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1. Opening Thoughts: What Would Success Look Like, by littlejohn
2. Gemini and Gopherspace News
3. Tech News
4. Cyberspace Musings
5. Letters From Our Readers
6. Classifieds
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.
Best viewed under xterm.
by littlejohn <littlejohn@sdf.org>
Happy New Year, everyone! 2020 just went out through the back door. Unfortunately, it hasn't picked up its thrash -- that's still up to us to do! -- but at least we have a good excuse to rejoice and be merry. After the year we've had, I'll take any excuse for that, thank you very much!
I've been fortunate enough to have *two* good reasons for that in the last couple of day. This week marked one of the happiest events in Smog's (so far short) life: its first mirror. Over a protocol other than Gemini. Finger, to be precise. No, really, check it out: finger smog@typed-hole.org.
This is a big deal for me. Not because it means more people will read Smog, although that's obviously something I'm happy about, but because it means it's prompted someone to try something new. I've barely been at it for three weeks, and someone already read Smog and thought okay, I'm going to do something fun with it.
How many readers a publication has is a success metric that's taken pretty much for granted. In and of itself, it's just a vanity metric. It's relevant because it gives you a base figure for other, "more important" things. How many people your message can read and influence. How many people see the ads you publish. More recently -- since, presumably, people won't spend too much time reading things they aren't interested in -- how big the targeted advertising base is and how much behavioural data you can siphon and cross-correlate.
Obviously, these are all moot points for Smog.
The overlap between "people interested in Gemini" and "people with malfunctioning corporate bullshit detectors" is probably negligible. Smog's is a skeptical audience that's disproportionately difficult to "influence", especially when you factor in how small it is anyway.
Smog runs ads, but it runs them for free. The size of Smog's reader base would constitute leverage, but *for what*? The price is the same whether it's two people seeing the ads or two million (hey, Gemini - HTTP gateways are a thing, yeah?)
As for personal data: first of all, Gemini lacks the means to gather enough of it to make it useful. But even if it develops it in the future, targeted advertising would never make it to Smog, not just because I *personally* think it's a parasitic piece of technology that I want to have no part in and no dealings with, but also because it would be a really stupid move. Being able to escape the content churning mill of the targeted advertising industry is one of the reasons why people are on Gemini in the first place. If someone attempted to exploit Smog's reader base through that, it would vanish in an instant. The fact that said reader base is probably a dozen people certainly helps, too :-).
So what would constitute success, then? If I were to sit here on January 1st 2022 and look back upon 2021, how would I know if it were a successful year for Smog?
I think the right measure of Smog's success would be inspiration. How many people did Smog nudge towards, or help, or inspired to try new things, to experiment with something, to hack something?
That's why Smog's finger mirror is a big deal for me. As far as I know, it's the first piece of tinkering that Smog inspired, and I hope many others will follow.
Needless to say, this isn't easy to measure, but I also have no stakeholders to hold me accountable for it. Nobody is going to demand inspiration metrics and gather six other suits in a room to discuss if I carried out our inspiration-driving objectives.
This belief, that the ultimate usefulness of a written publication is in disseminating ideas and inspiring others, rather than in the immediate profit it creates for its publishers, is what "fueled" many of the decisions behind Smog. It's why Smog is permissively-licensed (minus the commercial distribution catch, that I wrestled with for a while but eventually left in as a useful safeguard). It's why derivative work is not just allowed, but explicitly encouraged. It's why Smog run ads for free.
But this approach isn't (just) a cultural statement. I'm not a disgruntled, burnt-out journalist showing a middle finger to the rich publishing industry bosses (I'm not a journalist in the first place, and I'm not going to waste precious calories raising the middle finger to some rich publishing exec!) I actually think *this* is a good recipe for publishing something that people want to read.
If you build something specifically in order to facilitate the dissemination work of PR departments in the tech industry and to sell ads, you're going to come up with something that's not really good for anything else. Eventually, publications that optimize for that devolve to things that only people from the PR and advertising industries read, precisely so that they can see what other PR and ads people do.
If you build something specifically *in order to disseminate ideas*, you will inherently end up publishing things that are worth reading, assuming, of course, that you do it right. If you're also seeking some sort of profit, you can successfully piggyback ads on top of that, and you'll have the right-sized reader base.
So if you're reading Smog these days and want to do something neat, whether it involves Smog or not, why wait? Go do it, and drop me a line to tell me about it, too. I'm *always* going to be boastful about things Smog's readers do!
John Lemme came up with a very neat messageboard/link aggregator with support for threaded comments -- sort of like Reddit, minus the "View this community in our app" pop-up, and you won't have to go to old.bearforceone.net/outpost to *actually use it*. Check it out!
---
Call For Ideas: Making Geminispace Social
As you've certainly seen countless times, many Gemlog posts are written in response to other Gemlog posts. But there is currently no standard way to embed that information in a post. Thus, you can't easily to do things like automatically "ping back" the original author, or find other posts made in response to the same original post.
ew0k, whom you may know from the Garden Gnome project, is investigating a way to preserve and augment the "social" ties behind Gemlog posts, and has a lot of interesting points to make!
---
Version 0.4.0 of the Tinmop Gemini and Pleroma client has just been released. This version includes several bugfixes, scripts, and new features.
---
LC19, a simple Gemini server that follows the USCPI model, has just been made available by its author. It's a simple, clean tool written in a very Unix-y style.
---
The Random Road Gemini Directory
The Random Road Gemini Directory is a manually curated directory of Gemini capsules. Its author mentions that it was inspired by the CommunityWiki 'Trunk' for Mastodon accounts, but for some of us it might be reminiscent of something else -- that long-lost gem called The Open Directory Project.
---
Gneto: a personal Gemini proxy
Gneto is a very neat tool that runs a Gemini <-> HTTP proxy on a local port. It's not meant to build a *public* gateway -- it runs a *local* proxy. Think ofit as a local instance of proxy.vulpes.one or portal.muzz.us, just for your own use. Check it out!
---
Adobe Flash Player is now truly, finally, really, really, dead. For real.
The venerable Flash Player was officially EOL-ed on December 31st 2020, and running Flash content in the plug-in will be blocked after January 12th. It's been a long and wild ride.
Loathsome though this closed-source, bug-ridden, CVE museum plug-in may be, IMHO the HTML5 era hasn't yet produced anything that comes close to how accessible and flexible Flash was. The open technology behind modern web browsers is certainly a progress in technical terms, but replicating things that took a few hours to make in Flash is still a week-long CSS hacking effort that frequently produces disappointing results.
If it's the Flash games that you miss, you'll probably want to go here:
The Flashpoint webgame preservation project
---
Images of the samples from Ryugu have been posted on the Hayabusa2 project website. Yes, I know they're rocks, but they're not *just* rocks!
---
Corellium wins lawsuit against Apple
The latest episode of "You Don't Need No Law Degree, Common Sense will Suffice" has Corellium, a security company that developed what is, essentially, an iPhone emulator, win a completely bollocks suit that Apple filled for reasons that aren't very easy to discern in the first place, but presumably have something to do with their failure to acquire Corellium back in 2018.
Apple, according to the Washington Post's excellent summary, argued that "Corellium's products could be dangerous if they fall into the wrong hands because security flaws discovered by Corellium could be used to hack iPhones". That would be especially problematic, as "Corellium sells it product indiscriminately". Judge Rodeny Smith graciously called these claims "puzzling, if not disingenuous": the "virtual iPhones" meet the fair use definition, and it turned out that Corellium does, in fact, vet its customers, too.
"Puzzling, if not disingenuous" is, apparently, legalese for bullshit, and I intend to call it nothing but *that* from now on!
---
Intel urged to consider outsourcing CPU manufacturing
Spurred by the rather unsatisfying performance of Intel's shares, Third Point, who quite literally holds a billion-dollar stake in Intel, has very publicly urged Intel's CEO to consider a number of measures that ought to improve their increasingly difficult situation.
The most important suggestions mentioned in the letter are outsourcing the CPU manufacturing business and divesting "certain failed acquisitions" -- the letter doesn't mention which ones, but I'm just saying, have you heard about anything useful ever coming out of the Altera acquisition?
Intel's position is certainly unenviable. Its leading position in terms of manufacturing has slowly eroded until it gave way to Samsung and TSMC. AMD, its main competitor in the PC industry, directly benefits from this, as they contract TSMC for their manufacturing. Their CPUs are also being pushed off Apple's product line.
Whether this would help Intel or Third Point is, of course, a completely different matter. They might be on to something. Or it might just be some of the usual hedge fund, uh, puzzling, if not disingenuous talk.
You can read the full letter here.
---
("Back" as in "All the cool kids sit in the back of the class")
How and Why I Stopped Buying New Laptops
Your friendly editor was scatter-brained enough that he forgot to link to this wonderful nugget of environment-friendly information back when it was fresh. But it's worth reading it at any time!
---
The Register sums up the latest on Apple's ongoing AppStore trouble. As always, there are two sides to every story -- but since on of these sides is Apple's, there's a good chance that side is mostly puzzling, if not disingenuous.
---
Writing a Bittorrent engine in Rust
mandreyel has an interesting post on the basic architecture and implementation of crateorrent, a Bittorrent engine written in Rust. It's an interesting read whether you're fluent in Rust or not.
---
~aravk writes to tell us about mblaze:
From: aravk <email redacted>
Hi! SMOG is very cool, and I wanted to share something that I found to
be really helpful: `mblaze`, a suite of maildir manipulation utilities
following the UNIX philosophy (disclaimer: no affiliation). I've tried
aerc, neomutt, and a bunch of web-based interfaces, but this is the only
one that I've really liked. I wrote a blog post about it, describing
common (and cool) use cases with it. I know that everybody has
different opinions about mail and how to handle it, but this is
something I found really effortless to use yet really powerful, which is
why I wanted to share.
=> https://github.com/leahneukirchen/mblaze
=> gemini://gemini.ctrl-c.club/~aravk/blog/2020-12-29-mblaze.gmi
~aravk
P.S: Loving how you're handling SMOG!
I haven't used mblaze (yet!) but I have used other tools written by Leah Neukirchen, and I think her work is nothing short of amazing. I imagine mblaze has to be really good, too.
And, of course, thank you very much for your kind words! Gemini is fueled primarily by reader satisfaction and curiosity -- given the sorry state of user tracking and profiling on Gemini, VC funding is pretty hard to come by.
(That is a very fortunate state of affairs if you ask me.)
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
---
> #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!)