Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • What Are You Reading?

    Reading was a big part of my childhood. I always was a very quiet kid. You could give me a book and leave me in the same corner for hours while I went through it. My grandparents had these big, leather-bound, beautifully illustrated books of classic stories. I devoured them. In elementary and middle school, talking about what you were reading was a great conversation starter. Reading the same series of books (I was a big fan of Goosebumps and Animorphs as a child) automatically built a strong bond between me and other kids.

    I continued reading in high school and university. I made some great friends. Their personal taste in books contributed to the picture of them I formed in my mind. One of them loved fantasy, another thrillers, a third science fiction. It was great! We encouraged each other to read our personal favorites and there was a lot of cross-pollination. I had never participated in a book club at the time, but sometimes a friend and I accidentally read the same bestseller at the same time and we talked about it.

  • The Crossroads of Should and Must

• Politics and World Events

  • Welcome to Zombieland By Anonymous

  • Inside ELITA: Antisemitism, Abuse and Trolling on I2P IRC

    The following is an IRC transcript documenting conversations on the ELITA / I2P network.

    It contains antisemitic, racist, abusive and otherwise offensive language. Such statements are reproduced for documentary purposes and do not represent the views of Kol HaAm.

    Links posted by IRC participants are preserved as part of the original transcript. Their inclusion is for documentary purposes and does not constitute endorsement of their contents.

    Technical I2P host identifiers have been removed because they are not necessary for understanding the conversation.

• Poems

  • A Concrete Poem

• Technology and Free Software

  • Google Maps - taking back control

    Mrs k and I are on holiday in Somerset, near to the city of Wells. I love maps and navigation and my wife loves to drive, so when we go somewhere new we play to those strengths, but on this trip Google Maps has been the cause of a little tension.

    Before we came away I bought a new road atlas, a 100,000:1 scale with spiral binding, which gives you 1.5 miles to the inch, because I knew from experience that using satnav alone wouldn't be a completely satisfactory experience. The problem with Google Maps and presumably with other similar apps is their tendency to send you off down narrow roads, wide enough only for one car but with passing places from time to time. We've come across more of these very narrow roads in Somerset that we are used to at home, which to be fair is a rural area itself.

  • Ploum: I don't have a smartphone

    As he goes on to admit, it's very hard these days to "stay pure". But that doesn't mean we shouldn't try.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • More Everything Forever

      I quit mainstream social media many years ago. I deleted the last account I owned, on Twitter, at the beginning of this year. I remember being very confused by all the talk about accelerationism, effective altruism, rationalism, longevity drugs, and going to Mars. These topics occasionally popped up in the social media bubble that tech people like me frequented at the time. Now, after reading More Everything Forever, I know where all that talk came from. This book taught me everything I need to know about tech billionaires and their questionable ideologies.

      I will not go into any detail about the ideologies and movements the book talks about. The author makes an excellent job at describing them in detail, tracing their history, and reviewing their contemporary exponents. If I had to come up with an umbrella term for all of them, though, I would call them "competent-sounding delusions". Movements like effective altruism, longtermism, rationalism, etc. have a facade of research, sophistication, and soundness. If you unpack their arguments, though, you find an endless amount of unsubstantiated claims about the future of technology and and the destiny of humankind. Nevertheless, this aura of competence is enough for tech billionaires to justify their less-than-humanitarian goals.

    • Least Privilege, Most Shenanigans

      I have been growing more and more careful about security as I develop new services for the Geminispace. I mostly write in C++, which is not known to be the safest language around. Plus, AI agents can now be ultra-persistent about pwning your service. This is not good... but I refuse to use Rust because I am yet to understand it well enough to know its best practices and pitfalls. So, in the meantime, I looked into the tricks OpenBSD uses to make life literal hell for attackers, even when a bug exists. Make finding a bug the 1st step in the attacker's many problems to come, instead of the be-all and end-all of your security. If tokens are cheap and attacks are therefore cheap, we can make attackers burn them like power plants and get nothing in return:

    • Reflections on Gemini's Early History

      I went through Solderpunk's phlog and his Gemini side-phlog. I'm glad that this material is still available because it offers a small window into Solderpunk's early thoughts about Gemini.

      I was impressed by the frequency of the early writings: some days, Solderpunk published several posts. From the tone of those posts, it's evident that Solderpunk was very excited about the early progress. I believe that Gemini stroke some chords at the intersection of a passion and a technical challenge. I have never used Gopher, so I can't really judge the technical merits of Gemini over it, but Solderpunk sounds like a veteran of the older protocol. He seemed to love Gopher and its community, he didn't want the Gopherspace to go away, and he strove to propose a specification that could capture what made Gopher special and nurture it into something better.

• Slop

  • Re: No Way to Say No - Cameron Rye

    The things people were worried about weren't brushed aside. Per-host rate limiting is now enabled, concurrency is capped and robots.txt is respected. You can explicitly tell gopher-mcp that you don't want it visiting your gemini capsule or gopher hole.

    These fixes are NOT the important part. It was acknowledging that the small web isn't just a collection of endpoints waiting to be queried. It's people. It's weird little pages, abandoned projects, personal notes, terrible jokes, and imaginary plants. And maybe the most important part is what the world wide web lost: the wandering.

    I really appreciate Cameron taking the criticism and the github issue seriously, admitting where the project got things wrong, and changing it because people from the small web spoke up.