● 05.18.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Gemini Links 18/05/2023: Distributed Sites Over Git

Posted in News Roundup at 7:08 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal

• In 1977 came Star Wars, the movie. In the UK, the BBC created a television show in response: Blake’s 7.

• Imagine what would happen if you took the basic theme of Star Wars—an extremely successful evil galactic empire, and the rebels fighing it—and rewrote it as a serial with one rule: be realistic.

• If there is an extremely succesful evil galactic empire, then it holds all the cards; and the ones fighting it are eternally desperate and probably not too happy most of the time. Losses are frequent; victories are rare and probably insignificant.

Technical

• Vapad is a little text editor that I started a year ago (or thereabouts) just in order to try out programming in Vala. It’s intentionally a pretty simple little editor, but exposes a lot of the underlying functionality that you get for free just by including GtkSourceView such as syntax highlighting, smart indentation, and even vi mode. Being a Gtk+ app it’s most useful on Linux or BSD.

• Sometimes one might see worries about the “Intel Management Engine” (or the AMD equivalent) which if exploited would give an attacker a flawless victory, sub-zero wins! Given various CVE and TLA some of these fears may have merit. However, these same ME-fearing folks may fire up a “heavyweight champion” web browser without thought, even though that browser has much higher odds of having multiple exploits, and is much more likely to access such exploits from the cornucopia of content in a modern web request. Get over here, geese, it’s horn o’ plenty time!

• This is the tenth in a planned series of posts (well, eleventh if you count the announcement) where I’ll share my experience writing smolver, my Gemini server software, written in Swift.

• You can find the previous iterations below.

Internet/Gemini

• Hey bartender! Looks like the green padlock on the door is damaged. Could you check please? It says “S S L” on the lock. Sounds like a trustworthy brand. Hope you fix it soon!

• It seems my previous post wasn’t as poorly received as I thought it would be (at least yet ^^), which is great and show the open mind of most geminauts. I’ve read a lot of different reactions to it, on the fediverse, via email, on other gemlog or on bubble itself, as there is a [dedicated page about it] in the discuss subspace!

• Hi everyone! I’m Degauss, pleased to meet you! This is my first log entry in The Oldest gwit Site, where I’ll write about gwit to document it, spur conversations on its evolution, and help others adopt it.

• But what’s gwit? In summary, gwit is an effort to create a distributed and future-proof digital publishing system as simple, lightweight and human-friendly as possible. It can host your current static Gemini or Web site, too. And it needs your help.

• Another day, another reminder of thieving others.

• (Thought about another way, though, that’s irrelevant except in an ego-centric view/context wherein some mind-made “I” is troubled/inconvenienced by such.)

• But that’s not always true. There are some standouts that break away from that mold. The main being “Welcome to the N.H.K”. This contains elements of slice of life, comedy, and romance. But its first and foremost a drama about anxiety, depression, and self loathing. It is honestly my favorite anime series. I watched it shortly after release and it just stuck with me – as a depressed high-schooler. Rereading the light novel in 2023 casts a slightly new light on it, as one character gives off major incel vibes… it makes the story even more tragic… knowing that this epidemic has only gotten worse since the mid 2000s.

• My hoping to automate uploading a new gemini post file and index.gmi file, and then re-point Antenna to that updated index.gmi file led me back to the horrific nightmare also known as security.

• The system I host my gemini capsule on seemingly doesn’t like scp, giving me the impression I’m apparently stuck with sftp, which to automate seems to require the ‘-b’ flag pointing to a batchfile. But -b overrides there being any means to specify a password, apparently leading to needing to investigate ssh-keygen and get key files in the right places. I think I’ve been there before, and all that’s coming to mind are vague memories of a bad taste in my mouth, giving me the feeling I’ll have to pour gobs of time down the drain to make such work again – no doubt getting locked out of my account while not getting it right too many times along the way.

• Then again, maybe I’m just a big, whiny hypocrite for supporting higher barriers to entry with respect to cross-posting links, yet pissing and moaning over having to dick with ssh keys to automate file uploads?

• One of my favorite “Capsuler” in the Geminispace has raised personal worries about a current polarization trend of the Geminispace into few centralized spaces such as, for instance, “Antenna” and the brand-new Skyjake — for the record Lagrange’s creator — project: Bubble; which really pushes the Geminispace a in total different level (although I haven’t check that out personally).

• If I was totally unaware about the history or the development of Gemini I would totally agreed that centralization is bad, always! To reiterate the concept centralization is what makes the WWW ugly, for instance the ActivityPub protocol is under attack due the centralization push that is leveraging the (biggest) instance of Mastodon.social.

Share in other sites/networks: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. Permalink  Send this to a friend

----------

➮ Sharing is caring. Content is available under CC-BY-SA.