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Comment by boricj | Hacker News Reader

If modern encryption is that big of a performance drag, would using a proxy that deals with the encryption sidestep that issue?

With hardware that old and power-hungry, I'd expect a proxy hosted on a modern single-board computer in the local network to be essentially a rounding error on the electricity bill in comparison.

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That would kinda kill the last hope of using one as a portable device. You'd either be chained to your home network, or have an extremely inconvenient dongle hanging from the side. (Unless you'd do the TLS termination e.g. on your phone.)

But that gave me some ideas. While the G4 PowerBooks are recent enough to be officially blessed with WiFi capability (via PCMCIA), Macs that are even older have to resort to community-made devices, such as BlueSCSI[1]. Perhaps it would be feasible to cram an SBC with on-board Wifi/BT into a PCMCIA form factor, and - in addition to providing physical network connectivity - use it for TLS?

[1]: https://jcs.org/bluescsi

This sounds like something an ESP32 or other wireless-capable microcontroller could do. It would probably be easier to fit a system-on-module than an off-the-shelf single board computer in a crammed space.

The proxy can also be hosted on a cheap virtual machine somewhere.

Personally I have a small proxy that convert HTTPS and Gemini to HTTP/0.9 with an option to use a readability library to keep only the content of the articles I'm browsing and not show anything else.

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