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I often work in the terminal - for example on a VPS I've set up - including for browsing with links and lynx. Unfortunately I've been getting some errors:

links:

Error loading https://www.thepiratebay.se/: 
SSL error

lynx:

Looking up www.thepiratebay.se first
Looking up www.thepiratebay.se
Making HTTP connection to www.thepiratebay.se
Sending HTTP request.
HTTP request sent; waiting for response.
HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
'A'lways allowing from domain '.thepiratebay.se'.
Data transfer complete
HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Using https://www.thepiratebay.se/
Looking up www.thepiratebay.se
Making HTTPS connection to www.thepiratebay.se
Retrying connection without TLS.
Looking up www.thepiratebay.se
Making HTTPS connection to www.thepiratebay.se
Alert!: Unable to make secure connection to remote host.

lynx: Can't access startfile http://www.thepiratebay.se/

Disclaimer: ThePirateBay is of course just an example - taken completely out of the air... and besides, if I actually used the site, it would only be to read all the in-depth articles...

I've come across the same problem for some other sites too, and I suspect it may have something to do with them using CloudFlare (I'm not sure though)...

firefox and chrome have no SSL/TLS problems with the same sites.

I'm running an current updated Ubuntu 14.04.4 x64 on DigitalOcean.

Edit: Versions:

Lynx:

Lynx Version 2.8.8pre.4 (04 Feb 2014)
libwww-FM 2.14, SSL-MM 1.4.1, GNUTLS 2.12.23, ncurses 5.9.20140118(wide)
Built on linux-gnu Feb  5 2014 17:12:49

Links:

Links 2.8

Baard Kopperud
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1 Answers1

4

First lynx:
According to the report by SSLLabs the server supports only ECDHE ciphers. Based on a packet capture when using lynx in 14.04 it offers no ECDHE ciphers. This means no cipher overlap and thus the handshake fails.

And links:
According to the SSLLabs report the site needs a client with support for SNI. links got SNI support with version 2.10 but you are using 2.8 only. Therefore the handshake will fail.

Steffen Ullrich
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