Gemini Articles of Interest

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jun 30, 2023

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

• Technology and Free Software

  • Re: What dystopia?

    I used to feel the same way in the middle of the 00s. The “downhill battle” era. The “year of the Linux desktop”. Fewer and fewer .doc and .swf files littering our drives.

    Anything they would write, we in the FOSS world could clone better; and we also had our own ideas and our own apps which were pure fire magic. Compilers, wikis, milters, httpd, rsync, blender, gigs of .oggs—we had it all.

    [...]

    Also a lot of the ills that are plaguing us are social ills (we’re not yet particularly well adapted as a species to the idea of social networks), or environmental disasters (we can maybe solve the network externality but the fossil fuel externality is a harder nut to crack).

  • I Need Your Opinion

    Whether this will be accepted into the game or not depends on what people think of it. The thing is that most of the opinions received so far are "I don't like that exclusive transport rights exist at all and always disable them in the settings."

    While being a perfectly valid preference it doesn't really have anything to do with the proposed change.

  • fingerprinting people on IRC with no privileges

    TL;DR If you want to join an IRC server anonymously, your best bet is to use an e.g. Tails VM. Conventional IRC clients allow correlating seemingly isolated connections to different servers.

    Let me clarify the threat model. Let's say I'm "dzwdz" on one server, and "notdzwdz" on another. I'm using a single client for both, but "notdzwdz" is proxied through Tor, has distinct default nicknames/quit messages/etc, all the obvious privacy leaks are taken care of. I don't want anyone to be able to tell that I'm behind both those identities.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • yet more TOFU ruminations

      In SSH only the fingerprint (of a key type) is available when a host key changes; Gemini instead offers a whole X.509 certificate, for better or worse. The worse involves the complexity of X.509, even the limited modern version, and the too many security vulnerabilities thereof. The better is the metadata, which could be logged, or one might store the whole certificate so that future comparisons can look at whatever fields they want (subject, issuer, etc). Oh no, the disk space usage of unscalable certificate stores!

  • Programming

    • Software? That someone else wrote?

      I was reading a new post by a new user Sugar trying to negotiate Jekyll and settling on Agate for the Gemini side at least!

      This makes me laugh a little at myself for how hard I make own life. If it's writable by myself, why wouldn't I?

      There are many great FOSS solutions to my problems but if I think a few bash scripts and at worst a lil bit of python or something can solve it then why not.

      Why am I like this? I know in some part because it's fun. Making little tools is my wheelhouse, my bread and butter. Part of me just knows the command line can do everything I need for this task so why would I introduce some complex thing when my shell script can call a series of complex things to do it!

    • Unveiling `guprecords.raku`: Global Uptime Records with Raku

      For fun, I am tracking the uptime of various personal machines (servers, laptops, workstations...). I have been doing this for over ten years now, so I have a lot of statistics collected.

      As a result of this, I am introducing `guprecords.raku`, a handy Raku script that helps me combine uptime statistics from multiple servers into one comprehensive report. In this blog post, I'll explore what Guprecords is and some examples of its application. I will also add some notes on Raku.

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