False alert for “the global Internet blackout”
France is afraid! September 30, the end of the world will strike our latitudes and the country will be plunged into a post apocalyptic world in which the Internet will have disappeared. In question ? An update that will destroy the ecosystem and possibly trigger a world war and the automatic launch of nuclear warheads. Well, we add a little more, but even if it means making crates for not much like other notorious alarmists do, you might as well go all out!
We reassure you right away before you order a nuclear shelter on AliExpress (or a survival kit at Banggood): none of this is true!
Reminder defeated
Even stronger than the bug of the year 2020, prepare to face the apocalypse of September 30. The whistleblower is named Scott Helme. This computer security researcher has indeed read on his blog that he had discovered that the root certificate IdentTrust DST Root CA X3 was going to expire that day. So under that obscure and barbaric name that sounds like a droid name from Star wars hides an electronic document that Let’s encrypt used to increase the level of security on the web. The company uses it in its activity to verify that of the sites on which you visit. This allows to find out if the site is what it claims to be and check the reliability of the connection. Because of this, when you visit a web page, you know that your data will not be intercepted on the way to it. Let’s encrypt being free and fairly easy to use, it is more than 2 billion certificates that have been issued worldwide since its creation in 2014.
📲 Is my smartphone likely to be deprived of internet connection from this Thursday?
BFMTV answers your questions pic.twitter.com/mydwpGI6te
– BFMTV (@BFMTV) September 28, 2021
What consequence for the world as we know it today? It can simply make it impossible for connected devices to access certain sites which may then share an error message with you. What to trigger Ragnarök on the surface of the Earth as we are suggested? For the media adept at cookie-cutter ads, yes. In fact, not really.
The reality less important than the improbable
First of all, and for the sake of consistency, we can only agree with Scotte Helme’s announcement. Yes, the expiration of this certificate will create problems on connected devices. But the probability that these devices still exist in 2021 is as high as that of encountering Scarlett Johansson wearing a sombrero in Le Havre in a kebab. For your phone / tablet / computer to have a problem on September 30th, it would have to be at least 10 years old and never been updated. The announcement of millions of smartphones in the harbor as of tomorrow is therefore a bit exaggerated. That’s all the same the list of operating systems that might have problems :
- Windows XP Service Pack 3 or lower
- iOS 10 or lower
- macOS 10.12.1 or lower
- Android 2.3.6 or lower
- Mozilla Firefox 50 or lower
- Amazon FireOS (Silk browser)
- Ubuntu 16.04 or lower
- Debian 8 or lower
- Java 8 8u141 or lower
- Java 7 7u151 or lower
- OpenSSL 1.0.2 or lower
- NSS 3.26 or lower
Looking closely at each name on this list, we see that they all do almost part of a world that no longer exists and that the millions of damaged devices that are announced to us tomorrow will surely be only a few thousand. In addition, for many, it will suffice to use Firefox to work around the problem. What problem again? Faced with the almost zero scale of its resonance, we even end up wondering if it ever existed.
