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1. Opening Thoughts: The Hardest Part of Any Journey
2. Gemini and Gopherspace News
3. Tech News
4. Smog; An Independent E-Zine, by littlejohn
5. Editor's Notes: Get Published, Ads, and More, by littlejohn
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.
Wait are you serious did you really start an e-zine? In 2020?
I did but that has nothing to do with being serious!
by littlejohn <littlejohn@sdf.org>
Good morning, dear readers, Gemini and Gopher fans, independent techies and non-techies alike!
You are reading the first issue of Smog: The Saturday MOrning Gemzine, the first Gemini e-zine of the Free Internet.
(I know it's not morning everywhere, that's just a figure of speech, you see!)
Smog is an independent, non-commercial e-zine that aims to be your companion through the surveillance-free, independent-minded Internet universe. It will include news, reviews, art, and every other sort of information about Gemini, Gopher, Unix, indie software development and many more.
It's no coincidence that Smog is published on Gemini. Smog is to the large tech websites as Gemini space is to the WWW. It's an independent, small zine, decoupled from the content mill of the modern web, devoid of SEO efforts, a magazine that attempts to build bridges among communities. Smog seeks to encourage its readers to make new things and tinker with old ones, rather than to monetize their lunch breaks and their I-can't-take-this-crap-anymore bouts of procrastination.
Smog is published (almost) every week on Saturday morning. The last issue of every month (except for December 2020, most likely) will be a larger issue, with original articles, tutorials, op-eds and other goodies!
The ephemeral nature of e-zines is well known so I will not make any promises on that front, but you know what they say: the hardest part of any journey is making it past the doorstep.
Castor 9: A plan9 Gemini browser
Julien Blanchard wrote a great Gemini browser for the Plan 9 operating system. I haven't tried it *yet* as I want to avoid the Plan 9 Black Hole of Free Time for a while but if any of you are sucked in already, you might as well check it out while you're there!
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Jon wrote a very small, self-contained and elegant monitoring service for Gemini capsules.
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Stephane Bortzmeyer announced Lupa, a Gemini crawler that maps the Gemini space for research and statistics. Lupa is not a search engine -- it only stores metadata and its aims are altogether different. Its author is also publishing the stats that Lupa has gathered so far. The stats, I dare say, are even more interesting than the program!
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https://github.com/LukeEmmet/SmolNetSharp
SmolNetSharp is a Gopher and Gemini client library for C#. It comes with a simple demo to help you get started. The library is very neat and easy to pick up. Yours truly hasn't written any C# code since back when C# 2.0 was fresh, and I got a client up and running in no time.
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The Future of general-purpose computing
Jake Edge runs an excellent analysis of the recent Apple OCSP server failure kerfuffle. The real gem, though, is in Dave Heinemeier Hansson's tweet:
The whole process of having Apple mix these “protections against malware” into a system that’s also a “protection of our business model” remains deeply problematic. [..] We need to remain vigilant, and resist these power grabs masquerading purely as benevolent security measures. Yes, there are security benefits. No, we don’t trust Apple to dictate whether our computers should be allowed to run a piece of software. We already lost that on iOS.
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Suspected Russian hackers spied on U.S. Treasury emails - sources
A supply chain attack whose initial target was SolarWinds' Orion platform enabled foreign agents to exploit what could be one of the most spectacular security breaches in recent history. The extent of the breach -- and the exact identity of those who exploited it -- are not known yet. The National Telecommunications and Information Agency (NTIA) was definitely affected, as far as we know, but the extent of the hack is still being investigated.
Just a few days later, Microsoft announced it was affected, too
This is an event that will have far-reaching consequences and it's very likely that this is not the last time you'll be reading about it in the Smog...
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The venerable GTK toolkit has reached its 4.0 version. Most of us would rather not remember the early days of the 3.x series. Here's hoping the early days of GTK 4.x will be of a completely different nature!
There's certainly a lot to be on the lookout for in GTK 4.0. Some of the interesting changes include:
A simplified accessibility model
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William Woodruff has an exceptional analysis of the static calls mechanism introduced in Linux 5.10. Static calls are a replacement for global function pointers, intended to alleviate the performance impact of some Spectre mitigations. While the mechanism is certainly architecture-specific, I warmly encourage even those of you who don't really care about x86 anymore to have a look. The general principles may be of relevance well beyond Spectre.
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by littlejohn <littlejohn@sdf.org>
I will gladly publish material from Smog's readers, as long as it's not illegal or offensive, and if you are willing to license it under a license that does not prohibit free, non-commercial distribution and derivative works. I suggest the Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license, which adds a few more restrictions on top of that, but I'm happy with whatever other license that allows non-commercial distribution and derivative works.
If English isn't your native language, or if you're afraid you're not a good writer, please don't worry about it. I will help you polish your article, and besides, this isn't The New York Times.
In-depth technical content is encouraged, as well as art that somehow takes advantage of Gemini's or Gopher's text-only nature -- ASCII art, good-quality fiction and so on. But I will gladly publish anything that might be of interest to the Free Internet community.
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.
Your name and email address will not be published, and I will edit your letter to fix any obvious grammar or spelling errors that might make it easier to identify who sent them. But I will obviously respect your wishes if you don't want to see your letter published.
Smog runs ads 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.
I will generally say *yes* to any ad that's not illegal or offensive if:
I don't plan to say "no" to anything that's legal and civil.
Ads are published in a random order. I can run an ad for up to 4 consecutive issues, and they will get shuffled each time. Donation calls for good causes are the only exception: they will always be published at the top of the ads section, and I can run them for as long as necessary.
Please note that ads will be printed in a section that starts with a big "no endorsement" fine print.
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 -- as long as the result is no bigger than 72 lines x 8 columns. Links will have to be copy-pasted by your readers.
If you'd like to see your ad here, drop me a line on littlejohn@sdf.org.