell you that browser is too old, it’s just going to fail in weird and mysterious ways instead.

I wouldn’t worry too much about visiting known-trustworthy sites with it. If it was Windows I would warn you that you are one malicious ad away from your system being taken over, but in reality, the chance of that on MacOS is pretty low. Not zero though, so keep that in mind.

Your best course of action is to only use updated browsers exclusively.

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Sure … but, the failures on BBS/Discourse (no GIFs, cannot login - and I think that is fairly recent) are not reflected anywhere else I’ve been with Safari so far. Nice of Discourse to give me a message, but that’s presumably because it does not work with this version. Nobody else (so far) gives me a message, and so far nowhere else fails to work, either.

It’s not a big issue, but it does make me wonder why Discourse is, so far, the exception.