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1. Opening Thoughts: Blinkenlights, by littlejohn
2. Gemini and Gopherspace News
3. Tech News
4. The Free Internet, by littlejohn
5. Cyberspace Musings
6. Classifieds
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Gemini is a cool idea but what's the point?
Yes!
by littlejohn <littlejohn@sdf.org>
Smog has now reached issue 2, which if memory serves me right puts us right up there in the top 5% most long-lived e-zines ever published. Two issues isn't much, but a new year's resolution that says "publish 48 issues" sounds a lot more realistic when you write it down before issue #3, rather than before issue #1.
I was more than just a little surprised by how much attention Smog got. I honestly didn't expect it. It came as no surprise that the kind and enthusiastic Gemini community gave Smog a warm welcome. What surprised me was the magnitude. It feels like everyone who was ever on Gemini took the time to write me a message of encouragement, and I am not good enough at this, like, saying words *THING*, to tell you just how happy you've made me!
This has given me tremendous joy and inspiration, and not because it was about Smog per se. Smog is just an e-zine, and I'm not using the word "just" ironically. It's not Phrack of PoC || GTFO. It's barely a blip on the radar. But lots of people still reached out with more than just a token "cool, upvoting". I got questions and suggestions and even our first ad! That tells me people are *doing* things with Gemini. It's not just an attention mill. It's a small but lively community -- one of the small, lively communities that keep the hacker spirit going.
And it's *particularly* during times like these, when the blinkenlights of the Christmas trees briefly outshine the blinkenlights of the data centres, that the human quality of the online universe we all inhabit is worth remembering.
For the past year, "social interaction" on the Internet has come to mean Zoom meetings at work and customer calls. But for some us, its meaning has been completely different, for decades now.
Many of us have friends they've never seen in flesh and bones, whose voice they'd never heard and whose hand they'd never shook. BBS-es, IRC, ICQ, the plethora of IM programs that followed, web forums, the Fediverse -- and, like it or not, yep, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter -- have brought so many of us together, in ways that no other technology ever could.
And to some of us, this has been not just a fun pastime, but a refuge in times of loneliness, a place where everyone who'd ever been branded a misfit could, nonetheless, fit and find friends.
So here's to you, to all those who make the cyberspace a place of unbridled curiosity and hope. Enjoy your time with your family and your friends -- and if your life appears to be devoid of either, remember that you are *never* alone out here. Just because I don't know you by name doesn't mean I don't think of you.
Merry Blinkenlights Season, everyone!
The Mare Crisium Soviet Socialist Regency
The Mare Crisium Soviet Socialist Regency is the latest colony in circumlunar space. It joins its sister colonies, the Mare Serenitas Circumlunar Corporate Republic and the Mare Tranquillitatis People's Circumlunar Zaibatsu, as part of the flourishing Circumlunar project.
This is the first colony established after two years. Solderpunk's initial announcement can be found here:
Some of its members have already published a bunch of interesting things. For example, sejo has a cool atom feed generation script here:
and polaris, who some of you may know from thurk.org, has a constructed language that may not spark joy the way Toki Pona does, but still sounds very cool:
I, for one, welcome our new Soviet In^H^HOverl^H^H^H^H^Hfriends!
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Hyperreal Gopher's gopherhole builder
Hyperreal Gopher is working on a Gopherhole builder in Haskell. It's not yet complete and, at the time of writing, the first release isn't out yet, but they are looking for feedback about what features people are looking for in such a builder. Something to keep an eye on!
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Sophon - a wiki server for Gemini
Sophon is a wiki engine written in Go that use a powerful and flexible diff algorithm. It's in its early stages of development, but it's already at the point where it's useful!
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Rocketeer Gemini browser for iOS reaches public beta!
Arcturan Mega-Shadowfacts brings you a brand-new Gemini browser for iOS. Your friendly editor cannot attest to how well it works as all the Apple hardware he owns is of the vintage kind, but I hear good things about it!
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pitr's excellent open-source Gemini client was recently accepted into the App Store. It supports pretty much anything you could ever wish for -- bookmarks, tabs, full history, search, and more!
Minor releases tend to be a bigger deal in XFCE land, a rock-solid, stable environment that publishes infrequent but well-adorned and well-tested releases. XFCE 4.16 includes a considerable number of bugfixes and improvements.
Somewhat related:
IceWM and XFCE both hark from a very different era of free and open source desktop development. Many would call them obsolete, but they have a steady and silent user base that enjoys their stable, steady progress.
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Microsoft is investigating using custom ARM chips for servers
According to a Bloomberg report, Microsoft is now working on a custom ARM design for the servers that power its cloud workloads. The same Bloomberg source reports that Microsoft is also exploring such a chip for its Surface line.
This is interesting news because it allows us a glimpse at Microsoft's priorities. Designing custom CPUs that compete with Intel's CPUs for intensive -- even if specialized! -- workloads is expensive and long-winded. Only business units with the Crown Jewel rating get to dump money into that. Clearly, Microsoft's crown jewel is Azure.
Not that we didn't know it already but it shows a certain level of commitment to that idea.
--
Well, it's so thick you might as well use it for concrete now. It turns out Intel, Nvidia, Cisco, Belink, VMware, the US Treasury, Commerce, State, Energy, and Homeland Security departments, are only some of the organisations that have been affected by the SolarWinds breach. According to SolarWinds, "fewer than 18,000" organisations were affected which is certainly a relief, I was afraid they'd be like 20,000 of them but yeah, 18,000 is fine, it's barely a blip on the radar at this point.
If you think *that* could've been handled it better, just you wait:
SolarWinds tried to hide the list of breached customers
That backfired the way you expect it to backfire. I'd say we're about three high-level breaches before we have major corporations joining the fight for the right to be forgotten. I'm a hopeless optimist!
SolarWinds apparently had a big target painted on its back:
A second hacking team was targeting SolarWinds at the time of the big breach
Told you we'd return to this story real soon!
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Oracle's hidden hand is behind the Google antitrust lawsuits
According to a story initial reported by Bloomberg, Oracle may have played a role in the recent flurry of antitrust suits brought against Google. This wouldn't be surprising -- but revealing that an evil rival is behind all this also sounds like a PR hand that Google would gladly play. Their public perception isn't great but they're still at a point where most people would say hey, at least they're not *Oracle*. That's something worth keeping in mind through it all. Whether Oracle brought it up or not isn't something that ought to be relevant when it comes to whether Google broke the law or not.
My knee-jerk reaction was to try to find something poetic about two evil empires devouring each other but I think that would be grandiloquent...
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4. The Free Internet
by littlejohn <littlejohn@sdf.org>
Almost one week has passed since I announced the first issue of Smog on the Gemini mailing list. At the time, I mentioned that the first issue is devoid of grand statements of vision -- given the ephemeral nature of e-zines, I figured it was a good idea to save those for the second issue. Well, you're reading the second issue, so I figured it's as good a time as any to tell you what that "Free Internet" punchline is about.
/** * The original slogan I came up with was "The Free Internet's Second-Favourite * e-zine" but I figured that was presumptuous... */
If I were to make two lists, one called "things I don't miss about the Internet of the '90s" and one with "things I miss about the Internet of the '90s", the former would definitely be longer. Do you remember ActiveX? The Flash plug-in? Dial-up? MIDI blaring out of your speakers after clicking the wrong link?
The list of things I do miss would porbably have just one item: creativity in plain sight.
This whole Internet thing was new to most of us, so we were uninhibited about "the right way" to do things. Needless to say, this consistently yielded "cool" results, but the engineering quality and the viability of business models was more hit-and-miss. The former, though, is inherent to any new technology, and the latter wasn't a problem in many cases: lots of things were there *just because we could*.
Many successful early projects, both community projects and commercial ventures, challenged some aspect of conventional wisdom in some way. IUMA, the Internet Underground Music Archive, is a good example. IUMA was born by grafting the ideals of music fans and small artists on top of a new distribution technology, yielding something that quacked like a record company, walked like a record company, but was a completely different species.
Of course, there were plenty of ventures that were nothing more than "just like X, BUT ONLINE" -- they flourished, briefly, and then died off, quite spectacularly, right after Y2K.
But there was no established wisdom on how to do things and, thus, no heresy to be committed. There was an ever-present feeling that some revolution was always just around the corner.
At some point -- and this is probably something that happens to all technologies when they "come of age" and find mass adoption among those who aren't tech enthusiasts -- we exchanged that mindframe for one that favoured conformance over usefulness and originality.
The design of a new application, sorry, I meant *app*, the way your homepage looks, the way the app's icon looks -- all of these things, and more, will be judged not by their intrinsic value or functionality, but by how they conform to some "right way".
The next revolution is still right around the corner, but it never comes. Conditioned by daily stand-ups, infinite-scrolling timelines with news about whatever Elon "Space Karen" Musk did this time, and tech publications that are by now largely indistinguishable from press release fractional distillation installations, the Internet community at large would stare revolution right in the eye and wonder what the big deal is, I mean, it doesn't even appear to be monetized. One of these days someone will come up with a holographic projector and hundreds of designers will say it's terrible because it's not flat enough.
But not everyone has adopted this mindframe. All around the world, some people are still doing things that seem every kind of wrong, but if you take the time to ask them why they are the way they are, *they kindda seem to have a point*.
Their projects have little or no big commercial backing, although they sometimes have the financial backing of their fans. They aren't grand, all-encompassing platforms with a unified design visions, but they *work*, and they get better every day, one impossible thing at a time.
Gemini is a good example, and the reason why Smog is published over this protocol. Sourcehut is another good example (and you can tell I like it because I am willing to mention it despite its creator's abhorrent preferences in terms of text editors).
I've taken to calling this community -- or, rather, this loose association of communities around Fediverse servers, pubnixes, various FOSS projects, and so on -- the Free Internet.
It's not free as in beer, or free as in it will lecture you about the danger of proprietary software (although some of its members will and it's okay, I still like you just the way you are!). It's free as in unfettered by the Internet's technological norms.
It's the Internet of creators and tinkerers of every kind, and I don't mean just in the *technical* sense. Have a look at mastodon.art: you'll find musicians, graphical artists, entertainers, writers, poets, and many, many more.
Many of these people herd Kubernetes containers, or wrangle with Node.js microservices that have 400 lines of code and 500 dependencies, or keep the Zoom call wheels spinning, or write hype-y landing pages, or fiddle with Excel sheets, all day. But they get home and, over dinner, they figure out there's *got* to be more to technology than that.
And they're right: their dreamy, bold minds are free in a way that's incompatible with Silicon Valley's status quo. They are the inhabitants, and the makers, of the Free Internet.
("Back" as in "All the cool kids sit in the back of the class")
Back to the '70s with Serverless by Cees de Groot
Cees de Groot has an extremely interesting personal analysis of the latest episode of "everything in tech happens in cycles" -- serverless. I share both the author's reverence for Smalltalk and their grim prediction for the next episode in that series. On the bright side, now that this field has been disrupted to death, it looks like it is now ripe for a new generation of consultants if you are into that!
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My prayers have been answered!
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Brandon Azad from Project Zero has a wonderful, in-depth story about the writing a kernel exploit for Android. It's a very interesting read, with a lot of details and -- something rare in the age of copy-paste tutorials -- a very careful explanation of the though process that went behind it.
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. > ------------------------------------------------------------------------
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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!)