Gemini* and Gopher

• Politics and World Events

  • Fault lines

    A commentator was surprised that the above tariff is vintage 1890, not the more recent ruckus. Humans have been at this for a while now, and some of the fault lines remain largely unchanged:

    It represented protectionism, a policy supported by the Republicans and denounced by the Democrats.

    Geology shows similar results, in that past fault lines tend to be where future slips occur, areas of weakness or otherwise prone to similar antics when the pressure is up (or down, when extensional).

• Technology and Free Software

  • Internet/Gemini

    • The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Dark Web and Beyond — Part II

      Entering an anonymous network is not the same as opening an ordinary website. It is closer to entering an unfamiliar city after dark: most streets are ordinary, some are fascinating, some are abandoned, and a few are places where no sensible traveler should remain.

      Networks such as Tor, I2P, Gemini, IRC, Matrix, Yggdrasil, Freenet, and various peer-to-peer systems were created for different purposes. Some emphasize anonymity, some decentralization, some simplicity, and others resistance to censorship. None of them automatically make a person safe, invisible, trustworthy, or morally exempt from responsibility.

      Anonymity can protect journalists, political dissidents, whistleblowers, abuse survivors, researchers, artists, and ordinary people who simply want privacy. It can also attract scammers, manipulators, extremists, malicious hackers, and people seeking victims.

    • GiM's gemlog - 2026-07-22 Substack

      I hate substack. That itself is not a bad thing, there are quite few good reasons to hate it.

      If you thought world's most hated "social" site - linkedin - is full of grifter generated LLM slop, it only means you've likely haven't been lurking around substack. Good for you, nothing lost.

      There is however one particular blog that I enjoy reading and it seems that the author after moving through various locations and platforms is not going anywhere (at least not YET).

      I wouldn't like this content to get lost and I wanted to be able to read it in a _sane_ way. So I've finally forced myself to do a pretty dumb archiver and make the posts avail here.