💾 Archived View for rawtext.club › ~sloum › geminilist › 005531.gmi captured on 2023-11-14 at 10:02:12. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2021-11-30)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Bradley D. Thornton Bradley at NorthTech.US
Tue Feb 23 19:19:31 GMT 2021
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
On 2/22/2021 6:21 PM, Jason McBrayer wrote:
Dave Cottlehuber writes:
403 Forbidden is ideal for this, or one of the 50x error codes. In
practice most systems will retry a 50x request but not a 403.
I feel that by analogy, status code 418 might be appropriate.
Oh Jason you beat me to the punch lolz.
Yes I was just this very minute playing with ASCII-art generators for akewl teapot response page delivered with status code 20.
I figured I might need this after checking a few webproxies. somerespect robots.txt, some don't. I understand that some of those authorsmay not view their proxy as a bot, but middleware it is. It may not haveever occured to them to accommodate that part of the spec.
to further complicate things where my philosophy is concerned, and thiswas pointed out yesterday or so with the explanation as to what exactlya "webproxy" is, due to the necessarily vague verbiage in the spec.
What if, Someone uses something like what Bitreich has with their SSHkiosk, to enable people to burrow Gopherholes? I've actually thought ofdeploying a service like this for Gemini...
But if I authored such a thing, I myself would have to say that yes, I'mgoing to have to consider my product a webproxy and not violate aDisallow rule for webproxy user agents.
And certainly, my specific intent here is not to stymie that sort ofvehicle. My beef, is I don't want any of the unique content that Ipublish in Gopher space or Gemini space leaking to HTTP space. I justloathe the thought of that - What purpose does Gopher or Gemini havewhere the client side is concerned if it's just going to be published inHTML.
In fact, I rarely, and I mean rarely ever publish anything in HTTP spacethat exists in either Gopher or Gemini space. I maintained a packagerepo containing well over ten thousand slackware packages back in theSlackware 9 and 10 days, and none of those packages were obtainable viaHTTP - only gopher.
To me (no point in debating me on this as it's simply how I feel aboutit), having "Unique" content in a particular aspect of a network breedsrelevance for the usage of that space. With Gemini, I see much morepotential than simple phlogs in Gemini capsules here in the future.
But enough of why I feel that it's important enough for me to be kinda adik about it with respect to the way I brought it up the other day. Itry to be a lot nicer than that most of the time lolz.
Now I'm just thinking of my own properties in the following, so it mayor may not be applicable or attractive to others now or in the future -or NOT. Either way is kewl :)
So short of /dev/null routing tables, I think a CIDR based event handlerfor Vger might be worth a go, because as it has been pointed out, it'san actual user that will receive the page for all of those URLs. Insteadof baking this into the the daemon of Vger, perhaps it would be moreelegant to forward the packets to another Gemini service with somethinglike go-mmproxy and simply serve a single page with that HTTP 418graphic for any and all requests?
I'll still have to manually hunt down the offending webproxy bots thatrefuse to comply with the published spec:
gemini://gemini.circumlunar.space/docs/companion/robots.gmi
But that's not so difficult, since most are eager to advertise as apublic service (and most with good intentions, to be certain).
I'm long past being angry about it. Now it just feels like a fun littletinkering project to play around with. This problem is not unique toGemini space - the bat bot phenomenon has plagued the HTTP space fordecades, but as the spec points out, it's different with Gemini, becausethere's no user agent to assist in the identification process.
Although I think serving a .gmi with an HTTP 418 graphic is quitehilarious, there's an undercurrent that is sinister on another,non-technical level.
I have wanted to believe that I can incorporate copyright law into thethings that I personally wish to share with the world by using thingslike the GPL v2 (and in some instances the AGPL) or with a CC-BY-SA. Butthis matter has me questioning if that's going to afford others (andmyself) the protections I choose for my works.
Do I need to do something like "Copyright 2021 all rights reserved?" orwill simply racheting things up a little bit to a CC-BY-ND legallyprotect my intellectual property from being converted into HTML?
And what about the other user agents? Search engines like Gus andHouston? Will they think that maybe they shouldn't crawl and indexservers that state that webproxies aren't welcome - I certainly don'twish for that to happen, those are not simply valuable services to thecommunity, but in the coming years they're going to be vital.
And what about the archiver agetns? are they going to store theirresults in space that includes HTTP servers?
It's potentially a whole can "O" worms.
My position is quite simple. I don't want ANYONE to be able to read,surf or access content on Vger from a web browser via HTTP protocol.This of course, excludes plugins like Geminize, because the user isactually using native Gemini protocol to access Gemini space.
Very simple concept to me. It makes Gopher more valuable. it makesGemini more valuable (provided the content is worth visiting via thenative protocols).
And I really don't want people to have to adhere to a "No Derivitive"clause in a creative commons license. I want them to be able to take mytoys and edit them and share them with others in a form that suits thegreater good (Yes, even if that means they put that shit on a webserver - they just have to retrieve it via Gemini or Gopher client).
I really don't know the answers to all of the questions that may raise,and maybe that's where the discussion should go, coz I don't see anyroadblocks adressing this technically, or in a neighborly fashion. It'sthe people who choose an immoral approach that may beg of licensing andcopyright discussions.
But in the end... Hey man, what do I know? I'm just a teapot :)
Kindest regards,
-- Bradley D. ThorntonManager Network Serviceshttp://NorthTech.USTEL: +1.310.421.8268