Gemini* and Gopher

• Technology and Free Software

  • Block Them All

    Not everything, but one may want to reduce load on your systems as much as possible: less CPU waste, less log noise if you have logging turned on. There's been mutterings on the internet about those nasty AI scrappers causing so much load that (perhaps not maximally efficient software such as) fail2ban cannot keep up with the log spam. This is not new; spammers caused so much load on a mail server operated by Brian W. Kernighan and Rob Pike as related in "The Practice of Programming" that they had to write some new software. That was back in the now glorious 1990s when mentioning AI in your grant would get your funding correctly cut, the good AI winter still being a thing back then.

  • Journal Update 29: Git Annex, Signed Commits, and Axing Email

    The certificate for this journal's ICANN site mirror⁷ expired weeks ago. I didn't notice it until today. It turned out to be an issue with Certbot's autorenewal failing.

    This could've been detected sooner or even prevented by having monitoring and observability. If I had my server configuration documented as code, I may have noticed the issue beforehand, or already implemented monitoring and observability. Yet another reason to automate server configuration, in addition to the reasons I gave in my prior journal update⁸.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Cryptography of the Internet - Part 0

      This article is a continuation, of "Part Base", to understand the evolution of cryptography. Do read the previous, "Part Base", article.

      The Private-key Cryptography is, still today, the strongest type of Cryptography. But, it has a slightly non-technical problem; which is, the correspondents have to exchange a *secret* (for example, a private number) in a *secure* way. Preferably in-person. They have to do this first and foremost, before starting the private correspondence. Sometimes this is not possible, or not convenient.

      Public-key Cryptography aims at solving this *private*/*secret* exchange, by (somewhat) eliminating it from the procedures. Yes, it is possible, and it works!

      With Public-key Cryptography, the correspondents each have a keypair. And each keypair is composed by one public key and one private key. With the private key, a correspondent does some type of cryptography operation, and with the public key a correspondent does the opposite type of the private's key cryptography operation.