Gemini Articles of Interest

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Oct 02, 2022

A Gemini client^* is needed for the following links.

• plass(1) first public release

  Many many moons ago, so many that I don’t remember the details, I was trying to hack something with pass(1) and got really fed up with it. It was my second password manager, with keepassxc being the first, and I really loved the idea behind it but I started to hate the interface.

  I remember that I found the output of the various pass commands difficoult to parse programmatically; having to bypass it (for example by means of find(1) seems wrong.) When I’m using a CLI tool, I want a good output I can further hack on.

  [...]

  I remember that I found the output of the various pass commands difficoult to parse programmatically; having to bypass it (for example by means of find(1) seems wrong.) When I’m using a CLI tool, I want a good output I can further hack on.

  For those who don’t know, pass(1) is a simple password manager. It stores passwords in a directory tree rooted at ‘~/.password-store’ where the passwords are files encrypted with GPG. How to organize things is up to you; for example if I have to save the password for the website ‘example.com’ where my username is ‘foo’ I’d probably persist it as ‘www/example.com/foo’.

  So, dirven by my scriptability problem (and also the fact that I wanted to use got(1) instead of git(1)) I wrote mine. The name? It’s a “perl pass”, so “plass”! (God, I’m awful at picking names...)

• Decentralized Gemini

  I love decentralization: the freedom for individuals to establish a presence in a society, online or in the real world, on equal terms with everyone else, and to not be beholden to large corporations or government entities to provide a place and a space for them. It's one of the things I loved about the early days of the Internet, and it's one of the things I currently love about Gemini so much. To that end, I always want to encourage the adoption of decentralized tools as much as I can, from Mastodon to PeerTube to Tox, and even self-hosting on Gemini.

  [...]

  The biggest problem with reversing this trend is that most people don't care about it. They say they're worried about privacy invasions and aren't comfortable with government surveillance, but they don't take any active steps to mitigate it. Why?

  [...]

  One is the convenience of centralization: any content you could ever want to find is on YouTube, Amazon, Google, Reddit, and all the rest. One no longer has to keep a lost of bookmarks, as was so common twenty years ago; one of my friends recently commented that he hasn't used bookmarks outside of a work context in over a decade. Now, simply go to one page, type in what you want, and voilà! Everything is one click or tap away.

  [...]

  In fairness, some security know-how is required to self-host Internet services safely. Most people don't understand what it takes, and most people don't care. But that apathy is a killer to decentralized projects in the long run.

  [...]

  The problem with an approach like this is that it would require so many additions and extensions to a Gemini client that it would essentially no longer be running the Gemini protocol. Certainly a viable decentralized network could be built this way, but other tools already operate under this paradigm far more effectively, and they don't use Gemini either.

• Extending fail2ban on NixOS

  Fail2ban is a wonderful piece of software, it can analyze logs from daemons and ban them in the firewall. It's triggered by certain conditions like a single IP found in too many lines matching a pattern (such as a login failure) under a certain time.

  What's even cooler is that writing new filters is super easy! In this text, I'll share how to write new filters for NixOS.

^* Gemini links can be opened using Gemini software. It’s like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.