It means you should not use it for anything important, because it can be decrypted by the public with little effort. If you look back, it has been this way for quite awhile. My gripe is with the clickbait title 'Break Me If You Can'

https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/cve-2016-2183

Surely someone who has been here as long as you have understands that this type of behavior is not compatible with the guidelines.

> Converse curiously; don't cross-examine.

You could have just corrected them and not goaded them into further revealing their ignorance. Yes, they underestimated how difficult it is to crack 3DES. You could have simply told them that.

if i were to guess, they are referring to CVE-2016-2183, which lead to deprecation of 3DES by NIST in 2019 (announced in 2017) and disallowing all uses in 2023. openssl also stopped including it in default builds starting in 2016 because it is considered weak.