Re: [Lynx-dev] Cannot use duckduckgo suddenly

[Axel Beckert]

Hi,

On Wed, Dec 16, 2015 at 07:15:35PM -0600, Tim Chase wrote:
> > On 2015-12-16 23:39, Ian Collier wrote:
> > > doing it by hand works too:
> > > 
> > > $ (echo "GET / HTTP/1.1" ; echo "host: duckduckgo.com" ; echo )
> > > | nc duckduckgo.com 80 > test.html
> > 
> > But if you send HTTP/1.0 instead of 1.1 it closes the connection
> > without sending any data.
> 
> Just received confirmation from the DuckDuckGo folks that they
> dropped HTTP/1.0 support:
> 
> https://twitter.com/duckduckgo/status/677291463957422080
> 
> But really, HTTP/1.1 (AKA RFC-2068) became official in January of
> 1997, replacing the HTTP/1.0 standard (RFC-1945) that had only become
> the standard ~2 years prior.  According to [1], lynx supported
> HTTP/1.1 as of version 2.5 but according to [2] it wasn't supported
> as of 2005.  So nearly 20 years later, one might hope that lynx
> supported 1.1. :-(

Lynx already sends the Host header which is required for HTTP/1.1 (and
became a defacto must for HTTP/1.0 when virtual hosting came up like
15 years ago).

So the only thing missing to support a minimal HTTP/1.1 would be to
send a (hardcoded) "Connection: close" header to avoid running into a
persistent connection. AFAIK that should already suffice to get back
into the game.

Funnily I ran into a similar issue just very recently with Lynx, w3m
(also mentioned here as failing) and Xymon's xymonnet monitoring
client: If an Apache 2.4 used the ITK MPM and the client came over
HTTPS and didn't use/support persistent connections, the client just hung
because the server side behaved as if a persistent connection had been
requested: https://bugs.debian.org/798108

                Kind regards, Axel
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