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[off-topic] [tech] talkat

mbays mbays at sdf.org

Sat Oct 2 11:41:26 BST 2021

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Apologies to those who already saw my glogposts on this. Nothing much new here.

I've been thinking for a while that it should be possible to repeat Gemini's trick of updating a classic protocol (gopher) to take into account the realities of the modern internet -- its international character, meaning unicode support is essential, and mass surveillance, meaning solid encryption and authentication are also necessary -- while aiming for maximal simplicity, and keeping it inextensible to avoid the potential for future complexity.

A couple of months ago, I realised that unix talk would make a great candidate for this kind of update, and now I've completed my attempt at that. Like gemini, it consists of little more than TLS+UTF8.

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gemini://gemini.thegonz.net/talkat/spec.gmi Spec=
gemini://gemini.thegonz.net/htalkat/ Implementation in Haskell

Maybe people here could be interested in playing with it, picking holes in it, or even writing their own implementations. All would be welcome!

Meanwhile, any thoughts on what else could do with geminification?-------------- next part --------------A non-text attachment was scrubbed...Name: signature.ascType: application/pgp-signatureSize: 195 bytesDesc: not availableURL: <https://lists.orbitalfox.eu/archives/gemini/attachments/20211002/19a54162/attachment.sig>