________ ________ _____ / ___| \/ o| _ |@ __ \ \*`--.|o. . | | | | | \/ `--. \ |\/| | | | | | __ /\__/ / | | \ \_/o/ |_\ \ \___o/\_| |_/\___/ \____/ News from the Free Internet Issue 6, January 23, 2021
1. Opening Thoughts: Beyond Lingua Franca, by littlejohn
2. Gemini and Gopherspace News
3. Tech News
4. Cyberspace Musings
5. Letters from Our Readers
6. Classifieds
7. PSA: Sorry About Confusing Your Robots!
Unless stated otherwise, the material here is shared under the Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.
Mirroring, copying, distribution, and derivative works are not only permitted, they are encouraged. If you wish to distribute Smog to your friends, I specifically encourage you to mirror it instead of linking to it. This will help keep hosting cost down and help Smog reach a wider audience.
You appear to be browsing Smog in private mode and we can't do jack sh!t about it.
by littlejohn <littlejohn@sdf.org>
Many, many years ago, back when Geocities was still a thing, me and a friend of mine went through the Directory Listing Ritual. We listed the website that we'd made -- mostly by copy-pasting things in CoffeeCup HTML Editor -- in a website directory. The process was pretty painless. You'd fill in a form and the webmaster would get back to you a few days later. Once it was clear you're not scamming anyone or distributing warez, you were good to go.
The webmaster did write back a few days later. He listed our website, but at the bottom of the section we asked for -- but, to make up for that, he also listed it in the "English" section of the directory.
You see, our website wasn't in English. And most websites on that directory weren't.
We both *spoke* English (as well as 6th graders who study English as a foreign language could speak it, of course) and we were already running another English-language website. It's not that we couldn't publish web pages in English, we just didn't want these ones to be in English.
This was pretty common back then. France, Germany, and to a remarkable degree, the Netherlands, hosted plenty of websites written in French, German, or Dutch.
Now, don't let these glasses of mine seem rose-tinted: I'm fairly sure that, for any given language, there's more content in that language on today's WWW than back in 2001. Back then I was happy that I could practice my French on a handful of French websites -- nowadays there are probably *thousands* of websites about learning French alone. This isn't about some lost paradise of linguistic diversity.
Quite the contrary: hosting a non-English website was a pretty difficult experience. This was back when plenty of people had not yet seen the UTF-8 light. On average, we got about one email a month about junk characters in our website's text. This was also way before Google Translate -- every once in a while, I'd get an email saying hi, I saw this snippet of code on your website and I speak Perl just fine but could you maybe give me the short version of all that text *around* the snippet?
The tech stack of the 2020s doesn't suffer from the same problems, or at least not at the same rate as the one we had way back in the late 90s and early 00s. And every day, I see more and more Gemini capsules, and even Gopherholes, from authors who use both English and whatever other language(s) they speak.
It's a great chance to go beyond "technicaL" English, the lingua franca of our Internet. Because, make no mistake about it, the soft, Corporatese-infused English that keeps a lot of international Internet communities going is its variety of English, one that is delightfully accessible and yet disappointingly bland half the time.
There is no irony in this encouragement being written in the same variety of English that I just called "bland". For better or for worse -- better, as far as I'm concerned -- English is a great language to know, and not just for technical communication. English-language literature is fantastic. And, owing to the popularity of English, there are many works that I've read in English because I don't speak the language they were originally written in, but they haven't been translated in my native language, either. My own gemlog is in English, for that matter.
But I think linguistic diversity is a basic ingredient of cultural diversity. You can't cultivate one without the other. And even if you don't think that more diversity is inherently better, I would posit that, at the very least, linguistic diversity is still worth pursuing for its intellectual value alone.
Gemini and Gopher are still small enough that "being heard" doesn't matter that much -- and being heard *a little* still matters a lot. Writing English will probably help you reach ten times more people than French, Czech, Swedish or Gaelic -- that is, it'll probably be read by 20-30 people instead of 2-3. Oh, the tragedy!
So if you're setting up your Gemini capsule or a gopherhole, or publishing something over Gemini, please consider writing *some* of it in whatever other language you speak, even if it's not your native language, and even if you're only doing it as an exercise. What do you have to lose?
An Esperanto language aggregator on Gemini
E-Fluo is a very interesting project -- an aggregator for Esperanto-language Gemini capsules! Indeed, it seems that a lot of people in the Gemini community know Esperanto, but don't write in it, something that the author hopes to change.
Like Ben, I also hope this will encourage users of other languages to use them in writing, even if they don't do it all the time. Stefano Costa, for example, runs a capsule in Italian:
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A pull request adding Gopher support to luakit has just been opened and is currently under review. It is based on the earlier work of another developer whose pull request eventually remained unmerged. Here's hoping this one fares better!
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Tucows Downloads Has Been Retired
If you just ran out of excuses to take a walk on Nostalgia Blvd., fear not: Tucows has just retired Tucows Downloads, once *the* website for shareware and freeware on the WWW. 25 years later, the world has moved on -- for better or for worse -- and this, like all good things, has come to an end.
So long, and thanks for all fish!
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Gigantic Asshole Ajit Pai Is Officially Gone. Good Riddance.
When something big happens in tech, *everyone* reports it. I usually try to link to "the best" one here -- chosen by my own, extremely subjective standards -- but there are always a lot of options.
How did I pick this one, you ask? It was really easy: this time, I just went with the one that had the best headline.
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DuckDuckGo grew by 62% in 2020
According to its own statements (so, you know, grain of salt and everything), DuckDuckGo has seen a 62% growth in average daily searches during last year. At this point, DuckDuckGo has surpassed both Yahoo and Bing (the search engine that Microsoft just won't shut up about already) in the US.
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Google and Australian Government stand-off
After recently having had to agree to a similar agreement in France, Google is now threatening to remove the search function in Australia if the new media code -- which would require them to pay media companies for using their content -- becomes law.
The interesting part about this isn't really the ritual hissing and spitting involved in every high-level political negotiation, but the fact that it's the *search* functionality that plays a central role in it. It's a bold bluff, and it's usually a bad idea to involve an asset of vital importance in a bluff unless the stakes are outrageously high.
It's certainly likely that the stakes are very high. Or, then again, perhaps Google Search is to Alphabet as Windows is to Microsoft: an annoyingly-relevant piece of tech that's useful, but is slowly being displaced from the crown jewel spot.
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Google Dropping Google-exclusive APIs from non-Chrome builds
Google has recently announced that it will be cutting off access to a number of APIs and features for Chromium builds. What started as a rumour was eventually confirmed on one of the project's mailing list by someone at Google. If you're curious, the whole discussion is public:
(Disclaimer: much of it is in Standard Corporatese)
This further complicates the problem of packaging Chromium -- an already difficult endeavour, that has caused endless grief throughout the Linux world -- and some package maintainers are already considering dropping it altogether.
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("Back" as in "All the cool kids sit in the back of the class")
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Maybe "tragedy" is too big a word for such a small protocol, but who's to say there is no room for tragedy here?
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The name would suggest more to this story than there is in the article, but it's not a bad start. It lists the biggest hurdles that Corellium had to put up with when porting Linux to the M1 -- mind you, it essentially lists them by name, without much information. But knowing what to Google (so that you can give up and reverse engineer it because it's mostly undocumented...) is the hardest part of learning something new!
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It looks like we've been running news about Intel for a few issues now. News about Intel *almost* made the cut this issue, too, except it was mostly in the form of rumours.
But this little article? While not news, it's a great summary of *why* Intel is struggling right now. And also very relevant for what's coming ahead. x86 cemented its position not only through software support and shady deals between Microsoft, IBM & co., but also through Intel's exceptional position in terms of manufacturing. Things have changed, though, and not only in that department.
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From: <redacted> To: littlejohn@sdf.org Subject: good zine I just discovered Smog, and I will be coming back for more as it comes out. Thank you for putting this together, and I hope you keep it going! Your article about oozing into meatspace was interesting to me. Nothing good ever seems to happen when something starts oozing, does it. From: littlejohn@sdf.org To: <redacted> Subject: RE: good zine Thank you very much for writing me and for your kind words! I'm glad to hear you're enjoying Smog! > Your article about oozing into meatspace was interesting to me. Nothing > good ever seems to happen when something starts oozing, does it. I have very mixed feelings about all that. I don't quite know what to think -- but, yeah, I'm not holding my breath for a good outcome, I guess. On the one hand, cyberspace finally being relevant IRL feels a ltitle vindicating to those of us who grew up with the distinct feeling that all that cyberpunk jazz is blown out of proportion, and that our virtual realm is in fact irrelevant. On the other hand, I'm not sure how I feel knowing that the ones who do the oozing, so to speak, aren't netizens in general, but fancy-ass CEOs who have their left hand in politicians' pockets, and their right hand in the datacentre. I'm not sure what I was expecting though... All the best, LJ
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Another one of our readers writes to tell us about a very neat setup they concocted for personal use. I like this, because it's small-scale and easy to share with others in a small circle of friends. Small protocols, with unpretentious tech stacks behind them, make this easy to do -- hopefully, for things way more useful than Smog, too:
From: <redacted> To: littlejohn@sdf.org Subject: HTTP Feed Proxy for Smog Hi, I don't know if this falls under mirrors but I wanted to share this is how I've added smog to my feed reader and smog is usually cached there so less load on the original server. I run this at home so uptime is (hopefully) >95%. It runs Gemini feed expander by celenher which is a proxy made specifically for feeds. i.e. Gemini URLs are converted to feed content before serving the feed. => gemini://celehner.com/proxy/
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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!
Garden Gnomes Unite! @
@ /
I know you've heard of Astrobotany, \/ ,
and of course you have a plant. ||/
^^^^^^
Take your engagement to the next level with
gemini://gardengnome.ml
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One of our readers recently let me know that the server at gemini://gemini.trans-neptunian.space/ serves robots.txt with the wrong mediatype, which confuses at least one crawler.
In case you got weird entries in your crawler logs, sorry, folks, that's my fault!
Real life got in the way this week, and I had a bigger revamp of the server planned for, uh, when I get a bloody free afternoon? but I promise I'll have it fixed as soon as possible!
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!)