________ ________ _____ / ___| \/ o| _ |@ __ \ \*`--.|o. . | | | | | \/ `--. \ |\/| | | | | | __ /\__/ / | | \ \_/o/ |_\ \ \___o/\_| |_/\___/ \____/ News from the Free Internet Issue 4, January 9, 2021
1. Opening Thoughts: You're Never Helpless, by littlejohn
2. Gemini and Gopherspace News
3. Tech News
4. Cyberspace Musings
5. Letters From Our Readers
6. Classifieds
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by littlejohn <littlejohn@sdf.org>
Today's Opening Thoughts was supposed to be about something else entirely but I have the attention span of a squirrel on caffeine.
Okay, my attention span isn't *that* bad, but I saw that "squirrels on caffeine" meme last week and I really wanted to use it somewhere. No, the reason why it's different has to do with someone's rant on Mastodon, which I realize is not helping with my attention span situation but the two really aren't connected, like, at all. My attention span is fine. OOOH SHINY OBJECT!
This is the thread that derailed my Opening Thoughts essay.
Lance R. Vick makes a point that many of us have tried to make, in various contexts, for a long time: that a closed technology cannot make any long-term guarantees with regards to protecting its users' interests.
That isn't inherently different for open technologies: openness counts towards resilience against being "confiscated" by a small faction, but it's not a guarantee. There is, however, a further difference that makes this resilience matter more than you think: you're never helpless.
The recent debacle about WhatsApp's privacy policy has caused a lot of people to talk about -- and move to -- Signal. For most people, this is far from the ideal outcome, but there's no third way. Either you admit that all your base are belong to Zuck, or you move all your base somewhere else.
What "third option" would there be? You can't set up your own server, can't write your own WhatsApp client, can't (easily) use other protocols over WhatsApp.
Facebook is the villain here because they're the ones who did it. But the game was rigged from the beginning: whether by the will of Lieutenant Commander Zuck or by someone else's, WhatsApp's user base was always ripe for the taking, because it depended on a service that had been *designed* so as not to allow any kind of user control.
Having things move in one direction when some users would like to have them move in *another* direction isn't unheard of in the open source world, either. But the game isn't rigged from the beginning. "The community" -- by which I mean, people who care that something isn't the way they want it to be enough to take some action -- can and often does step in. They aren't always successful, sure, but at least the game isn't lost before it even starts.
There are many ways to "close" a technology besides closed licensing and a centralized design. Large, complicated codebases, for example, are effectively closed *despite* their licensing. If the barrier of entry consists of a build farm and reverse-engineering twenty years' worth of undocumented code, the GPL header at the beginning of each file is meaningless. Nobody is going to be *able* to modify the damn thing, even if there are no lawyers to slap them over the fingers if they try to. That's why some of us advocate for simplicity and composability, even -- where feasible -- at the price of performance.
Does the community model always succeed? When I log on to the Mastodon instance at SDF, I'm tempted to think it does, but then I look at how much hand-holding my Linux machine requires in order to have a functional desktop and I realize the answer is obviously a no.
But the *chances* are better: for an open technology, a kind community and a team of responsible developers is all it takes. For a closed technology that's owned and operated by people other than those who use it or develop it, neither the people who use it, nor the people who write it matter much.
Bill Havanki just announced Doppio, a GeminiServerFactoryFactory, I mean, uh, a Gemini server written in Java. In its author's own words, it "mostly passes gemini-diagnostics", but it's definitely useable at this point.
---
An unofficial gemini mirror of the crates.io registry
Ben Aaron is working on a Gemini mirror of Rust's crates.io . A preliminary (but already very neat!) version is available for your enjoyment.
---
Schapcom: a Gemini feed aggregator
Sandra Snan just announced a great tool call Schapcom. It's a feed aggregator, similar to CAPCOM with excellent support for following multiple curated fields. It's compatible with both Gemfeed and Gmisub feed formats and it's written in Chicken Scheme, which is enough to incite some interest from those of us who think sliced bread is the best thing since S-expressions :-).
---
Stéphane Bortzmeyer will be giving a talk about GEMINI at Fosdem, in the Retrocomputing room. Don't miss it!
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UK judge blocks Julian Assange's extradition to the US
In a remarkable, if sad, case of extra-judicial pressures backfiring in unexpected ways, District Judge Vanessa Baraitser rules that "extradition would be oppressive by reason of mental harm", over concerns regarding Assange's mental health and the US prosecutors' inability to provide the protection, oversight, and medical care required for a fair trial. The Judge did *not* establish whether Assange is guilty of the charges brought to him or not. However, British extradition law requires British authorities to consider whether Assange would be treated humanely in case he were extradited -- and, based on this ruling, the conclusion is pretty obvious.
The full text of the ruling can be consulted here.
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LibreSSL support is slowly being dropped among Linux distributions. Alpine used it as its primary TLS library for a while, but moved back to OpenSSL. Gentoo is preparing to drop LibreSSL support. There's been some debate about this in Void Linux circles for about a year now.
LibreSSL never really saw mass adoption in Linux land, although cross-platform support is one of the project's goals (and, indeed, bugfixes specific to non-OpenBSD platforms are regularly featured in the changelog). There's no word from OpenBSD land at the time of writing. Whether they'll eventually migrate back to OpenSSL is anyone's guess, but I wouldn't hold my breath for the time being...
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QT 5.15 LTS commercial-only phase starts
After Qt 6.0's (rushed?) release, the Qt Company announced that the 5.15 LTS branch would be closed starting January 5th. The response from the community has been what you'd expect it would be, particularly since the 6.0 release is more like a 5.99 beta release (6.1 would break binary compatibility, making the 6.0 release somewhat less feasible).
A community fork of the 5.15 LTS branch, aptly name 5.15-free, has been announced:
The community aims to backport relevant fixes to this branch, but this outcome is, in David Edmundson's words, "not an ideal outcome".
---
Bookwyrm: A Federated Alternative to Goodreads
Mouse Reeve is working on a decentralized alternative to Goodreads, built on ActivityPub and which doesn't use Amazon. It's a neat project that I encourage you to check out.
And while we're at it can we please give a shout out to the most *awesomely*-named program in history, namely...
...ozymandias, by the same author.
---
WhatsApp Will Require Users to Share Data With Facebook
In a move that surprises pretty much nobody, WhatsApp has begun requiring users to agree to a radically-revamped privacy policy which can be summarized as "if WhatsApp tracks it, Facebook and & friends will know about it".
Is this the beginning of a major policy change at Facebook? Only time will tell.
---
Intel Introduces RealSense Facial authentication
Intel just announced an interesting, local-only, on-device facial recognition and authentication solution. Intel touts privacy and reliable operation even in the presence of some variability of facial features (such as facial hair or glasses) as big selling points.
---
Asahi Linux is a crowdfounded project that seeks to bring Linux to Apple's M1 platform. The effort involved is certainly non-trivial: almost no documentation is available, so most of of the early bring-up effort essentially consists of reverse engineering.
---
("Back" as in "All the cool kids sit in the back of the class")
Dissecting the Apple M1 GPU, part I
Alyssa Rosenzweig (of Panfrost fame) shares some early results from her efforts of figuring out the architecture and inner workings of Apple's M1 GPU. In addition to the interesting insights in the blog post, Alyssa also published a simple disassembler that our more curious readers will probably want to check out as well!
---
From: Sean <email redacted>
Why not? The thought of this ad running just amuses me. For context,
this was the "ad" on my blog:
http://boston.conman.org/2019/01/12.2
as an example of adtertising being added to gopher. I'm not sure the firm
advertised exists now---at the very least, it's no longer at the address
given.
Anyway, print or not. The dashed lines (with the little scissors icons)
are NOT part of the ad---they just delimit it.
-spc
----[ 8< ]---------------------------------
TYPEWRITERS
For SALE, HIRE, or EXCHANGE, at HALF the USUAL PRICES.
MS. (Manuscripts) Typewritten from 10d. per 1,000 words.
100 Circulars for 4s
TAYLOR'S, 74, Chancery Lane, London. (Est. 1884.)
Telegrams: "Glossator," London. Telephone No. 690, Holborn.
-----[ >8 ]--------------------------------
From: littlejohn <littlejohn@sdf.org>
Hi, Sean,
I *knew* I remembered that from somewhere -- took me a little to piece
it all back to the Boston Diaries :-).
Unfortunately, I don't think I can publish that in the classifieds
section. It's not a problem that they're not at the address anymore,
what with all the COVID-19 restrictions and all, but I don't think
you'll get them on the phone if you call 690 in London anymore,
either, and I'm not sure how many people even know what a telegram is
anymore. I just don't see how you would drive engagement with this,
you know?
Also, I'm just sayin', their business model is very interesting but I
don't see how it would work. The OCR market is definitely ready for
disruption but I don't know if a mechanical approach is the way to do
it. We need something that's more like Uber for OCR.
What I *can* do is publish it in the Letters From Our Readers section
because honestly it's bloody hilarious and it made my morning, and I
want to make other people's morning, too :-D. It has a 1921 feeling to
it's that just *perfect* for publishing it in 2021. Would that be okay
with you?
Cheers,
LJ
---
Smog and your friendly editor does not endorse any of the products, services, organisations, individuals or technologies mentioned below. However, I do not *not* endorse them, either!
---
> #CircusInPlace --------------------------------------------------------- > The only jitsi call featuring legit theater clowns, hackers, and lovely > weirdos from all over the world! Hang out with terrific people as they > work on their passion projects, terrible puns, and circus skills. The > chat starts at 8pm UTC-6 MWF, and runs late enough to wind down with > friends overseas. > Contact @russsharek@mastodon.art, or check #CircusInPlace on Mastodon. > ------------------------------------------------------------------------
---
Smog runs ads on any topic for free and will never charge or accept money in exchange for publishing an ad. However, your friendly editor reserves the right to say no to an ad, or to stop running it at any time. That being said, I don't plan to say "no" to anything that's legal and civil.
Ads are published in random order, for up to 4 consecutive issues, re-shuffled each time. Ads will have to be no longer than 8 lines, wrapped at 72 columns, for a grand total of 576 characters. I encourage creative expression with ads though -- use ASCII art, sed one-liners, whatever you want!
If you'd like to see your ad here, drop me a line on littlejohn@sdf.org.
If I get interesting letters from my readers, I will publish them in the following issue. I encourage you to send your thoughts on your friendly editor's email address: littlejohn@sdf.org. If you would rather *not* get your letter published, please make a mention of it.
Want to see your writing in Smog? I will gladly publish or re-publish original articles, as long as they're not illegal or offensive, and if you're willing to license them under a license that does not prohibit free, non-commercial distribution and derivative works.
Please note that Smog is a non-commercial project with built-in SEO deterrence, an audience of maybe 12 people, and a business model that is best summed up by the word "nope", so all payment is in hipster points. If we are ever in the same pub, I will also buy you a beer (or a non-alcoholic equivalent!)