Mathwiz

To clarify, FF does support the general.useragent.override pref. But Basilisk, PM, and Roytam's builds of those also support prefs of the format general.useragent.override.www.amazon.com ... so you don't need an add-on to send a different user agent string to www.amazon.com than to everyone else. That's what VistaLover was referring to as SSUAOs.

I've run into similar problems, and it's a PITA. It sounds like your emails (or at least some of them) were in two places: in the OE database on your XP machine, and also on the email server. If all your imported emails were duplicated, then I suppose you could just start over, not import them the second time, and just let them all download from the server. That's a particularly good approach if you're using IMAP, because it will only download the message headers; it won't download the body of an email unless you click on one to view it. Otherwise, the best thing would probably be to set OE not to retain emails on the server (Tools / Accounts / Properties / Advanced, then uncheck "Leave a copy of messages on server"). Then do a send/receive; be patient because it should send commands to the email server to delete everything, which will probably take a while. Then you can start over with Thunderbird, import everything, and they won't be on the server to download and duplicate everything. The drawback to this approach, of course, is that you won't have a copy of your emails on the server any more.

Slightly OT, but if you own Windows 7 Pro, you can download & install "Windows XP Mode" and use it to run those old programs in Windows XP on a virtual machine. Anyhow, on your old PC you'll probably need the POSReady hack to get your https: support up to speed. That should help with downloads.

This post is just to summarize what I learned from the very detailed and involved DRM discussion about 80 posts back, along with similar posts from other threads: The NPAPI version of Google's Widevine CDM plugin will run on Vista but not XP, so it's no help. Stephen Fox has a PPAPI version of Widevine that will run on XP, but you'll need Chrome, not FF or one of its variants, to run that. The Adobe Primetime CDM plugin will install and run on Basilisk 52 just as with FF 52 ESR (although you need to toggle media.ffvpx.enabled to false in about:config), but few providers of DRM-protected content will use it. (I suppose you could try anyway, by spoofing an older FF version with those sites.) One last possible fallback is Microsoft's Silverlight. But as with #2, you'd generally need to spoof an older FF version that didn't support Widevine, in order to get sites to try to use it. (With some sites, such as Amazon Prime, you also need to spoof Windows 7 in your user agent string.) Do I have that about right?

Kinda sounds like a bot to me

Thanks. Looks like it's basically bug fixes, so I went ahead and updated.

I believe the high-CPU issue with Windows Update was resolved recently. However, I'm pretty sure the fix was a POSReady update....

Version 1.6g is available from various download sites (MajorGeeks, CNet, etc.) but I can't find 2.0.49.0. Since it's a beta version, does it provide any functionality that would make it worth trying to track it down and update over version 1.6g?

It's probably a bigger deal for servers than for old client systems like 9x, ME, NT4, or 2000. In a typical home or small office environment, the only places I can imagine the packets coming from would be either a compromised router or a malware-infected PC on the network - and it seems to me the latter would be more interested in spreading itself to the other PCs than in merely shutting them down.

Could you describe the problem more precisely? If the problem is that you can't click "I am not a robot," this may help:

What does British Airways have against Firefox 57?

With Basilisk it's enough to set general.useragent.compatmode.firefox to false. WhatIsMyBrowser.com then detects Netscape Navigator 5, which it doesn't claim is out-of-date

They did; actually there are two: This one adds TLS 1.2 support to the base OS: ... and this one adds it to IE8: ... so if you install XP, upgrade to IE8 and Windows Installer 4.5, then enable, download, and install POSReady '09 updates, you may be able to activate online again. But since activating by phone is automated and known to work, that's the easiest way by far.

What goes wrong when you install Windows Installer 4.5? I bet if we can get that fixed, you'll be able to install most of the POSReady updates too. I hadn't heard of it causing problems for anyone, but there are so many machine configurations out there....

You need to leave Windows Installer 4.5 installed. It's needed for many POSReady updates and has been for some time, as documented at the main POSReady thread: Also, MS released a couple of "stinkers" that cause lots of problems:

It was a joke! I guess it got lost in translation; sorry.

Also, keep in mind Roytam's disclaimer about Basilisk 55 (Moebius): Basilisk 55 should nonetheless be reasonably secure. But for the (how does glnz put it) supercalifragilistic-XP-paranoid, Basilisk 52 & NM 28 are probably the safest of Roytam's offerings.

That is true, and I mentioned that at the time. But decrypted data never appears anywhere on the network; only within buffers on the PC running HTTPSProxy. Data to/from localhost isn't sent out the Ethernet port; it never leaves the PC. A script injection attack wouldn't work either, because neither server listens on any external network address. So from outside the PC (say, a compromised router), it's impossible to tell HTTPSProxy is even running. So an attacker would need to get malware onto your PC to exploit this "vulnerability." But if an attacker has managed to do that, they could more easily read decrypted data directly from your screen or keyboard! So unless you think Heinoganda has secretly installed malware in his updates, you really don't have much reason to worry.

That's right. A little history: I originally found ProxHTTPSProxy on a forum for the Proxomitron (a local proxy for filtering ads). There was a need to break https: internally on the user's PC so Proxomitron could do its ad-filtering thing on secure Web sites, and then to re-create https: security so it would all be transparent to the Web browser. I realized we could use it even if Proxomitron wasn't involved, in order to use newer https: protocols, ciphers, etc. with older browsers that have outdated security. Then Heinoganda took it over and has kept it up-to-date as OpenSSL (which it's based on) has evolved.

I agree. There are folks who are at least somewhat technically inclined, but who set up systems for others who are not as technically inclined (like their parents, perhaps). An auto-updater would avoid weekly trips, or signing in via Remote Desktop. In theory it should be simple: check o.rthost.cf for the latest build of whatever browser you're using; if newer than current build, download the newer version and schedule a delete of the old directory and rename of the new one when the browser isn't in use (on the next reboot, perhaps). You could even keep an old version or two around in case the newest version has problems.

Huh? It's a local proxy; the "server" is your own PC! I presume you own it, or at least control it....

+1. I see no reason to abandon XP just because updates stop. I didn't abandon XP when they stopped the first time (and I didn't know about POSReady '09)!

That could be it! I have my user agent overridden to NT6.1 specifically to avoid issues like these.

The click works fine in Roytam's Basilisk (Serpent) XP build, so it's curious that it doesn't work in New Moon 28.

I believe the problem is Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC), not SHA2. As you know, the latest Crypt32.dll/SChannel.dll updates support SHA2, AES, and even TLS 1.2. But they still rely on the traditional RSA public-key algorithm to turn SHA2 hashes into digital signatures, and many new certificates use the ECC algorithm instead.