YHK - yet another hacker news clone

OpenSSL 4.1.0

130 points petecooper 3 hours ago 32 comments

Razengan 2 hours ago | parent

> Dropped Windows-on-Itanium

A sad day. End of an era *salute*

ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 2 hours ago | parent

seems like a versioning-induced death

i think a project like this would slough old architecture like mad and let major versions tick, but they forge on...

literalAardvark 1 hour ago | parent

MS ended paid extended support for Itanium, so it's kind of a dead target

madduci 29 minutes ago | parent

Microsoft pulled the plug earlier

haunter 2 hours ago | parent

> Dropped Windows-on-Itanium (VC-WIN64I) and Windows CE (VC-CE) targets from Configurations.

What a throwback. afaik Windows Server 2008 R2 had Itanium updates until 2020 and paid support until this year. Pretty good run to say at least

mrweasel 2 hours ago | parent

Make you wonder what they've been testing this on. Even NetBSD doesn't have a recent release for Itanium. Crazy that you can run NetBSD 11.0 on HPPA, but not Itanium, given that HPPA is in some sense the pre-cursor to Itanium.

p_l 2 hours ago | parent

Honestly more HPPA gear to test against than Itanium

mondainx 2 hours ago | parent

More than likely in "government"; they are always behind and keeping legacy stuff around. I found Windows 1.0 floppies in a drawer, back-in-the-day.

mixdup 1 hour ago | parent

Age is probably less relevant than current installed base/active users

nirui 1 hour ago | parent

I kinda wonder what if Microsoft (or any major software company) would give their engineers a few decades of time just to refactor their existing systems, opposite of piling on new features. Will it result a much cleaner code, better architect, and stable product?

The last Windows I daily use was Windows 7 Home (same era with Windows Server 2008). The newer ones don't really improved much featurely from my (user) point of view, and from what I've heard, it's getting more sloppyer every newer version.

zbentley 1 hour ago | parent

> what if Microsoft would give their engineers a few decades of time just to refactor their existing systems

They wouldn't, even if they didn't care about shipping new features. The technical complexity inside Windows/Office/old core MS offerings arises only in small part from ordinary tech debt--that is, things fixable without changing observable behavior. The lion's share of that complexity is because of Microsoft's priority to avoid breaking compatibility (backwards, or with hardware/software combos that work) at all costs.

That means that a refactor-only decade would achieve little unless that compatibility priority were changed.

egorfine 1 hour ago | parent

This will NOT please the shareholders. And that's all that matters.

CodesInChaos 27 minutes ago | parent

It's just as likely it would end up as an overengineered mess. And that's without considering backwards compatibility constraints, which are one of the biggest maintenance burdens.

0c3ca83 38 minutes ago | parent

Glad they kept big endian x86_64, at least.

https://github.com/openssl/openssl/blob/c69b5af10a754051274e...

fweimer 5 minutes ago | parent

Not sure if the Stratus reference is correct. Big-endian x86-64 is a real thing on HPE NonStop:

“ The executable format that works on HPE Nonstop Compute's OSS is ELF64-bit, Big_Endian, X86_64. ”

https://inbox.sourceware.org/gcc-help/AM7PR02MB6483A12F6B98D...

hannob 2 hours ago | parent

I don't see "we fixed some of the the excessive performance regressions that we introduced in 3.0". Unfortunate...

Context: https://cryptography.io/en/latest/statements/state-of-openss...

ahartmetz 1 hour ago | parent

>We do not fully understand the motivations that led to the public APIs and internal complexity we’ve described here. We’ve done our best to reverse engineer them by asking “what would motivate someone to do this” and often we’ve found ourselves coming up short.

Surely they thought of it but didn't say it out loud... to keep it exploitable, maybe?

woodruffw 9 minutes ago | parent

No, that's not what's being implied. They're just saying they don't understand why OpenSSL has added so many indirections to otherwise straightforward operations.

Source: I am friends with the maintainers who wrote this and was one of the people who reviewed it in draft form.

chemodax 44 minutes ago | parent

AWS-Lc looks very promising replacement for OpenSSL these days.

Bender 10 minutes ago | parent

I looked into this and was tempted as there is less read locking and better RNG performance but they stripped the SSL_get1_curves() API which I depend on for bot detection plus I would have to recompile nginx and all its modules everywhere so in the end it was not tempting enough for me. Perhaps I am just lazier in my older age.

snvzz 2 hours ago | parent

Mandatory reminder libressl[0] exists.

0. https://www.libressl.org/

madduci 29 minutes ago | parent

Do you know of TLS 1.3 has been added?

snvzz 17 minutes ago | parent

Was in 2020.

amelius 1 hour ago | parent

Was it verified by AI?

(Not a strange question given the recent PHP vulns found by AI.)

adzm 36 minutes ago | parent

I think this is the only software project I use that still requires me to have perl

owenthejumper 35 minutes ago | parent

I think it's too little too late, people have started moving on https://www.haproxy.com/blog/state-of-ssl-stacks

ashkankiani 18 minutes ago | parent

tangential, but I've always wondered what the point of these random pictures of a lock, gears, or unrelated little voxel art are for? Pre-LLMs, they were often hit or miss in terms of how much they added depending on if they were a random stock image or something someone drew.

But now, with LLMs, they're more available to customize, and it seems like people aren't actually thinking anymore about why they should be there. I think I'm implicitly biasing against the rest of the content in articles which have them as a result, since it's probably a sign of some level of lack of care/thought.

grenoire 15 minutes ago | parent

SEO-maxxing.

ksec 35 minutes ago | parent

I wonder what is the current marketshare of Libressl and OpenSSL ?

aftbit 29 minutes ago | parent

Wait, OpenSSL didn't support GREASE until now? The RFC standard landed 6 years ago...

I've been linking a lot of stuff against boringssl during that time, I suppose...

markasoftware 14 minutes ago | parent

Interesting they're adding new support for DTLS 1.3 when afaict most new applications are defaulting to QUIC datagram mode. I have something built around DTLS 1.3 and am using wolfssl for that reason, will have to check this out.