Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • 🔤SpellBinding — ADYILTG Wordo: SNOBS

  • pathways update.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Innovation is more complex than that

    I've seen a number of news articles and LinkedIn posts recently about how European innovation is "lagging" due to "overbearing legislation", while innovation in the USA and Asia is advancing apace. Now, obviously everything posted on LinkedIn is nonsense; anyone who posts on LinkedIn is probably fundamentally unserious and only trying to make themselves seem important and/or intelligent (though anyone with any real intelligence knows better than to post drivel on there). However, the number of publications parroting this same line is reminiscent of the Jimmy Kimmel bit about every single news host being surprised that it's October.

    [...]

    I may be naïve in my belief that software can be used for good, but it is a belief I still hold. I do not, however, believe that this is possible in a tech industry with no oversight and legislation. As someone who writes software and has worked in the open source industry for over a decade now, I believe all software should be treated with healthy suspicion. Software is complex and multifaceted, and should be crafted with the same care as a bridge or skyscraper. Without stringent rules that set sensible boundaries about how to build software, enthusiastic and even well-meaning developers will often charge in and write without adequate care. It's true that many problems can be reduced to data structures and mathematics, and it's exciting when you start to think about how it can be done. I have recently been talking with my mother about turning her PhD research into a queryable API and we both got quite animated when we started discussing how the data could be structured and linked. But this kind of project is building off of many years of research, and so benefits from all of the hard work being done already.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Gopherproxy down due to bot abuse

      The gopher proxy is down temporarily due to bot abuse, I have worked out a solution that will prevent 85-80% of the malicious request from being sent to other gopher servers via the proxy.

      Unfortunately I will have to turn off plain HTTP requests to the proxy forever, HTTPS with TLS 1.3 will remain supported.

      Guess this ends my long streak of posting nothing up here. :)

    • Nina.chat is Dead

      I read that nina.chat, the ICQ/MSN/AIM/AOL chat provider has ended operations [0], with a cryptic note on their website [1]:

      Due to reasons beyond our control, that we wish weren't the case... all web, social, promotional, etc. services have been shutdown. MSN is still available at Escargot, but you won't find anything here anymore. It's been fun.

      Which is too bad, I enjoyed going online with ICQ during this year's OCC [2]. What's odd is that I just tried logging into their ICQ service via pidgin on my Lenny box and was able to. So it's not totally offline, but you can't create new accounts or manage the one you have.