Bonum Certa Men Certa

Gemini Links 24/08/2023: gmid 2.0 Alpha



  • Gemini* and Gopher

    • Personal/Opinions

      • Hey gopherites!

        Hey gopherites!

        Macro news:

        There were a couple of rain showers today. The air has cleared up from "smoking a whole pack of Export A cigarettes at once" to "1980s LA smog."

        Down in the Kelowna area, it sounds like just under 100 houses burned. They haven't announced how many burned in the North Shuswap. Needless to say, more rain would be great.

      • Rain

        So it rained last night. Hard. Twice.

        The smoke is almost gone. The rain washed almost all of the ash away. Hopefully this is the end of the fire season for us this year.

      • Dreams

        Thank you two gopher friends who wrote after my last diary entry. I missed pandemic conviviality. It was good to hear from you guys.

        Evy woke up last night gasping. In her dream we had to dump out some spoiled milk. To avoid being seen the three of us ducked in a cave and traversed it. When we emerged there were still people. We'd disposed of the milk, but we ducked back in, to exit by our original entrance. I jumped in the water. There was no bottom. Daughter and I were pulled down. Evy jumped in to rescue us, was also pulled down. Drowning in the dream she woke up gasping because her sinus infection migrated to her lungs.

      • WhatsApp, Restraint Orders, Matrix

        Because of a silent WhatsApp group protesters use to locate MK Simha Rothman, chairman of the Constitution Committee. wherever he goes and to protest there, Now Rothman tries to appeal to Jerusalem Magistrate Court in order to issue restraint orders against 400 protesters. In addition, he wants to shut down theie WhatsApp group.

      • The Cooperative Principle

        When talking, most people expect that the cooperative principle is in play.

        “If, for example, at a particular stage I need four screws, I expect you to hand me four, rather than two or six”, as Grice put it. But four is a subset of six so giving six screws is logically complying with the request, you might object. If that’s your reaction, you might wanna read up on the cooperative principle, and try to find some applications and examples of it.

      • begin.txt (X-post)

        Yo. This is the second (and a half) iteration of me making a blog. The first time was... something.

        First, I used Bash and the Neocities API. Lots of appending, and the RSS feed was.. garish to say the least. But it worked! No one ever read it though. The gist is on my Github somewhere. I should really make this project parse links and images. Like gemtext!

        Second time, I used webpy by Aaron Swartz (RIP.) I still *am* but just without the templates and fancy stuff. Minimalist, if you will. I figured that it'll be easier for me to just write and add services with webpy rather than just reskinning the same website over and over. I'll post the new code somewhere soon enough.

    • Technology and Free Software

      • 👻 DANE Will Set Us Free

        I was digging around in the configuration of my email server (probably a separate post on that forthcoming), and kept stumbling over the many various extensions which have been made to the email protocol over the years. SPF, DMARC, MTA-STS, oh my! Most of these extensions have been bolted on top of email in the hopes of preventing spam and forgery of messages, but at this point there's so many that I began to wonder which are actually necessary from a server admin's point of view. So I did some research.

        One of these extensions is DKIM, which stands for... something. It doesn't matter. The aim of DKIM is to prevent undesirables from spoofing the From address of an email. This is accomplished by sticking a public key in a well known DNS entry, and then signing all outgoing messages with the associated private key. Mail servers receiving email which (ostensibly) comes from your domain are expected to check that the signature on the received email matches the public key on the DNS record.

      • Software Releases/Announcements

        • gmid 2.0 first alpha

          It took quite some time. Last September I was thinking I would have 2.0 ready for December, and here we are. Better late than never I guess.

          This time I decided to do a round of public testing before releasing 2.0 itself.

          I decided to call this an "alpha" rather than a first RC to better convey the idea that I'm still open to change (even in incompatible ways) the new feature set before the release. It works perfectly for me, but since it's used by other people as well I felt the need to wait a bit and gather some feedback.


* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It's like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.



Recent Techrights' Posts

Linux is Sabotaged by Botspam and Bloat (de Facto Denial of Service Attack in "Intelligence" Clothing After Rust in "Security" Clothing)
Linux is becoming orphaned, devalued and diluted by GAFAM slop
Switzerland No Longer Wants Microsoft's 'Swiss Cheese' (Back Doors)
Switzerland's patience with Microsoft is wearing thin
Debian is Not a Community, Many Debian Developers Work for Large Companies Including GAFAM (US)
"Community" sounds like friendship and amicability
Links 08/09/2026: Slop Companies Attack Some More Sites, Nvidia Bribes 'Linux' Foundation for Some More Openwashing and for Saying Slop is "Secure"
Links for the day
Gemini Links 08/09/2026: Ultra Introverts, BlackBerry Bold in 2026, and Laughing at LLMs
Links for the day
Microsoft Layoffs in October 2026
Microsoft is a market leader. In NDAs.
Links 08/09/2026: "The Green Revolution Has Failed Africa" and Palantir/Microsoft Harming NHS
Links for the day
Microsoft's Silent Layoffs Are the New Normal at Microsoft
Microsoft has a ton of layoffs all the time, but the media isn't mentioning those as no WARN notices get issued
SLAPP Censorship - Part 175 Out of 200: Implicit and Explicit Coalition Against the UK's SLAPP Industry
SRA recognises the problem
Further Transparency Problems at the EPO
The EPO was never meant to be profitable
Gemini Links 08/09/2026: "Everything Must Go", Announcing Perigee, and Presentations in a Browser
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Monday, September 07, 2026
IRC logs for Monday, September 07, 2026
Alleged Manager at IBM Says "[t]here are likely to be a lot (and I meant, A LOT) of RAs before December."
"We’re getting pressure from above to put some team members on PIPs."
Links 07/09/2026: Amazon Cargo Plane Crash, .org/.net/.com Domains Considered Risky
Links for the day
Gemini Links 07/09/2026: Cheese, Text-based Life, and Icons in Swaybar
Links for the day
Freedom, Not Fame, is His Goal
pursuit of money can be not only tiring but also involve abandoning one's freedom
Links 07/09/2026: Slop Trashes Memory of Parton, Flock Surveillance Infuriates Everyone
Links for the day
Getting Better After 20 Years
Exactly two months from now this site is turning 20
EPO Hiding Cocainegate and Abandoning Transparency (Even Access to Very Basic Information is Denied)
The EPO isn't just becoming like a private for-profit corporation. It's also becoming more secretive.
Richard Stallman Has Resurrected Lost Updates
We didn't ask about it
SLAPP Censorship - Part 174 Out of 200: Cascading Scandals and a Path Towards Much-Needed, Long-Awaited Reform
Reform the UK's law, not "Reform UK"
EPO's Gema Requena Sempere (PD People) Contacted Regarding Children With Disabilities
In the coming week we may be in fruitful contact with some media regarding EPO scandals
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
Gemini Links 07/09/2026: Music Composition, Free Stuff, and Self-hosting Git Repos
Links for the day
IRC Proceedings: Sunday, September 06, 2026
IRC logs for Sunday, September 06, 2026
People Who Enforce the GPL Banned From Linux Foundation Board (After Bribes From Prolific GPL Violators), Now They're Banned From Giving Talks at Events
about the "LF" ('Linux' Foundation)
Gemini Links 06/09/2026: The Slop Plagiarism 'Holy War' (Hype, Scam, Scheme), Burning CD-Rs, and Hardcopy Mono
Links for the day
Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) Inaction and Incompetence - Part IV - Insufficient Resources in the Face of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) by Lawyers
it's about 120KG
OpenStreetMap is the Future, Dictatorship is the Past
OpenStreetMap helped us check maps for transport, various overlays with addresses, and there was 0% reliance on GAFAM or "Google" anything
Silent Layoffs, Cool-down, and Cool-off: How GAFAM and IBM Operate (the Law Doesn't Apply to Them)
Laws? What laws?
How Strikes at the European Patent Office Are Seen by Striking Staff in Berlin, Germany
We have some more EPO scandals to cover later this year and next year
Association for Computing Machinery Cites Techrights in Relation to GemText and Gemini Protocol
published yesterday, Open Access
Links 06/09/2026: More XBox Trouble (Microsoft Unrest, Many Silent Layoffs This Month), John Duffy as Next USPTO General Counsel
Links for the day
Gemini Links 06/09/2026: Avoiding 'Smart' 'Phones' and Setting up Gemini for the First Time
Links for the day
Links 06/09/2026: Sabotage by Slop and "What Happens If 'Open' 'AI' Dies?"
Links for the day
How Back Doors Became the 'Normal' or 'Norm'
"We also allowed a lethal monoculture to fester"
Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) Inaction and Incompetence - Part III - The SRA is Vastly Worse Than Brits Realise, We Have a "Wild West" in London
In the next part we'll begin looking at correspondence with the SRA
SRA and Manslaughter: How the SRA Contributed to Agony in Proprietary Software Scandals With Clear Misuse of "Without Prejudice"
Trying to prevent the public from finding out the criminal stuff that went on, resulting in many deaths
Canonical (or Ubuntu) Rejecting IRC Isn't the Widespread Trend
Internet Relay Chat (IRC) adoption still growing by some yardsticks
SLAPP Censorship - Part 173 Out of 200: Two Years
It was exactly 2 years ago that we filed lawsuits against Garrett
Linux of America
We could not help but notice GNU/Linux in North America yesterday
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Saturday, September 05, 2026
IRC logs for Saturday, September 05, 2026
Gemini Links 06/09/2026: Internet Limiting (Limited Time Allotted) and Solar MiniServer
Links for the day
Eight Months of Strikes in EPO, Organised by the Staff Union (SUEPO) Also in Berlin
In Berlin, only one member of staff voted against the action plan