Gemini Articles of Interest

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Sep 15, 2023

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

• Technology and Free Software

  • Stirring and shaking may be boring, but the future this brings will effect you in the future

    The whole STIR (Secure Telephony Identity Revisited)/SHAKEN (Signature-based Handling of Asserted information using toKENs) thing first crossed my path a few years ago at The Enterprise. At the time, I wasn't sure what the difficulty was in stopping spam/robo calls and that the Oligarchic Cell Phone Companies were complicit with said calls because it made them money. The actual story, covered in the above article, is much more complicated and nuanced than my own cynical take on it (worth reading, even if it's a bit long). By the time I left The Enterprise [2], we were starting to support it with our offering (which was “Caller Name ID”—that is, given a phone number, map that back to a name), along with a process that was attempting to classify the originating side of the call as legit or not if the call wasn't attested (that was being done at another department within The Enterprise). If you use a certain Oligarchic Cell Phone Company, and see the name “Potential SPAM” as the caller name, you were using code I worked on.

  • GPG WKD

    I know that for Proton Mail users, you can just gpg --locate-keys their address and you’ll get their keys.

    I wanted to set up something similar for my own email and it was a headache and a half. This is more of a li’l diary entry and causerie than reliable and complete documentation.

  • re: Are You a Terminal Emulator Hipster?

    I stopped using Gnome Terminal when I stopped using Gnome. It's a fine terminal, but it requires a ton of library packages that you don't need unless you're already running gnome. I think I might have had some problems with fonts as well, but it's so long ago that I doubt that would still be an issue.

    I switched to Konsole for a while, which suffers a similar problem wrt required packages, but not to the same degree. It's also lighter in resource usage, iirc.

  • Thus spake the master programmer: “time for you to leave.”

    Read enough of my posts over the past year or so, and it's clear that I am not happy working at The Enterprise. The process über alles, the overly managed and useless laptops, the bad communication (which I don't think I've mentioned, but man, I didn't expect the telephone game [1] to be an actual strategy of a company), the so called “agile development” that is anything but agile [2], the twice daily scrum meetings (because my manager wanted his own scrum meeting with *just the team* with no other departments involved—that's the *other* daily scrum meeting), and the testing.

  • in my usual terminal

    syncterm works nicely for getting cp437 art to show up nicely when I telnet into somewhere, but I miss being able to click on links.

    so I decided to make cp437 telnet work in the version of urxvt I have. Preferably without writing my own programs or patching. I've ended up with a short shell script to hold all the parts together, and a few symlinks and Xresources, and a config file.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • What Crap is This and Why Did We Let it Infect Gemini?

      I recently changed the certificate for AuraGem because it wasn't being validated properly in some Gemini browsers.

      I found the culprit. I put auragem.letz.dev in the Common Name (CN), since it's the common address for the capsule, and I put the alternative domains in the Subject *Alternative* Name (SAN) field. Should be fine, right?

      NOPE! It *was* fine before 2011, but apparently in 2011, RFC 6125 was published which includes Section 6.4.4 which basically states that if a SAN exists, the CN MUST NOT be checked. When that was published, every website that had its cert with the main domain in the CN but not the SAN became invalid as soon as this RFC recommendation was implemented into browsers. This also applies to CAs and HTTP over TLS specs as well.

    • RE: On using Pinyin

      I came across two articles on Gemini, discussing what would happen if Chinese switched to using pinyin instead of characters. I want to share my thoughgts as a native speaker.

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