Cell Phone Shopping And The Tale Of The Really Old Javascript

Sean — Mon, 27 Aug 2007 21:23:00 +0200

Every so often, a friend of mine asks me why I don’t have a cell phone. I usually tell them how most cell phones cause feedback with my implant, either when I try to talk at them (feedback with the headset), or when placed near the processor (rare, but it recently happened with a Blackberry. Funnily enough, I could make calls with the Blackberry) and then the conversation moves on. Recently, however, a friend of mine came up with a solution (of sorts). He asked why I didn’t just get a phone and a text message plan. Then it doesn’t matter if I can’t make a call, I can still text people on the go.

Armed with this idea, I started to look around a bit. Shopping around on Telus, I stumbled upon the following while trying to add a service to my package: http://www.mytelusmobility.com/sslerror.html

Wow, interesting reccomended browsers. IE4? Netscape 4? AOL 4? Also, consider that Opera has had 128 bit encryption support since 3.0 (which I believe was before the year 2000), and Telus isn’t recognizing it. I wonder just how Telus is deciding if a browser supports 128 bit encryption. Seems to be a Javascript function….. (http://www.telusmobility.com/js/webapps.js) Hmmm…. looking at mytm_crosslinks (which is the function being called) it seems to check SSL compatibility based on browser version. And completely ignoring anything not IE or Netscape.

Well, I guess at least they are descriminating against all alternative browsers equally… though I wonder why they decided to write their own browser checking function (complete with redundant checks) rather than…. use one of the wildly available ones. Actually, given that they reccomend IE/Netscape 4, I wonder just how old this function is anyway, and why they are still using it.

Crazy Or Genius?: Tag javascript

Cell Phone Shopping And The Tale Of The Really Old Javascript