Bonum Certa Men Certa

Gemini Links 30/06/2023: Fingerprinting People on IRC and TOFU Ruminations



  • Personal/Opinions

    • 🔤SpellBinding: DNOPRWU Wordo: LARKS
    • Histories of the Transgender Child by Julian Gill-Peterson
    • Flowers and Berries

      I think this is low-bush cranberry, a.k.a. lingonberry, a.k.a. Vaccinium vitis-idaea. But the pictures on the Internet don't have red leaves, so I'm in doubt. Some poisonous look-alike, perhaps?

    • TV Showcase: Bandersnatch

      “Black Mirror” is a UK show exploring the dark side of tech and the dark side of humanity; and “Bandersnatch” is an interactive episode.

      Before I go any further, I must give a content warning for Black Mirror; some episodes are very dark, I’d say as disturbing as anything on mainstream TV. You have been warned.

      It’s an “anthology” series, meaning every individual episode stands alone and has a different cast. If “dark side of tech and humanity” interests you but you’d rather skip the disturbing content, I recommend individual episodes S03E01 “Nosedive” and S04E04 “Hang the DJ”, which are great fun. They are about social media ratings and dating apps, respectively.

    • Been so tired

      It's been a hard few weeks and I haven't really written about it but one of my partners has been sick, like really sick. It's not covid. It was, weirdly, a bacterial infection that spread through their face in ways that were just freaky.

      Like it was sort of a sinus infection but it was so strong that it started swelling their entire face shut on one side and it was starting to *move* through their face.

  • Politics and World Events

    • There's lots of smoke in Ohio recently.

      Some coworkers questioned me for driving in with my top down. My car doesn't have a cabin air filter, so it's all the same as far as I'm concerned. This baffled them; I think sometimes people forget that cars older than 10 years old exist.

  • Science

    • Mechanization, Step 1

      I was recently diagnosed with sleep apnea, which would certainly explain why I’ve been tired every morning for the last…long time. For awhile I assumed it was a (then-new) antidepressant, but apparently that’s not it, or at least not the *whole* it.

      I began treatment a couple nights ago, which consists of connecting myself to a fancy air pump to make sure my lungs get a steady stream of air overnight so that my whole system doesn’t go into panic mode. I’m not used to it yet, but I definitely noticed that my feelings of sleepiness since I started were qualitatively different from how I felt before.

  • Technology and Free Software

    • Re: What dystopia?

      I used to feel the same way in the middle of the 00s. The “downhill battle” era. The “year of the Linux desktop”. Fewer and fewer .doc and .swf files littering our drives.

      Anything they would write, we in the FOSS world could clone better; and we also had our own ideas and our own apps which were pure fire magic. Compilers, wikis, milters, httpd, rsync, blender, gigs of .oggs—we had it all.



      [...]

      Also a lot of the ills that are plaguing us are social ills (we’re not yet particularly well adapted as a species to the idea of social networks), or environmental disasters (we can maybe solve the network externality but the fossil fuel externality is a harder nut to crack).
    • I Need Your Opinion

      Whether this will be accepted into the game or not depends on what people think of it. The thing is that most of the opinions received so far are "I don't like that exclusive transport rights exist at all and always disable them in the settings."

      While being a perfectly valid preference it doesn't really have anything to do with the proposed change.

    • fingerprinting people on IRC with no privileges

      TL;DR If you want to join an IRC server anonymously, your best bet is to use an e.g. Tails VM. Conventional IRC clients allow correlating seemingly isolated connections to different servers.

      Let me clarify the threat model. Let's say I'm "dzwdz" on one server, and "notdzwdz" on another. I'm using a single client for both, but "notdzwdz" is proxied through Tor, has distinct default nicknames/quit messages/etc, all the obvious privacy leaks are taken care of. I don't want anyone to be able to tell that I'm behind both those identities.

    • Internet/Gemini

      • yet more TOFU ruminations

        In SSH only the fingerprint (of a key type) is available when a host key changes; Gemini instead offers a whole X.509 certificate, for better or worse. The worse involves the complexity of X.509, even the limited modern version, and the too many security vulnerabilities thereof. The better is the metadata, which could be logged, or one might store the whole certificate so that future comparisons can look at whatever fields they want (subject, issuer, etc). Oh no, the disk space usage of unscalable certificate stores!

    • Programming

      • Software? That someone else wrote?

        I was reading a new post by a new user Sugar trying to negotiate Jekyll and settling on Agate for the Gemini side at least!

        This makes me laugh a little at myself for how hard I make own life. If it's writable by myself, why wouldn't I?

        There are many great FOSS solutions to my problems but if I think a few bash scripts and at worst a lil bit of python or something can solve it then why not.

        Why am I like this? I know in some part because it's fun. Making little tools is my wheelhouse, my bread and butter. Part of me just knows the command line can do everything I need for this task so why would I introduce some complex thing when my shell script can call a series of complex things to do it!

      • Unveiling `guprecords.raku`: Global Uptime Records with Raku

        For fun, I am tracking the uptime of various personal machines (servers, laptops, workstations...). I have been doing this for over ten years now, so I have a lot of statistics collected.

        As a result of this, I am introducing `guprecords.raku`, a handy Raku script that helps me combine uptime statistics from multiple servers into one comprehensive report. In this blog post, I'll explore what Guprecords is and some examples of its application. I will also add some notes on Raku.


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



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