Tag: Imported Post

Originally posted somewhere else (ex. a blog I don’t use anymore, or a social networking site) and moved here sometime later. Usually keeping the original posting date.

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I have very few memories of Gopher when it was current. It was already on its way out when I started college. The course catalogs and a few other things were available, but not much else, and if they ever offered student gopher space, I don’t remember it. I don’t even remember for sure if the student web space was available my first year or if they added that the second year.

So I missed Gopher’s heyday (such as it was). And I was fully enmeshed in the blogosphere when the gopher revival started. I hadn’t even heard of a “phlog” until I discovered the Gemini Protocol in 2021, and read about how in a way it was a reaction to that Gopher revival, trying to build something that was almost as simple, but with a few key features backported from the web. (Hyperlinks, some very minimal formatting, TLS to prevent eavesdropping, and general user input.)

I got out of Gemini for a while as I focused on my website again, then came back to it (but not as thoroughly). A blog post by Brennan Kenneth Brown, Gemini, Gophers and Fingers, Oh My! got me thinking about Gopher again.

And then I got stopped by the most trivial stumbling block ever: Naming. I felt like I needed to set up a Gopher presence before really diving in. And I wanted to just use my domain name like I do with my website and Gemini capsule…but Gopher listens on a protected port. That means I can’t run a server in the userspace on my webhost. I have to run it on something I have root access to (or else let someone else manage the software, which I probably should’ve started with). And the idea of typing this:

	gopher gopher://gopher.kvibber.com

just seemed absurd.

(Then again, maybe it’s not that trivial. There’s a reason for the classic phrase about the only really hard problems in computing being naming things and cache invalidation. And off-by-one errors.)

Eventually I got around to asking on the Fediverse, a place with a large population of Old Internet People like myself (and older): What naming conventions did people use for Gopher sites back then?

The consensus was that most sites just used a gopher prefix.

Though I did contemplate some sort of pun like pocket or botta (as in Botta’s Pocket Gopher, the most common one I see here in the Los Angeles area according to the rare photo I catch and post to iNaturalist).

Anyway, a follow-up to Brown’s post the other day prompted me to just build something.

I pointed gopher.kvibber.com to one of my VPSes, picked a reasonably current (by Gopher standards) piece of server software (Gophernicus, latest release 2020), and promptly discovered that not only is Gophernicus not available directly in Alpine Linux, but it relies on a system network listener (inetd, xinetd, systemd), and Alpine doesn’t install any of those by default. So
I figured out how to get inetd running on Alpine, built Gophernicus and started it up.

I’ve pulled in a few pages from my Gemini capsule to start with. And now that I have that place to start, I feel like going exploring.

Originally posted on gopher.kvibber.com.

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This is kind of funny. When I watched the movie Avatar way back in 2009, I was struck by the similarity of the premise to Timothy Zahn’s 2002 novel Manta’s Gift:

The main character, a human who’s suffered a severely disabling injury, is offered the chance to place his consciousness into an alien body and report back to the human expedition. Over the course of his time there, he finds that he has more in common with the aliens than with the humans who sent him, and pushes back against their exploitative agenda.

OK, so it’s a brain transplant, not a neural link, and it’s manta-like beings who live in the groundless atmosphere of Jupiter, not humanoids who are part of a literal Gaia.

I just discovered that the book was re-issued in 2020 (Timothy Zahn, 2002) with a tagline describing it as “A gripping first-contact adventure for fans of James Cameron’s Avatar…”

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In retrospect, it’s wild that so many tech people who were hyper-aware of the fact that Microsoft’s dominance in the 1990s and 2000s was due to more to marketing (“never underestimate Microsoft on marketing”) than technical merits…fell for the idea that a “marketplace of ideas” would coalesce around the best ideas, and not just the loudest ones.

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Interesting spam/phish technique: Look for subdomains with CNAMEs or SPF records that point to abandoned domains that you can then register…and effectively take control of the subdomain or SPF.

They haven’t seen any cases where it’s been used to host a phishing site at, say, an msn.com subdomain, but they’ve seen thousands of cases where it’s been used to pass email verification checks.

The article describing “SubdoMailing” gives a detailed example of a spam that made use of an msn.com subdomain that was used for a sweepstakes way back in 2001, with a CNAME pointing to the long-abandoned domain name for the contest, but the subdomain was never actually deleted.

Lesson: check your DNS for any dangling references to outside domains that might not exist anymore!

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I’ve been meaning to disconnect from Jetpack for a while now. This seems like a good time to do it, and to finally clear out the older Tumblr and WordPress.com blogs I don’t use anymore.

Tumblr and WordPress to Sell Users’ Data to Train AI Tools — 404 Media

It’s the kind of thing that you expect from Google or Facebook, or from any number of start-ups, but there’s been this sense that Automattic should know better — and with Tumblr being login-walled and ad-saturated, and the push to upsell in their WordPress plugins, and now this…it’s looking like they don’t.

I don’t think they’ve hit the “trust thermocline” yet, but selling user data is a pretty clear line.

As for AI access to the Firehose: My previous understanding of the firehose is that it’s basically an aggregation of what you’d see in a bunch of blogs’ public RSS feeds. Which, OK, fine. Analyze your heart out. Display my posts in your RSS reader. Just make sure private posts and comments don’t leak.

But LLM training isn’t the same as analytics, or showing a properly attributed post in a reader. And quietly changing the terms to allow more kinds of re-use on something most people using the service don’t know about? Not cool.

And not making it clear what is and isn’t included for which purposes? That breaks down trust.

Before this, I wasn’t worried about the Firehose. But now I’m not sure I can trust Akismet, never mind Jetpack, and I’m looking for a new spam filter.

Originally posted across several threads through my GoToSocial test site.

Update: Automattic did clarify that self-hosted blogs with Jetpack are not included in the training data. Only company-hosted blogs on Tumblr and WordPress.com. But I still uninstalled Jetpack from this site, just to be sure. Like I said, I’d been meaning to for a while.

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Option 1: will do some things you want, and some things you don’t.

Option 2: won’t do anything you want, will do all the same things you don’t want that option 1 will do, has promised to do more things you don’t want, undo the things you wanted that have already happened, make it more difficult for you to even have these choices in the future, and has previously demonstrated that they’re willing to go through with all of the above.

And yet I keep seeing people say they’re the same picture???

Really????

It’s like…you need to hire someone to fix your heater. One contractor will fix your heater for the advertised price, but break some of your windows in the process and stop taking your phone calls. The other will rip out your entire heating system and your plumbing, and steal the copper phone lines to make it hard for you to call someone else (I know, outdated metaphor), insist that you broke it yourself and charge extra. And they’ll break your windows too.

A bunch of reviews point out that both of them will break your windows, so they can’t be all that different, right?

It would be great to find someone who would fix your heat without breaking your windows! But there’s a glass factory in town that wants more business and gives all the local contractors kickbacks, so your best bet for that is to hire someone from out of town…but they’re booked until summer.

So you can either go with the one who’ll break things even more, or the one who will fix some things and break others, and then deal with the breakage while you still have heating, plumbing, and a working phone.

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