Gemini* and Gopher

• Technology and Free Software

  • Comparison of cloud storage encryption software

  • Comparison of cloud storage encryption software

    When using a not end-to-end encrypted cloud storage, you may want to store your file encrypted so if the cloud provider (that could be you if you self host a nextcloud or seafile) get hacked, your data will be available to the hacker, this is not great.

    While there are some encryption software like age or gpg, they are not usable for working transparently with files. A specific class of encryption software exists, they create a logical volume with your files and they are transparently encrypted in the file system.

  • Mainstream Unix, underground Unix / mainstream veganism, underground veganism

    I’m reminded every day of how lucky I am to have a girlfriend who respects my basic needs as an autistic person – an INSA alumnus at that – that is, my girlfriend, I’m a sociology student – but having a principled stance on free software has made me repeat several times. Every prestige university student I know has an excellent relationship to computing, which means, for example, that my girlfriend would accept YouTube’s tracking back in 2016, because she needed to succeed in her studies.

    Nevertheless, speaking as an ADHD haver and as a school/class abuse survivor, I’ve been addicted to social media for over a decade, which as a cypherpunk and cyberpunk activist has nearly killed me several times (sometimes concurrently, e.g. out of losing my home). I first wrote 100 blog posts in a year, then I’ve finally made the bold move of moving to Telecoop, a 10€/month then 2€/GB telco, which has lead me to a whopping 76€ bill the next month, and has motivated me into reinstalling postmarketOS on my phone. Today I pay around 12€/month, I’m working around 4 hours a day on my master thesis, and this is improving.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • neovim + offpunk amusement

      There was a thread going on in the offpunk devel list about using cat as the pager (as an option instead of less). A new user thought it would be a nice option, and coincidentally it was actually the very first change I made to my local checkout of offpunk. Except their solution was quite a bit cleaner than mine, as mine was an ugly hack to just replace the call to less.

      My motivation for it was that I wanted the entire page content dumped to the screen at all times and I would use a pager after the fact. I’d just hit the tmux keybinding to enter copy-mode. This worked pretty well, and I used it for a few days. But then I started finding more capsules and wouldn’t you know it, some of them were long. There are one or two that are thousands of links in a page long. Using copy mode started to lose the allure while browsing these. But I still kind of liked it for a lot of places.

      Anyway, I stopped using it because I couldn’t think of an elegant way to keep it and I really wanted to try out some other features, so I just smashed it when I merged something else later.

    • AI web scrapers / content stealers are out of control

      On 02/16/2026 at 17:19 I was rudely awakened from a nap by an automated email from my hosting provider... Stating that my VPS has "exceeded the notification threshold (90) for CPU Usage by averaging 99.9% for the last 2 hours."

      Upon investigating I discovered that some dumbass AI crawler was sending hundreds of request per second to my gopher proxy and loading bitreich's AI trap (LOL!) and also bitreich's PHAROS (Internet Archive over gopher) instance. Humorous aside from wasting the bandwidth of all involved parties - 100% cpu, 100% available FDs, 100% of temp space, 100% of RAM, and a sizable chunk of swap space on gopher.zcrayfish.soy . . .

      I immediately went to work to deal with the bots, the gopherproxy uses temp space MUCH more efficiently and has garbage collection there as well... And requests sent via the proxy that attempt to load the AI honeytrap will return a nice random selection of tarbombs, deflate bombs, markov babble, and other malicious anti-bot content; without even sending a request off to bitreich. Additionally I have configured the gopherproxy to send HTTPS redirects to some of the PHAROS URLs back to the internet archive HTTPS server.