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<title>The Gopher Times</title>
<subtitle type="text">All the best news around gopherspace.</subtitle>
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<updated>2023-08-29T13:22:38+0200</updated>
<entry>
<id>gopher://bitreich.org/9/tgtimes/archive/2021-10-23</id>
<title><![CDATA[2021-10-23]]></title>
<author><name>The Gopher Times Authors</name></author>
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The Gopher Times
____________________________________________________________
Opus 1 - Gopher news and more - Nov. 2021
____________________________________________________________
A Newspaper for Gopher josuah
____________________________________________________________
Starting from today, The Gopher Times is going to be
published. How can a paper-oriented journal make
sense in this hypermedia [1] era?
Rather than a continuous feed of upmost shocking
headlines, The Gopher Times publishes news you can
read without a cookiewall or paywall.
Paper newspapers go through a long chain: reporters,
photographers, redactors, editors, columnists, layout
artists, typesetters, printers, carriers and other
supportive technicians... and are sold for a quarter.
The web considerably shackled the landscape: the high
speed of computers made real-time text news a reality,
where time from Trump's tweet announcements to
publication is below a few hours.
This journal diverts the present norm by 90° by using
troff(1) as its foundation: a typesetter producing
static documents ready to be printed.
A new markdown to troff converter [2] as well as an
entire custom macro set mw [3] are built to fit
screens of all shapes, and build-up the sensibility of
an actual journal.
____________________
[1]
term used by Roy Fielding (Apache httpd)
[2]
git://git.z0.is/notmarkdown
[3]
git://bitreich.org/tgtimes
This month in Nixers Book Club nixers
____________________________________________________________
There are a lot of books in a library, and it is the
role of teachers to build up a sequence of books to
learn a topic. This Nixers.net forum thread follows
the path of Operating System and UNIX working and
design.
The UNIX Programming Environment: from shell scripting
to C programming with UNIX system calls by Kernighan
himself.
https://nixers.net/showthread.php?tid=2390
The UNIX-HATERS Handbook: A semi-humorous edited
compilation of messages to the UNIX-HATERS mailing
list.
https://nixers.net/showthread.php?tid=2417
The Art of Unix Programming: by Eric S. Raymond,
history and culture of Unix programming
https://nixers.net/showthread.php?tid=2466
Computer Science from the Bottom Up: a shop class for
computer science: where do you go to learn what is
under the hood?
https://nixers.net/showthread.php?tid=2508
The good old web nixers
____________________________________________________________
That thread in the Nixers.net forum proposes to
recognize a website given a small screenshot.
Hackers sometimes build webpages for a software
project, a community, even an error page, which never
ever changed. Website appearance sometimes enter deep
into our memories.
We remember places we lived in, faces of people we
met... but also how web pages look? Are web pages
like places we frequently visit? You might be
surprised:
https://nixers.net/Thread-Web-Tag
Analgram Authentication 20h
____________________________________________________________
As you know, bitreich is always ahead of time and
in introducing new technology. We now offer members
the authentication to all services via
gopher://bitreich.org/I/memecache/bitreich-2fa.jpg
Via your analprint scan you are distinguished from
all other humans. No other human has such an analprint
as you have. You are special.
In case you want to authenticate, come on #bitreich-
anal on IRC and send the picture of your analprint. We
call this the analgram authentication. It is secure,
cannot be easily copied and the biometric feature
is hidden for most of your life. No simple photo can
steal this credential.
Current work is done to make this a standard for all
U.S. and EU funded projects and contracts. Hopefully
the future is anal-gram!
Sincerely yours, Chief Backwater Officer (CRO)
BAN Party on 2021-10-03 20h
____________________________________________________________
This Sunday, on 2021-10-03, at 13:00 UTC, we will
have another BAN party, to play the new Supertuxkart
release. There are new tracks, new drivers and more
fun. For this BAN party we set a new time at 1pm, so
friends from America and Australia can join in at a
natural time.
Sincerely yours, Main Gaming Officer (MGO)
BAN Party Results 20h
____________________________________________________________
Today we had a two part BAN party. The first onw
was teeworlds, since this was easily running and
through a community effort openra in the newest
appimage got setup in some virtualbox debianesque
setup on FreeBSD. It really ran. And so in a
combined effort of Dutch Australian and German armies,
we defeated the enemies using all kind of weaponry,
from naval to aircraft units. Long live Bitreich!
Yes, it was very much fun.
Next time with more players we can play even bigger
maps. Everyone is invited!
Sincerely yours, Chief Gaming Officer (CGO)
Other newspaper projects josuah
____________________________________________________________
OpenBSD Webzine: As a complement to undeadly.org, the
OpenBSD Webzine provides a condensed summary of what
is new on OpenBSD.
https://webzine.puffy.cafe/
The Webpage: Aggregation of multiple RSS feeds,
rendered server-side into a paper newspaper looking
page. Similarly to The Gopher Times, the layout of
the document published is static.
https://webzine.puffy.cafe/
Low-Tech Magazine: This magazine published a
simplistic version for its solar-powered server,
with dithered images and other techniques to save
bandwidth and reducing the workload server-side.
https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com
10k Meme BAN party on 2021-10-31 20h
____________________________________________________________
The Bitreich Meme database is approaching 10k memes.
To celebrate this, we will hold a BAN party on
2021-10-31 on 11:00 GMT (12:00 CET). The time is
adapted so bitreich people from America and
Australia can join in at the same time.
Games we will play:
• OpenRA Dune2k, CNC and RA Be sure to have a current
version due to multiplayer protocol changes.
• Teeworlds
• SuperTuxKart on extreme level Be sure to run the
newest version because of new race tracks and
characters.
• Armagetronad
• Wireguard
• Whatever game you like to play.
Everyone is welcome. We will be using a mumble server
for instant audio talk, where the details are
revealed on #bitreich-en on BAN party day. Please
join there to get further details.
Sincerely yours, Chief BAN Officer (CBO)
World of Animals 0x1bi
____________________________________________________________
Back in the nineties when Windowds 3.1 was still very
much a thing, my old man, while doing his post
graduated studies, found this story on some Russian
usenet group, saved it, printed it out, posted it in
his office.
Years later he made the mistake of giving me the
internet. And I found the same story, now on the world
wide web.
I've taken the time to translate the story from
Russian to English such that everyone can enjoy the
gifts of Russian usenet koans.
Enjoy responsibly.
>> Медведь был безобpазным, косолапым и гpязным
животным. Однако добpее его не было никого во всем
лесy. Hо звеpи замечали только его внешность, на что
Медведь жyтко обижался, ловил их и жестоко избивал
ногами. Поэтомy звеpи его не любили. Хотя он был
очень добpым. И веселым. Он любил задоpные шyтки. За
эти шyтки звеpи его скоpо жyтко возненавидели и били.
Да, тpyдно быть на свете добpым и веселым.
The bear was a filthy, clumsy, and dirty animal.
However, no one was as loving as he was in the whole
forest. But the animals only saw his exterior, to
which the bear became upset, caught them, and brutaly
beat them with his legs. Even though he was very
loving. And happy. He loved practical jokes. For these
jokes the animals started to hate the bear and beat
him. Yes, it;s hard to be loving and happy.
>> Волк был тоже безобpазным и гpязным. И еще он был
очень злым и жестоким. Hо звеpи не испытывали к немy
ненависти и не били. Потомy, что Волк yмеp еще в
pаннем детстве. Потомy, что Медведь pодился pаньше
Волка. Да, хоpошо, когда Добpо побеждает Зло.
The wolf was also filthy and dirty. He was also very
evil and cruel. But the animals din't hate him and
didn't beat him. Because the wolf died early in his
childhood. Because the bear was born before the wolf.
Yes, it's good when good triumphs over evil.
>> Заяц тоже был злым и жестоким. И гpязным. И еще он
был тpyсливым. Гадостей Заяц никомy никогда не делал.
Потомy, что боялся. Hо его все pавно сильно били.
Потомy, что Зло всегда должно быть наказано.
The rabbit was also evil and cruel. And dirty. He was
also a coward. The rabbit never commited any evil as
he was scared. But he was still beaten. Because evil
must be punished.
>> И Дятел тоже был злым и жестоким. Он не бил звеpей,
потомy, что y него не было pyк. Поэтомy, он вымещал
свою злость на деpевьях. Его не били. Потомy, что не
могли дотянyться. Однажды его пpидавило насмеpть
yпавшее деpево. Поговаpивали, что оно отомстило.
После этого звеpи целый месяц боялись мочиться на
деpевья. Они мочились на Зайца. Заяц пpостyдился и
yмеp. Всем было ясно, что во всем был виноват Дятел.
Hо его не тpонyли. Посколькy не смогли выковыpять
из-под yпавшего деpева. Да, Зло иногда остается
безнаказанным.
The woodpecker was also evil and cruel. He didn't beat
animals, as he didn't have any arms. So he took his
anger out on trees. He was not beaten, as no one could
reach him. One day a tree crushed him to death. The
animals said it took revenge. After that, then animals
were afraid of pissing on trees for a month. Instead
they pissed on the rabbit. The rabbit got a cold and
died. Everyone knew that the woodpecker was at fault.
But he wasn't beaten, as no one could get him out from
the fallen tree. Yes, sometimes evil remains
unpunished.
>> Кpот был маленьким и слепым. Он не был злым. Он
пpосто хоpошо делал свое дело. Это он подъел деpево,
котоpое yпало на дятла. Об этом никто не yзнал, и
поэтомy его не избили. Его вообще били pедко. Чаще
пyгали. Hо его было очень тpyдно испyгать, потомy что
он был слепой и не видел, что его пyгают. Когда не
yдавалось испyгать Кpота, звеpи очень огоpчались. И
били Медведя. Потомy, что им было очень обидно.
Однажды Медведь тоже захотел испyгать Кpота. Hо Кpот
не испyгался. Потомy, что Медведь его yбил.
Hечаянно. Пpосто Медведь был очень неyклюжим. И
звеpи его очень сильно избили. Даже, несмотpя на то,
что Медведь сказал, что пошyтил. Плохо, когда твои
шyтки никто не понимает.
The mole was small and blind. He was not evil. He just
did his job really well. It was he who dug under the
tree which fell on the woodpecker. No one knew about
his digging and he was not beaten. He was rarely
beaten. More often scared. But it was really hard to
scare him as he was blind, and didn't see that he was
being scared. When the animals were unable to scare
the mole they became very upset. And beat the bear.
One day the bear decided to sacre the mole. But he
didn't scare the mole. Because he killed him.
Accidentally. As he was very clumsy. And the animals
brutally beat him for killing the mole, even though
the bear said it was a prank. It's unfortunate when no
one understands your pranks.
>> Лиса была очень хитpой. Она могла запpосто
обхитpить кого yгодно. Когда ей это yдавалось, то ее
не били. Hо иногда ей не везло. И ее били. Били всем
лесом. И она yже не могла кого-нибyдь обхитpить.
Потомy, что очень тpyдно го-нибyдь обхитpить, когда
тебя бьют. Однажды ее избили до смеpти. Да, жилда
всегда на пpавдy выйдет.
The fox was very cunning. She could easily outsmart
anyone. When she could outsmart someone, she was not
beaten. But when she coudln't, she was beaten. Hard.
And at that point she couldn't outsmart anyone, as
it's hard to outsmart someone when you're being
beaten. One day she was beaten to death. Yes, truth
will always come to light.
>> Кабан был большой, сильный и стpашный. Его все
очень боялись. И поэтомy его били только всем лесом.
Или пpосто кидали в него камнями. Кабан этого очень
не любил. И однажды ночью он спpятал все камни в
лесy. За это его очень сильно избили. Больше Кабан
никогда не пpятал камни. Воистинy говоpят - вpемя
собиpать камни и вpемя их не тpогать никогда.
The boar was big, strong, and scary. Everyone was
scared of him. That is why he was always beaten with
the whole forest. Or simply stoned him. The boar
didn't like that. One day he hid all of the stones in
the forest. For the he was beaten really hard. After
that, the boar never hid stones. And so they say,
there is time to collect stones, and time to not touch
them.
>> Козел не был ни злым, ни добpым. Он был пpосто
Козел. н часто козлил. И его боялись бить. И он
своим козловством всех достал. И тогда его избили до
смеpти. Потомy, что иначе он бы yмеp от стаpости.
Когда-нибyдь. Когда Козел yмеp, Медведь сильно
плакал. Потомy, что он в тайне любил Козла. Да,
любовь зла, полюбишь и Козла.
The goat was neither good nor evil. He was a goat. He
often goated. And the animals were scared of beating
him. With his goatness he got on everyones nerves. And
he was beaten to death, because otherwise he would
have died of old age. Someday. After the goat died,
the bear cried, because he secretly loved the goat.
Yes, love is a cruel mistress.
>> Ежик был маленький и колючий. Он кололся. Он не был
злым, он кололся по своей пpиpоде. Из-за этого его
били только в живот. Ежик этого не любил и стал
бpиться наголо. И тогда его стали бить как всех. Да,
очень тpyдно быть не таким как все.
The hedgehog was small and prickly. He wasn't evil, he
was prickly by his own nature. For that he was beaten
exclusively in the stomach. And so the hedgehog
started shaving bald. And he was beaten like everyone
else. Yes, it's hard to be not like everyone else.
>> Скyнс был почти таким, как Заяц. Hо только очень
нючим. Он плохо пахнyл. Его били только в
полиэтиленовом пакете. Тогда запах был не такой
сильный. Однажды y Скyнса был день pождения. Он
пpигласил всех звеpей, потомy, что был жадным и любил
подаpки. И звеpи подаpили емy новый полиэтиленовый
пакет. И сильно избили до потеpи сознания. И Скyнс
задохнyлся в пакете. Так его и похоpонили. В пакете.
В очень Дальнем Лесy. Потомy, что меpтвый Скyнс вонял
еще сильнее. Потом пpишли жители Очень Дальнего Леса
и в сех сильно избили. Им не понpавился запах
меpтвого Скyнса. Да, с соседями надо жить в миpе.
The skunk was very much like rabbit. But very smelly.
He was beaten only inside a plastic bag, because then
the smell wasn't as bad. One day the skunk had a
birthday party, and he invited all of the animals as
he was greedy and he loved presents. The animals got
him a new plastig bag. And then proceeded to beat him
until loss of consciousness. The skunk then suffocated
inside the bag. That is how he was buried. In the
plastic bag. In the very far away forest, as a dead
skunk smelt worse than a living skunk. Then the
animals from the very far away forest came and beat
everyone hard. They didn't like the smell of the dead
skunk. Yes, you must love your neighbour.
>> Хомяк был тоже очень жадным. И богатым. Если бы он
делился своим богатством, его бы били не так сильно.
Hо он был очень жадным. За это его били сильно. И емy
все pавно пpиходилось делиться. И он гоpько плакал.
Да, богатые тоже плачyт.
The hasmter was also very greedy. And rich. If he
shared his riches he woudn't be beaten as hard. But he
was greedy. And he was beaten hard. And he still had
to share his riches. For that he cried. Yes, even rich
people cry.
>> Лев был цаpь звеpей. Он пpавил лесом. Цаpей бить не
положено. Это закон. Hо звеpи давно забили на закон.
Звеpи били и льва. Hи за что. Потомy, что так yж
здесь повелось.
The lion was king. He ruled the forest. You're not
supposed to beat kings. Such is the law. But the
animals gave a fuck about the law. They beat the lion.
Why? That's just how things go in forest.
>> Моpаль: А зоpи здесь тихие...
Moral: Sunrises here are quiet...
Publishing in The Gopher Times you
____________________________________________________________
Want your article published? Want to announce
something to the Gopher world? Directly related to
Gopher or not, reach us on IRC with an article in any
format, we will handle the rest.
ircs://irc.bitreich.org/#bitreich-en
]]></content>
<updated>2021-10-23T21:09:52+0200</updated>
<link type="application/pdf" href="gopher://bitreich.org/9/tgtimes/archive/2021-10-23/tgtimes-2021-10-23-opus1.pdf" />
</entry>
<entry>
<id>gopher://bitreich.org/9/tgtimes/archive/2021-10-23-errata1</id>
<title><![CDATA[2021-10-23-errata1]]></title>
<author><name>The Gopher Times Authors</name></author>
<content type="text"><![CDATA[
The Gopher Times
____________________________________________________________
Opus 1 - Gopher news and more - Nov. 2021
____________________________________________________________
A Newspaper for Gopher josuah
____________________________________________________________
Starting from today, The Gopher Times is going to be
published. How can a paper-oriented journal make
sense in this hypermedia [1] era?
Rather than a continuous feed of upmost shocking
headlines, The Gopher Times publishes news you can
read without a cookiewall or paywall.
Paper newspapers go through a long chain: reporters,
photographers, redactors, editors, columnists, layout
artists, typesetters, printers, carriers and other
supportive technicians... and are sold for a quarter.
The web considerably shackled the landscape: the high
speed of computers made real-time text news a reality,
where time from Trump's tweet announcements to
publication is below a few hours.
This journal diverts the present norm by 90° by using
troff(1) as its foundation: a typesetter producing
static documents ready to be printed.
A new markdown to troff converter [2] as well as an
entire custom macro set mw [3] are built to fit
screens of all shapes, and build-up the sensibility of
an actual journal.
____________________
[1]
term used by Roy Fielding (Apache httpd)
[2]
git://git.z0.is/notmarkdown
[3]
git://bitreich.org/tgtimes
This month in Nixers Book Club nixers
____________________________________________________________
There are a lot of books in a library, and it is the
role of teachers to build up a sequence of books to
learn a topic. This Nixers.net forum thread follows
the path of Operating System and UNIX working and
design.
The UNIX Programming Environment: from shell scripting
to C programming with UNIX system calls by Kernighan
himself.
https://nixers.net/showthread.php?tid=2390
The UNIX-HATERS Handbook: A semi-humorous edited
compilation of messages to the UNIX-HATERS mailing
list.
https://nixers.net/showthread.php?tid=2417
The Art of Unix Programming: by Eric S. Raymond,
history and culture of Unix programming
https://nixers.net/showthread.php?tid=2466
Computer Science from the Bottom Up: a shop class for
computer science: where do you go to learn what is
under the hood?
https://nixers.net/showthread.php?tid=2508
The good old web nixers
____________________________________________________________
That thread in the Nixers.net forum proposes to
recognize a website given a small screenshot.
Hackers sometimes build webpages for a software
project, a community, even an error page, which never
ever changed. Website appearance sometimes enter deep
into our memories.
We remember places we lived in, faces of people we
met... but also how web pages look? Are web pages
like places we frequently visit? You might be
surprised:
https://nixers.net/Thread-Web-Tag
Analgram Authentication 20h
____________________________________________________________
As you know, bitreich is always ahead of time and
in introducing new technology. We now offer members
the authentication to all services via
gopher://bitreich.org/I/memecache/bitreich-2fa.jpg
Via your analprint scan you are distinguished from
all other humans. No other human has such an analprint
as you have. You are special.
In case you want to authenticate, come on #bitreich-
anal on IRC and send the picture of your analprint. We
call this the analgram authentication. It is secure,
cannot be easily copied and the biometric feature
is hidden for most of your life. No simple photo can
steal this credential.
Current work is done to make this a standard for all
U.S. and EU funded projects and contracts. Hopefully
the future is anal-gram!
Sincerely yours, Chief Backwater Officer (CRO)
BAN Party on 2021-10-03 20h
____________________________________________________________
This Sunday, on 2021-10-03, at 13:00 UTC, we will
have another BAN party, to play the new Supertuxkart
release. There are new tracks, new drivers and more
fun. For this BAN party we set a new time at 1pm, so
friends from America and Australia can join in at a
natural time.
Sincerely yours, Main Gaming Officer (MGO)
BAN Party Results 20h
____________________________________________________________
Today we had a two part BAN party. The first onw
was teeworlds, since this was easily running and
through a community effort openra in the newest
appimage got setup in some virtualbox debianesque
setup on FreeBSD. It really ran. And so in a
combined effort of Dutch Australian and German armies,
we defeated the enemies using all kind of weaponry,
from naval to aircraft units. Long live Bitreich!
Yes, it was very much fun.
Next time with more players we can play even bigger
maps. Everyone is invited!
Sincerely yours, Chief Gaming Officer (CGO)
Other newspaper projects josuah
____________________________________________________________
OpenBSD Webzine: As a complement to undeadly.org, the
OpenBSD Webzine provides a condensed summary of what
is new on OpenBSD.
https://webzine.puffy.cafe/
The Webpage: Aggregation of multiple RSS feeds,
rendered server-side into a paper newspaper looking
page. Similarly to The Gopher Times, the layout of
the document published is static.
https://webzine.puffy.cafe/
Low-Tech Magazine: This magazine published a
simplistic version for its solar-powered server,
with dithered images and other techniques to save
bandwidth and reducing the workload server-side.
https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com
10k Meme BAN party on 2021-10-31 20h
____________________________________________________________
The Bitreich Meme database is approaching 10k memes.
To celebrate this, we will hold a BAN party on
2021-10-31 on 11:00 GMT (12:00 CET). The time is
adapted so bitreich people from America and
Australia can join in at the same time.
Games we will play:
• OpenRA Dune2k, CNC and RA Be sure to have a current
version due to multiplayer protocol changes.
• Teeworlds
• SuperTuxKart on extreme level Be sure to run the
newest version because of new race tracks and
characters.
• Armagetronad
• Wireguard
• Whatever game you like to play.
Everyone is welcome. We will be using a mumble server
for instant audio talk, where the details are
revealed on #bitreich-en on BAN party day. Please
join there to get further details.
Sincerely yours, Chief BAN Officer (CBO)
World of Animals 0x1bi
____________________________________________________________
Back in the nineties when Windowds 3.1 was still very
much a thing, my old man, while doing his post
graduated studies, found this story on some Russian
usenet group, saved it, printed it out, posted it in
his office.
Years later he made the mistake of giving me the
internet. And I found the same story, now on the world
wide web.
I've taken the time to translate the story from
Russian to English such that everyone can enjoy the
gifts of Russian usenet koans.
Enjoy responsibly.
>> Медведь был безобpазным, косолапым и гpязным
животным. Однако добpее его не было никого во всем
лесy. Hо звеpи замечали только его внешность, на что
Медведь жyтко обижался, ловил их и жестоко избивал
ногами. Поэтомy звеpи его не любили. Хотя он был
очень добpым. И веселым. Он любил задоpные шyтки. За
эти шyтки звеpи его скоpо жyтко возненавидели и били.
Да, тpyдно быть на свете добpым и веселым.
The bear was a filthy, clumsy, and dirty animal.
However, no one was as loving as he was in the whole
forest. But the animals only saw his exterior, to
which the bear became upset, caught them, and brutaly
beat them with his legs. Even though he was very
loving. And happy. He loved practical jokes. For these
jokes the animals started to hate the bear and beat
him. Yes, it;s hard to be loving and happy.
>> Волк был тоже безобpазным и гpязным. И еще он был
очень злым и жестоким. Hо звеpи не испытывали к немy
ненависти и не били. Потомy, что Волк yмеp еще в
pаннем детстве. Потомy, что Медведь pодился pаньше
Волка. Да, хоpошо, когда Добpо побеждает Зло.
The wolf was also filthy and dirty. He was also very
evil and cruel. But the animals din't hate him and
didn't beat him. Because the wolf died early in his
childhood. Because the bear was born before the wolf.
Yes, it's good when good triumphs over evil.
>> Заяц тоже был злым и жестоким. И гpязным. И еще он
был тpyсливым. Гадостей Заяц никомy никогда не делал.
Потомy, что боялся. Hо его все pавно сильно били.
Потомy, что Зло всегда должно быть наказано.
The rabbit was also evil and cruel. And dirty. He was
also a coward. The rabbit never commited any evil as
he was scared. But he was still beaten. Because evil
must be punished.
>> И Дятел тоже был злым и жестоким. Он не бил звеpей,
потомy, что y него не было pyк. Поэтомy, он вымещал
свою злость на деpевьях. Его не били. Потомy, что не
могли дотянyться. Однажды его пpидавило насмеpть
yпавшее деpево. Поговаpивали, что оно отомстило.
После этого звеpи целый месяц боялись мочиться на
деpевья. Они мочились на Зайца. Заяц пpостyдился и
yмеp. Всем было ясно, что во всем был виноват Дятел.
Hо его не тpонyли. Посколькy не смогли выковыpять
из-под yпавшего деpева. Да, Зло иногда остается
безнаказанным.
The woodpecker was also evil and cruel. He didn't beat
animals, as he didn't have any arms. So he took his
anger out on trees. He was not beaten, as no one could
reach him. One day a tree crushed him to death. The
animals said it took revenge. After that, then animals
were afraid of pissing on trees for a month. Instead
they pissed on the rabbit. The rabbit got a cold and
died. Everyone knew that the woodpecker was at fault.
But he wasn't beaten, as no one could get him out from
the fallen tree. Yes, sometimes evil remains
unpunished.
>> Кpот был маленьким и слепым. Он не был злым. Он
пpосто хоpошо делал свое дело. Это он подъел деpево,
котоpое yпало на дятла. Об этом никто не yзнал, и
поэтомy его не избили. Его вообще били pедко. Чаще
пyгали. Hо его было очень тpyдно испyгать, потомy что
он был слепой и не видел, что его пyгают. Когда не
yдавалось испyгать Кpота, звеpи очень огоpчались. И
били Медведя. Потомy, что им было очень обидно.
Однажды Медведь тоже захотел испyгать Кpота. Hо Кpот
не испyгался. Потомy, что Медведь его yбил.
Hечаянно. Пpосто Медведь был очень неyклюжим. И
звеpи его очень сильно избили. Даже, несмотpя на то,
что Медведь сказал, что пошyтил. Плохо, когда твои
шyтки никто не понимает.
The mole was small and blind. He was not evil. He just
did his job really well. It was he who dug under the
tree which fell on the woodpecker. No one knew about
his digging and he was not beaten. He was rarely
beaten. More often scared. But it was really hard to
scare him as he was blind, and didn't see that he was
being scared. When the animals were unable to scare
the mole they became very upset. And beat the bear.
One day the bear decided to sacre the mole. But he
didn't scare the mole. Because he killed him.
Accidentally. As he was very clumsy. And the animals
brutally beat him for killing the mole, even though
the bear said it was a prank. It's unfortunate when no
one understands your pranks.
>> Лиса была очень хитpой. Она могла запpосто
обхитpить кого yгодно. Когда ей это yдавалось, то ее
не били. Hо иногда ей не везло. И ее били. Били всем
лесом. И она yже не могла кого-нибyдь обхитpить.
Потомy, что очень тpyдно го-нибyдь обхитpить, когда
тебя бьют. Однажды ее избили до смеpти. Да, жилда
всегда на пpавдy выйдет.
The fox was very cunning. She could easily outsmart
anyone. When she could outsmart someone, she was not
beaten. But when she coudln't, she was beaten. Hard.
And at that point she couldn't outsmart anyone, as
it's hard to outsmart someone when you're being
beaten. One day she was beaten to death. Yes, truth
will always come to light.
>> Кабан был большой, сильный и стpашный. Его все
очень боялись. И поэтомy его били только всем лесом.
Или пpосто кидали в него камнями. Кабан этого очень
не любил. И однажды ночью он спpятал все камни в
лесy. За это его очень сильно избили. Больше Кабан
никогда не пpятал камни. Воистинy говоpят - вpемя
собиpать камни и вpемя их не тpогать никогда.
The boar was big, strong, and scary. Everyone was
scared of him. That is why he was always beaten with
the whole forest. Or simply stoned him. The boar
didn't like that. One day he hid all of the stones in
the forest. For the he was beaten really hard. After
that, the boar never hid stones. And so they say,
there is time to collect stones, and time to not touch
them.
>> Козел не был ни злым, ни добpым. Он был пpосто
Козел. н часто козлил. И его боялись бить. И он
своим козловством всех достал. И тогда его избили до
смеpти. Потомy, что иначе он бы yмеp от стаpости.
Когда-нибyдь. Когда Козел yмеp, Медведь сильно
плакал. Потомy, что он в тайне любил Козла. Да,
любовь зла, полюбишь и Козла.
The goat was neither good nor evil. He was a goat. He
often goated. And the animals were scared of beating
him. With his goatness he got on everyones nerves. And
he was beaten to death, because otherwise he would
have died of old age. Someday. After the goat died,
the bear cried, because he secretly loved the goat.
Yes, love is a cruel mistress.
>> Ежик был маленький и колючий. Он кололся. Он не был
злым, он кололся по своей пpиpоде. Из-за этого его
били только в живот. Ежик этого не любил и стал
бpиться наголо. И тогда его стали бить как всех. Да,
очень тpyдно быть не таким как все.
The hedgehog was small and prickly. He wasn't evil, he
was prickly by his own nature. For that he was beaten
exclusively in the stomach. And so the hedgehog
started shaving bald. And he was beaten like everyone
else. Yes, it's hard to be not like everyone else.
>> Скyнс был почти таким, как Заяц. Hо только очень
нючим. Он плохо пахнyл. Его били только в
полиэтиленовом пакете. Тогда запах был не такой
сильный. Однажды y Скyнса был день pождения. Он
пpигласил всех звеpей, потомy, что был жадным и любил
подаpки. И звеpи подаpили емy новый полиэтиленовый
пакет. И сильно избили до потеpи сознания. И Скyнс
задохнyлся в пакете. Так его и похоpонили. В пакете.
В очень Дальнем Лесy. Потомy, что меpтвый Скyнс вонял
еще сильнее. Потом пpишли жители Очень Дальнего Леса
и в сех сильно избили. Им не понpавился запах
меpтвого Скyнса. Да, с соседями надо жить в миpе.
The skunk was very much like rabbit. But very smelly.
He was beaten only inside a plastic bag, because then
the smell wasn't as bad. One day the skunk had a
birthday party, and he invited all of the animals as
he was greedy and he loved presents. The animals got
him a new plastig bag. And then proceeded to beat him
until loss of consciousness. The skunk then suffocated
inside the bag. That is how he was buried. In the
plastic bag. In the very far away forest, as a dead
skunk smelt worse than a living skunk. Then the
animals from the very far away forest came and beat
everyone hard. They didn't like the smell of the dead
skunk. Yes, you must love your neighbour.
>> Хомяк был тоже очень жадным. И богатым. Если бы он
делился своим богатством, его бы били не так сильно.
Hо он был очень жадным. За это его били сильно. И емy
все pавно пpиходилось делиться. И он гоpько плакал.
Да, богатые тоже плачyт.
The hasmter was also very greedy. And rich. If he
shared his riches he woudn't be beaten as hard. But he
was greedy. And he was beaten hard. And he still had
to share his riches. For that he cried. Yes, even rich
people cry.
>> Лев был цаpь звеpей. Он пpавил лесом. Цаpей бить не
положено. Это закон. Hо звеpи давно забили на закон.
Звеpи били и льва. Hи за что. Потомy, что так yж
здесь повелось.
The lion was king. He ruled the forest. You're not
supposed to beat kings. Such is the law. But the
animals gave a fuck about the law. They beat the lion.
Why? That's just how things go in forest.
>> Моpаль: А зоpи здесь тихие...
Moral: Sunrises here are quiet...
Publishing in The Gopher Times you
____________________________________________________________
Want your article published? Want to announce
something to the Gopher world? Directly related to
Gopher or not, reach us on IRC with an article in any
format, we will handle the rest.
ircs://irc.bitreich.org/#bitreich-en
]]></content>
<updated>2021-10-23T21:45:45+0200</updated>
<link type="application/pdf" href="gopher://bitreich.org/9/tgtimes/archive/2021-10-23-errata1/tgtimes-2021-10-23-opus1.pdf" />
</entry>
<entry>
<id>gopher://bitreich.org/9/tgtimes/archive/2021-11-23</id>
<title><![CDATA[2021-11-23]]></title>
<author><name>The Gopher Times Authors</name></author>
<content type="text"><![CDATA[
The Gopher Times
____________________________________________________________
Opus 2 - Gopher news and more - Nov. 2021
____________________________________________________________
Amiga-style demos on microcontrollers ltf
____________________________________________________________
The demoscene is an UNESCO-recognised art where
computer are programmmed to display graphics and
soundtrack in real-time. Competitions challenges
everyone to build the most impressive demo out of the
same limited resources as everyone, such as venerable
computers like Comodore64 or Amiga computers.
While faster computers are being built everyday,
computer with even less resources than the early days
are still in massive production and used:
microcontrollers.
Linus Akesson, a demoer known for its "A Mind Is Born"
winning entry [1] is pushing the kind of CPU that
controll your elevator to its limits to produce waves
of colors and rivers of melodies.
https://www.linusakesson.net/pages/scene.php
____________________
[1]
1st place on Revision 2017 competition
The aNONradio station sdf
____________________________________________________________
A non-radio is an independent radio blasting live
broadcasting from the sdf.org infrastructure: a group
of various UNIX-like system servers providing free
shell accounts among other services.
The presenter is well aware of the various UNIX-like
systems culture and operation, so do not be surprised
if you hear him talk about IRC channels or server
updates straight from the waves.
There are music from community DJ and artists
broadcast, weekly radio shows, handpicked tunes,
announce about upcoming shows, and even world news.
There are also Open MiC sessions where anyone may join
and discuss or broadcast, so drop them a word if you
want something played to that station.
Much like Bitreich conferences, live comments can be
sent to the presenter over IRC.
https://anonradio.net/
ircs://irc.sdf.org/#anonradio
Phrack Magazine fnord
____________________________________________________________
On the world of hacker, warez, and computer security
has a long-standing magazine respected by the
pioneers: Phrack.
May its crude plaintext aspect not mislead you in
thinking it is one of these retro computing group, as
cutting edge pentest strategies, defence strategy, or
reverse engineering material might likely be disclosed
in here:
• Android Kernel Rootkit
• Revisiting Mac OS X Kernel Rootkits
• Escaping from FreeBSD bhyve
• .NET Instrumentation via bytecode injection
Recent versions of the planet's most used operating
systems, terrific topics such as VM escape. Phrack is
not script kidding around!
Thanks to fnord.one gopher hole, each opus is also
available directly over gopher:
gopher://gopher.fnord.one/1/Mirrors/
FreeChess chess server telnet
____________________________________________________________
Chess has likely been there since forever, it might
have as well been there since longer than life on
earth [citation needed]. As such, software for
playing chess might have been around for a similarly
long amount of time.
Possibly one of the longest-running chess system
online for playing chess is FreeChess, the free online
chess server, and it is accessible over telnet:
$ telnet freechess.org 5000
A prompt offers to logon, and "guest" can be entered
for using it without an account, then <Enter> (then
once again later):
login: guest
By just staying here waiting, battle offers from other
players start to spawn:
GuestJZMS (++++) seeking 5 0 unrated blitz f \
("play 50" to respond)
GuestJZMS (++++) seeking 5 0 unrated wild/fr f \
("play 72" to respond)
GuestJZMS (++++) seeking 1 0 unrated lightning f \
("play 73" to respond)
fics%
Playing one of these games leads you to an ASCII
chessboard ready for white to play:
fics% play 72
---------------------------------
8 | *R| *N| *B| *Q| *K| *B| *N| *R|
|---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---|
7 | *P| *P| *P| *P| *P| *P| *P| *P|
|---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---|
6 | | | | | | | | |
|---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---|
5 | | | | | | | | |
|---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---|
4 | | | | | | | | |
|---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---|
3 | | | | | | | | |
|---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---|
2 | P | P | P | P | P | P | P | P |
|---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---|
1 | R | N | B | Q | K | B | N | R |
---------------------------------
a b c d e f g h
fics%
In complement to the raw telnet interface, a graphical
client may be used to join a game with the board shown
on-screen.
The Embedded Muse Newsletter ganssle
____________________________________________________________
Ever felt curious about the embedded world? These tiny
machines that are low-power enough to last all winter
powered by a potato battery? Then take a peek at the
Embedded Muse Newsletter.
This mail-based monthly publication is run by Jack
Ganssle since 1997. A well-known pioneer, but each
issue is turned toward the community, where everyone
submits its story that Jack publishes back.
You might find spicy UNIX and engineering humour.
http://www.ganssle.com/tem-back.htm
Mozilla, "OBEY" and 1988 movie jwz
____________________________________________________________
Surprisingly diverse themes. Just as diverse as Jamie
Zawinski's creations: Netscape, Mozilla, the DNA-
Lounge night club.
The 1988 movie offers a revelation about advertizing.
The "OBEY" Clothing Brand refers to that movie. The
Mozilla logo shares the same author as the "OBEY"
logo. Out of tihs, jwz narrates us a piece of our own
history.
Sometimes, ubiquitous, vastly popular, and highly
profitable projects have the most unexpected history,
in contradiction with what they became.
https://www.jwz.org/blog/2016/10/they-live-and-the
-secret-history-of-the-mozilla-logo/
Twtxt Over Gopher gopher ml
____________________________________________________________
The twtxt format is a plain text microbloggin format
that lives as a text file hosted on any server, in the
same style as RSS feeds.
The support gopher://example.com/0/twtxt.txt is
already there! As prologic points out on the Gopher
Mailing list, it is possible to use gopher:// links
for twtxt, as showcased by the yarn.social search
engine.
This might as well be the case for many other twtxt
clients, given that libcurl supports gopher:// and
gophers://.
It will soon be difficult to find a single software
that does not support Gopher...
https://twtxt.net/
https://lists.debian.org/gopher-project/
https://yarn.social/
Hosting Providers Projects tgtimes
____________________________________________________________
While hosting a server at home has its benefits (and
its charms), some interesting hosting providers do a
good job at sharing all the fun that hosting servers
can have while still handling the long-winged work of
keeping the hypervisors up and running.
Efforts also coming from the community that sometimes
take part into the project, or in reverse, hosting
providers contributing to help community projects,
either through funds or bug-fixing.
sdf.org Around since as early as 1987, the Super
Dimension Fortress describes itself as a public
access supercomputing center. An invitation to jump
both foot into the UNIX culture featuring games,
email, usenet, chat, bboard, gopherspace, webspace,
programming utilities, archivers, browsers, and
more. A different sense of community than the one
offered by social networks.
sdfeu.org Joint effort with the north Amercian
sdf.org, the European counterpart will have a better
network lattency for European, Middle east, and
African users.
grex.org Grex brings democracy to hosting, a concept
little explored by commercial hosting providers:
open access, but also owned by its members who can
vote on what to plan next for Grex. Also a good
pretext to get around a good meal during the Grex
conferences.
openbsd.amsterdam A hosting provider running OpenBSD
for its entire stack, including the hypervisor
itself: vmm(4). It permits its user to connect
directly onto the hypervisor through SSH and run
commands such as vmctl vm02 restart.
blinkenshell.org Younger by a few years, this open
shell project lets you give Linux a try. Occasion to
make someone discover the world of command-line and
programming through the editor and compilers
installed up there.
prgmr.com While keeping a commercial model, this Xen-
based hosting provider offers a command-line
approach to hosting, and consider the user as a
respectable admin rather than a supermarket
custommer.
Nixers.net Con 2021 nixers
____________________________________________________________
On November the 7th, the second edition of the
nixers.net *NIX users community took place:
• Creating your own troff macros — seninha
• Keeping track of your things — venam
• Truly Federated Identity for the web — push-f
The video recording are already available:
https://nixers.net/Thread-Nixers-net-Conf-2021
A message to developers nitot
____________________________________________________________
While Mozilla keeps the web browser vendor race going
while a former founder moved elsewhere offering to try
a different take on technology.
Tristan Nitot is the of Mozilla Europe, who also
worked at Netscape before its decline. After he left
Mozilla, he published "surveillance://" defending
privacy, and went as far as offering alternative to
Google by joining the Qwant team (web serach engine).
Yes, this is a Google-funded conference.
During this web, mobile and cloud conference, under
OVH, Google, and Microsoft sponsorship, what message
would he have to spread to developers getting started?
Mind the Global Warming!
How unexpected but welcome. He simply shew the
numbers, and shew big newspaper headlines: explaining
that the poor performance of software have been
largely compensated by the Moore's law for the last 50
years, letting software fat to accumulate without dire
consequence on usability.
A call to developers to consider supporting the
existing hardware through providing reasonable
performance, considering removing features, would have
the greatest impact; most CO² emission of IT
originating from producing new end-user devices. He
blamed Windows 11 badly for that, refusing to support
older chips. Yes, this is a Microsoft-funded
conference.
>> Between the early web pages of a few kilobytes to
the web pages of today, the size was went up by a
factor of 150. Are web pages 150 times better than
they used to be?
At the beginning of its talk, Tristan Nitot quoted
Upton Sinclair:
>> It is difficult to get a man to understand
something when his salary depends upon his not
understanding it.
https://devfest.gdglille.org/
https://climatefresk.org/
https://standblog.org/blog/
cirosantilli, a rabbit hole on its own tgtimes
____________________________________________________________
Is this name familiar to you? Maybe you encountered
cirosantilli on a StackOverflow or remembered one of
the iconic profile picture he chose? Did you encounter
the name on GitHub? If so you may have immediately
noticed how he weaponized this popular code hosting
platform into a freedom of speech silver bullet
against China's censorship.
The entire user profile was turned into a long
document that can resist to the most ferocious
censorship. A vast amount of images and keywords
censored by China is published straight on the front
page, making it outstanding to the visitors.
Would china dare to try to take down the biggest code
hosting platform, harming most of IT companies in the
world? And even if it tries, would it succeed? And so
without provoking too much tension with the U.S.?
While China's government censorship violence is world
famous, so is GitHub's DDoS mitigation services
(provided by a dedicated company, not performed by
GitHub themself), after undertaking 1.3 Terabit per
second during a famous DDoS attack.
This Brazilian Italian turned Goliath against Goliath.
Are you curious about its practical plan to take down
China's great firewall? Or maybe you are interested
in one of the many computer-related topics he teaches
on its website?
This activist doubled as student and teacher might
take you down the rabbit hole of both computer science
and fight for freedom.
https://stackoverflow.com/users/895245/
https://cirosantilli.com/
https://github.com/cirosantilli
Digitalisation Evangelists Hymn 20h
____________________________________________________________
Original Text: Dieter Birr / Wolfgang Tilgner
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbQuauLn52c
>> Einem war sein Heim, war sein Haus zu eng
One was his home, his home was too narrow
>> Sehnte sich in die Welt
Strived for the world
>> Sah den Himmel an, sah wie dort ein Schwan hinzog
Saw the sky, saw how a swan directed there
>> Er hieß Ikarus und er war sehr jung
He was named Ikarus and he was young
>> War voller Ungeduld
He was full of impatience
>> Baute Flügel sich, sprang vom Boden ab und flog
Built wings for him, jumped off the ground and flew
>> Und flog
And flew
>> Steige Ikarus! Fliege uns voraus!
Strive Ikarus! Fly ahead!
>> Steige Ikarus! Zeige uns den Weg!
Strive Ikarus! Show us the way!
>> Als sein Vater sprach: "Fliege nicht zu hoch!
As his father said: "Do not fly too high!
>> Sonne wird dich zerstör'n"
sun will destroy you"
>> Hat er nur gelacht, hat er laut gelacht und schrie
He only laughed, he laughed loud and screamed
>> Er hat's nicht geschafft und er ist zerschellt
He didn't make it and he shattered
>> Doch der erste war er
But the first one he was
>> Viele folgten ihm, darum ist sein Tod ein Sieg
Many followed him, that is why his dead is a victory
>> Ein Sieg!
A victory!
>> Steige Ikarus! Fliege uns voraus!
Strive Ikarus! Fly ahead!
>> Steige Ikarus! Zeige uns den Weg!
Strive Ikarus! Show us the way!
>> Einem war sein Heim, war sein Haus zu eng
One was his home, his home was too narrow
>> Sehnte sich in die Welt
Strived for the world
>> Sieht den Himmel an, sieht wie dort ein Schwan
Sees the sky, sees how a swan
>> Sich wiegt
himself enjoys
>> Er heißt Ikarus und ist immer jung
He is called Ikarus and he is always young
>> Ist voller Ungeduld
Is full of impatience
>> Baut die Flügel sich, springt vom Boden ab und
fliegt
Builds himself wings, jumps off the ground and flies
>> Und fliegt
And flies
>> Steige Ikarus! Fliege uns voraus!
Strive Ikarus! Fly ahead!
>> Steige Ikarus! Zeige uns den Weg!
Strive Ikarus! Show us the way!
>> Steige Ikarus! Fliege uns voraus!
Strive Ikarus! Fly ahead!
>> Steige Ikarus! Zeige uns den Weg!
Strive Ikarus! Show us the way!
>> Steige Ikarus! Fliege uns voraus!
Strive Ikarus! Fly ahead!
>> Steige Ikarus! Zeige uns den Weg!
Strive Ikarus! Show us the way!
Publishing in The Gopher Times you
____________________________________________________________
Want your article published? Want to announce
something to the Gopher world? Directly related to
Gopher or not, reach us on IRC with an article in any
format, we will handle the rest.
ircs://irc.bitreich.org/#bitreich-en
gopher://bitreich.org/1/tgtimes/
]]></content>
<updated>2021-11-23T21:43:56+0100</updated>
<link type="application/pdf" href="gopher://bitreich.org/9/tgtimes/archive/2021-11-23/tgtimes-2021-11-23-opus2.pdf" />
</entry>
<entry>
<id>gopher://bitreich.org/9/tgtimes/archive/2021-11-23-errata1</id>
<title><![CDATA[2021-11-23-errata1]]></title>
<author><name>The Gopher Times Authors</name></author>
<content type="text"><![CDATA[
The Gopher Times
____________________________________________________________
Opus 2 - Gopher news and more - Nov. 2021
____________________________________________________________
Amiga-style demos on microcontrollers ltf
____________________________________________________________
The demoscene is an UNESCO-recognised art where
computer are programmmed to display graphics and
soundtrack in real-time. Competitions challenges
everyone to build the most impressive demo out of the
same limited resources as everyone, such as venerable
computers like Comodore64 or Amiga computers.
While faster computers are being built everyday,
computers with even less resources than the early days
are still in massive production and used:
microcontrollers.
Linus Akesson, a demoer known for his "A Mind Is Born"
winning entry [1] is pushing the kind of CPU that
controls your elevator to its limits to produce waves
of colors and rivers of melodies.
https://www.linusakesson.net/pages/scene.php
____________________
[1]
1st place on Revision 2017 competition
The aNONradio station sdf
____________________________________________________________
A non-radio is an independent radio blasting live
broadcasting from the sdf.org infrastructure: a group
of various UNIX-like system servers providing free
shell accounts among other services.
The presenter is well aware of the various UNIX-like
systems culture and operation, so do not be surprised
if you hear him talk about IRC channels or server
updates straight from the waves.
There are music from community DJ and artists
broadcast, weekly radio shows, handpicked tunes,
announce about upcoming shows, and even world news.
There are also Open MiC sessions where anyone may join
and discuss or broadcast, so drop them a word if you
want something played to that station.
Much like Bitreich conferences, live comments can be
sent to the presenter over IRC.
https://anonradio.net/
ircs://irc.sdf.org/#anonradio
Phrack Magazine fnord
____________________________________________________________
On the world of hacker, warez, and computer security
has a long-standing magazine respected by the
pioneers: Phrack.
May its crude plaintext aspect not mislead you in
thinking it is one of these retro computing group, as
cutting edge pentest strategies, defence strategy, or
reverse engineering material might likely be disclosed
in here:
• Android Kernel Rootkit
• Revisiting Mac OS X Kernel Rootkits
• Escaping from FreeBSD bhyve
• .NET Instrumentation via bytecode injection
Recent versions of the planet's most used operating
systems, terrific topics such as VM escape. Phrack is
not script kidding around!
Thanks to fnord.one gopher hole, each opus is also
available directly over gopher:
gopher://gopher.fnord.one/1/Mirrors/
FreeChess chess server telnet
____________________________________________________________
Chess has likely been there since forever, it might
have as well been there since longer than life on
earth [citation needed]. As such, software for
playing chess might have been around for a similarly
long amount of time.
Possibly one of the longest-running chess system
online for playing chess is FreeChess, the free online
chess server, and it is accessible over telnet:
$ telnet freechess.org 5000
A prompt offers to logon, and "guest" can be entered
for using it without an account, then <Enter> (then
once again later):
login: guest
By just staying here waiting, battle offers from other
players start to spawn:
GuestJZMS (++++) seeking 5 0 unrated blitz f \
("play 50" to respond)
GuestJZMS (++++) seeking 5 0 unrated wild/fr f \
("play 72" to respond)
GuestJZMS (++++) seeking 1 0 unrated lightning f \
("play 73" to respond)
fics%
Playing one of these games leads you to an ASCII
chessboard ready for white to play:
fics% play 72
---------------------------------
8 | *R| *N| *B| *Q| *K| *B| *N| *R|
|---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---|
7 | *P| *P| *P| *P| *P| *P| *P| *P|
|---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---|
6 | | | | | | | | |
|---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---|
5 | | | | | | | | |
|---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---|
4 | | | | | | | | |
|---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---|
3 | | | | | | | | |
|---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---|
2 | P | P | P | P | P | P | P | P |
|---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---|
1 | R | N | B | Q | K | B | N | R |
---------------------------------
a b c d e f g h
fics%
In complement to the raw telnet interface, a graphical
client may be used to join a game with the board shown
on-screen.
The Embedded Muse Newsletter ganssle
____________________________________________________________
Ever felt curious about the embedded world? These tiny
machines that are low-power enough to last all winter
powered by a potato battery? Then take a peek at the
Embedded Muse Newsletter.
This mail-based monthly publication is run by Jack
Ganssle since 1997. A well-known pioneer, but each
issue is turned toward the community, where everyone
submits its story that Jack publishes back.
You might find spicy UNIX and engineering humour.
http://www.ganssle.com/tem-back.htm
Mozilla, "OBEY" and 1988 movie jwz
____________________________________________________________
Surprisingly diverse themes. Just as diverse as Jamie
Zawinski's creations: Netscape, Mozilla, the DNA-
Lounge night club.
The 1988 movie offers a revelation about advertizing.
The "OBEY" Clothing Brand refers to that movie. The
Mozilla logo shares the same author as the "OBEY"
logo. Out of this, jwz narrates us a piece of our own
history.
Sometimes, ubiquitous, vastly popular, and highly
profitable projects have the most unexpected history,
in contradiction with what they became.
https://www.jwz.org/blog/2016/10/they-live-and-the
-secret-history-of-the-mozilla-logo/
Twtxt Over Gopher gopher ml
____________________________________________________________
The twtxt format is a plain text microblogging format
that lives as a text file hosted on any server, in the
same style as RSS feeds.
The support gopher://example.com/0/twtxt.txt is
already there! As prologic points out on the Gopher
Mailing list, it is possible to use gopher:// links
for twtxt, as showcased by the yarn.social search
engine.
This might as well be the case for many other twtxt
clients, given that libcurl supports gopher:// and
gophers://.
It will soon be difficult to find a single software
that does not support Gopher...
https://twtxt.net/
https://lists.debian.org/gopher-project/
https://yarn.social/
Hosting Providers Projects tgtimes
____________________________________________________________
While hosting a server at home has its benefits (and
its charms), some interesting hosting providers do a
good job at sharing all the fun that hosting servers
can have while still handling the long-winged work of
keeping the hypervisors up and running.
Efforts also coming from the community that sometimes
take part into the project, or in reverse, hosting
providers contributing to help community projects,
either through funds or bug-fixing.
sdf.org Around since as early as 1987, the Super
Dimension Fortress describes itself as a public
access supercomputing center. An invitation to jump
both feet into the UNIX culture featuring games,
email, usenet, chat, bboard, gopherspace, webspace,
programming utilities, archivers, browsers, and
more. A different sense of community than the one
offered by social networks.
sdfeu.org Joint effort with the north Amercian
sdf.org, the European counterpart will have a better
network latency for European, Middle east, and
African users.
grex.org Grex brings democracy to hosting, a concept
little explored by commercial hosting providers:
open access, but also owned by its members who can
vote on what to plan next for Grex. Also a good
pretext to get around a good meal during the Grex
conferences.
openbsd.amsterdam A hosting provider running OpenBSD
for its entire stack, including the hypervisor
itself: vmm(4). It permits its user to connect
directly onto the hypervisor through SSH and run
commands such as vmctl vm02 restart.
blinkenshell.org Younger by a few years, this open
shell project lets you give Linux a try. Occasion to
make someone discover the world of command-line and
programming through the editor and compilers
installed up there.
prgmr.com While keeping a commercial model, this Xen-
based hosting provider offers a command-line
approach to hosting, and consider the user as a
respectable admin rather than a supermarket
customer.
Nixers.net Con 2021 nixers
____________________________________________________________
On November the 7th, the second edition of the
nixers.net *NIX users community took place:
• Creating your own troff macros — seninha
• Keeping track of your things — venam
• Truly Federated Identity for the web — push-f
The video recordings are already available:
https://nixers.net/Thread-Nixers-net-Conf-2021
A message to developers nitot
____________________________________________________________
While Mozilla keeps the web browser vendor race going,
a former founder moved elsewhere offering to try a
different take on technology.
Tristan Nitot founded Mozilla Europe, and also worked
at Netscape before its decline. After he left
Mozilla, he published "surveillance://" defending
privacy, and went as far as offering alternative to
Google by joining the Qwant team (web search engine).
Yes, this is a Google-funded conference.
During this web, mobile and cloud conference, under
OVH, Google, and Microsoft sponsorship, what message
would he have to spread to developers getting started?
Mind the Global Warming!
How unexpected but welcome. He simply showed the
numbers and big newspaper headlines: explaining that
the poor performance of software has been largely
compensated by the Moore's law for the last 50 years,
letting software fat to accumulate without dire
consequence on usability.
A call to developers to consider supporting the
existing hardware through providing reasonable
performance, considering removing features, would have
the greatest impact; most CO² emission of IT
originating from producing new end-user devices. He
blamed Windows 11 badly for that, refusing to support
older chips. Yes, this is a Microsoft-funded
conference.
>> Between the early web pages of a few kilobytes to
the web pages of today, the size was went up by a
factor of 150. Are web pages 150 times better than
they used to be?
At the beginning of its talk, Tristan Nitot quoted
Upton Sinclair:
>> It is difficult to get a man to understand
something when his salary depends upon his not
understanding it.
https://devfest.gdglille.org/
https://climatefresk.org/
https://standblog.org/blog/
cirosantilli, a rabbit hole on its own tgtimes
____________________________________________________________
Is this name familiar to you? Maybe you encountered
cirosantilli on a StackOverflow or remember one of the
iconic profile pictures he chose? Did you encounter
the name on GitHub? If so you may have immediately
recall how he weaponized this popular code hosting
platform into a freedom of speech silver bullet
against China's censorship.
The entire user profile was turned into a long
document that can resist to the most ferocious
censorship. A vast amount of images and keywords
censored by China is published straight on the front
page, making it outstanding to the visitors.
Would China dare to try to take down the biggest code
hosting platform, harming most of IT companies in the
world? And even if it tries, would it succeed? And so
without provoking too much tension with the U.S.?
While China's government censorship violence is world
famous, so is GitHub's DDoS mitigation services
(provided by a dedicated company, not performed by
GitHub themself), after undertaking 1.3 Terabit per
second during a famous DDoS attack.
This Brazilian Italian turned Goliath against Goliath.
Are you curious about cirosantilli's practical plan to
take down China's great firewall? Or maybe you are
interested in one of the many computer-related topics
he teaches on his website?
This activist doubles as student and teacher might
take you down the rabbit hole of both computer science
and fight for freedom.
https://stackoverflow.com/users/895245/
https://cirosantilli.com/
https://github.com/cirosantilli
Digitalisation Evangelists Hymn 20h
____________________________________________________________
Original Text: Dieter Birr / Wolfgang Tilgner
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbQuauLn52c
>> Einem war sein Heim, war sein Haus zu eng
One was his home, his home was too narrow
>> Sehnte sich in die Welt
Strived for the world
>> Sah den Himmel an, sah wie dort ein Schwan hinzog
Saw the sky, saw how a swan directed there
>> Er hieß Ikarus und er war sehr jung
He was named Ikarus and he was young
>> War voller Ungeduld
He was full of impatience
>> Baute Flügel sich, sprang vom Boden ab und flog
Built wings for him, jumped off the ground and flew
>> Und flog
And flew
>> Steige Ikarus! Fliege uns voraus!
Strive Ikarus! Fly ahead!
>> Steige Ikarus! Zeige uns den Weg!
Strive Ikarus! Show us the way!
>> Als sein Vater sprach: "Fliege nicht zu hoch!
As his father said: "Do not fly too high!
>> Sonne wird dich zerstör'n"
sun will destroy you"
>> Hat er nur gelacht, hat er laut gelacht und schrie
He only laughed, he laughed loud and screamed
>> Er hat's nicht geschafft und er ist zerschellt
He didn't make it and he shattered
>> Doch der erste war er
But the first one he was
>> Viele folgten ihm, darum ist sein Tod ein Sieg
Many followed him, that is why his dead is a victory
>> Ein Sieg!
A victory!
>> Steige Ikarus! Fliege uns voraus!
Strive Ikarus! Fly ahead!
>> Steige Ikarus! Zeige uns den Weg!
Strive Ikarus! Show us the way!
>> Einem war sein Heim, war sein Haus zu eng
One was his home, his home was too narrow
>> Sehnte sich in die Welt
Strived for the world
>> Sieht den Himmel an, sieht wie dort ein Schwan
Sees the sky, sees how a swan
>> Sich wiegt
himself enjoys
>> Er heißt Ikarus und ist immer jung
He is called Ikarus and he is always young
>> Ist voller Ungeduld
Is full of impatience
>> Baut die Flügel sich, springt vom Boden ab und
fliegt
Builds himself wings, jumps off the ground and flies
>> Und fliegt
And flies
>> Steige Ikarus! Fliege uns voraus!
Strive Ikarus! Fly ahead!
>> Steige Ikarus! Zeige uns den Weg!
Strive Ikarus! Show us the way!
>> Steige Ikarus! Fliege uns voraus!
Strive Ikarus! Fly ahead!
>> Steige Ikarus! Zeige uns den Weg!
Strive Ikarus! Show us the way!
>> Steige Ikarus! Fliege uns voraus!
Strive Ikarus! Fly ahead!
>> Steige Ikarus! Zeige uns den Weg!
Strive Ikarus! Show us the way!
Publishing in The Gopher Times you
____________________________________________________________
Want your article published? Want to announce
something to the Gopher world? Directly related to
Gopher or not, reach us on IRC with an article in any
format, we will handle the rest.
ircs://irc.bitreich.org/#bitreich-en
gopher://bitreich.org/1/tgtimes/
]]></content>
<updated>2021-11-24T10:32:18+0100</updated>
<link type="application/pdf" href="gopher://bitreich.org/9/tgtimes/archive/2021-11-23-errata1/tgtimes-2021-11-23-opus2.pdf" />
</entry>
<entry>
<id>gopher://bitreich.org/9/tgtimes/archive/2022-01-29</id>
<title><![CDATA[2022-01-29]]></title>
<author><name>The Gopher Times Authors</name></author>
<content type="text"><![CDATA[
The Gopher Times
____________________________________________________________
Opus 3 - Gopher news and more - Jan. 2022
____________________________________________________________
Heaven and computers tgtimes
____________________________________________________________
Before the era of smartphones, laptops, before Windows
and Apple, there were pioneers who took the fun of
computers from the hands of the few who could afford
computers, and shared them massively so that mere
individuals could afford it.
An ocean of creativity spread. Art of all kinds were
made on these new toys, that were permitting many to
try on their own, or enjoy a tune of 8-bit music, a
demo scene, play a video game, ASCII art...
Offering these pioneers a one-way ticket to enter the
legend, 8bitlegends.com builds a corner of peace,
making some room in our heart for the 8bit heroes.
https://8bitlegends.com/
Bitreich Radio playing auto-generated music 20h
____________________________________________________________
Bitreich Radio was lacking love. The scripts were
bugged and outputted strange music. To change this, a
redesign was done. See
gopher://bitreich.org/1/radio
for the new gopherhole menu.
When you listen to
gopher://bitreich.org/9/radio/listen
you will hear music auto-generated without any
copyright. It is relaxing music you can listen to in a
background, on a toilet, all for free and forever.
The #bitreich-radio title display has been fixed too.
I hope, this increases the listening experience.
All recommendations, especially about more auto-
generated music, are welcome. We need to escape the
copyright mafia trap.
Sincerely yours, Chief Music Manager (CMM)
Computer that lasts forever ploum
____________________________________________________________
More RAM, faster CPU, more cache size, lower latency.
Computer industry never sleeps while trying to raise
the bar over and over. It plays with the limit of
physics to keep the Moore's Law dream going.
By Building faster computers, hardware engineers offer
more resources to software makers, allowing them to
build more ambitious projects. The computer
performance discipline sure has been worked up
thoroughly.
If the software comsumes all the extra computing power
for its own goal, then we are conjointly building very
fast snails.
This conquest for a better cost/performance balance is
one direction for the evolution of computers, but it
is also possible to imagine a race for better
reliability and durability instead.
Ploum offers a vision of what computers are like when
maximizing durability of the hardware, but also the
software ecosystem, so that a computer built today
still be useful in 50 years, without upgrades (not
preventing upgrades to happen).
An old knife is still a piece of metal that can be
sharpened over again to be able to cut long after it
was built. Could this also be true for computers?
https://ploum.net/the-computer-built-to-last-50-years/
Year End Meeting 2021 Recordings Online 20h
____________________________________________________________
For everyone not able to join the 2021 year end
meeting, here are the recordings:
gopher://bitreich.org/1/end-year-meeting/2021
Thanks to everyone who contributed to bitreich over
the last five years!
Sincerely yours, Chief Community Manager (CCM)
100 years of radiodiffusion tgtimes
____________________________________________________________
The Internet existed forever: books and printed press
have always been around for communicating ideas and
information, and evolved progressively to become what
the Internet is today.
Letters were carried by messengers riding horses,
postal train, or airplanes. Long-range communication
evolved slowly for a long time, but has accelerated
rapidly in recent years, until today extreme bandwidth
and latency.
The common pattern: a new discovery in electronics
permits a new way to communicate information over a
long-distance, with a lightning-fast adoption all
around the world:
1919 wireless telegraphy and music transmission in
Germany, Netherland and United-States
1920 daily radio programmes in England, United-States
and USSR
1921 radio broadcasting from Eiffel Tower with 900 W
power intensity
1922 foundation of the BBC and arrival of 2000 W
broadcastings
A few years before, the long-range communication tool
of choice was paper.
A few years later, the telephone and television
started to develop.
Bitreich University reaches 100% employment rate 20h
____________________________________________________________
The first students are leaving the MEME university
degree programme. We, the board of meme professors,
would like to thank all students who participated.
All students found jobs in different careers:
Politics, News Reporters, Youtubers, Twitter
Conspiracy Trolls or Bakers. Just watch your local
news, radio, TV or anti-social network for them.
This means, there is a 100% employment rate!
We are so proud and hope for a new semester of
successful students.
Sincerely yours, Chief Meme Caretaker (CMC)
A world of tiny creatures tgtimes
____________________________________________________________
Ants. Is that what we would look like to the eyes of a
giant? What if one of those giants had the curiosity
of looking down on our world, watching all our tiny
activities, our tiny trades, our tiny farming, our
tiny meals, our tiny families, our tiny lives?
E.O. Wilson was one of these giants, looking at the
ants: the real ones, the insect ones: An entomologist,
someone dedicated to the study of insects.
After 92 years of empassioned life, E.O. Wilson is
fading away, joining the soil, which he spent his life
observing. Closing his own book, while at the same
time inviting everyone to open their eyes, and look,
carefully, at this world of tiny creatures.
stagit and stagit-gopher 1.0 is released bob
____________________________________________________________
I want to thank all contributors for patches and other
feedback.
You can find the releases on codemadness (primary) and
bitreich (mirror).
gopher://codemadness.org/1/releases/
https://codemadness.org/releases/
gopher://bitreich.org/1/releases/
It has the following changes:
stagit:
- Print the number of remaining commits.
- Ignore '\r' in writing diffs and file blobs.
- Percent encode characters in path names, like '?'
and '#'.
- Encode XML / HTML entities in the project name.
- Add EXAMPLES section to the man pages.
stagit-gopher:
- Print the number of remaining commits.
- Add EXAMPLES section to the man pages.
Thanks to:
- quinq: for the remaining commits patch.
- srfsh: for suggesting to look into percent encoding
characters.
(cl|g)it commander Bob
Uxn portable assembly language 100r.co
____________________________________________________________
The web is well-known for its drift toward platform
effect: reproducing the features of the underlying
operating system from one of its applications, in this
case, the web browser. This is largely made possible
through javascript, and the advent of WebAssembly can
only contribute more to this.
But making an assembly language a standard for
shipping graphical applications needs not to rhime
with excess and abuse of a platform. A more
conventional approach would be standardising high-
level API and protocols, for which low-level drivers
would be written. Instead, Uxn standardises as low as
the assembly language itself.
Yet, Uxn has nothing in common with Java:
>> Features were weighted against the relative
difficulty they would add for programmers
implementing their own emulators.
Say welcome to this rabbit hole, inviting you with a
fresh take on making computers work for end-users.
Impressive acheivements were reached, such as
portability of this platform on things as small as a
32bit microcontroller:
>> Currently, there are ports (not all are complete)
for GBA, Nintendo DS, Playdate, DOS, PS Vita,
Raspberry Pi Pico, Teletype, ESP32, iOS, STM32,
STM32, IBM PC, and many more.
https://100r.co/site/uxn.html
New Gopher Banner on bitreich.org 20h
____________________________________________________________
To support local gopher politics, we added a banner to
bitreich.org gopherhole. This is there to support
political movement into more gopher support all over
the world. Please support your local gopher charity,
if you can.
Please do not block the banner in your gopher
adblocker!
+===========================================+
+##########[ ALL GOPHERS MATTER ]###########+
+##[ DONATE TO YOUR LOCAL GOPHER CHARITY ]##+
+##############[ CLICK HERE ]###############+
+===========================================+
Sincerely yours, Chief Political Officer (CPO).
The UNIX calendar(1) command tgtimes
____________________________________________________________
It is probably there sitting in /usr/bin, the
calendar(1) command can offer you a fair dose of
flexibility that web-based or smartphone-based
calendars lacks.
By storing events in a single file of text edited by
hand, calendar(1) brings the comfort of your existing
text editor to manage events with a simple syntax:
- one line per event: first a date, then a tab, then a
description.
- A line starting with a tab implicitly has the same
date as the previous event.
- Empty lines are ignored, and the C preprocessor
brings #include and /* comments */ as needed.
No need to format everything right away: taking notes
at the bottom of the file, in the middle of a phone
call and formatting after hanging-up... It is it
trivial to manage a calendar file.
While the calendar(1) command is run, events for today
and tomorrow are printed: as a digest of what is
upcoming.
A command line flag permits sending this digest to all
users by email, making it a complete calendar software
suite from edition to reminder.
There is even support for weekly, monthly and yearly
(birthdays) events.
Sharing calendar events is as easy as sending the
section of the calendar file by email, and
synchronising the calendar across devices is a matter
of synchronising a single file.
By adding a few more custom syntax rules on top of
those supported by calendar(1), readable text can be
maintained with little effort.
Jan 23 09:00 Breakfast: cooked eggs and fruits
@ Home Sweet Home
10:30 The Gopher Times proof-reading
@ ircs://irc.bitreich.org/
15:30 On-call duty untill!
@ https://the-dull-gull.corp/login
Jan 24 12:30 Lunch break in town with folks
@ that small cafe that does snacks
Jan 26 19:15 Call with friends abroad
@ mumble://example.com/
Gopher log4j contest 20h
____________________________________________________________
We hereby announce the gopher log4j contest. Anyone
sending in the patches to java to allow jdni gopher://
loading will be awarded with one year free bitreich
premium membership. One drink per day is free.
Please post your patch on
ircs://irc.bitreich.org/#bitreich-en
and you will be rewarded with your membership pass and
a free towel for the member pool.
Sincerely yours, Leading Organisational Gardener 4
Java (LOG4J)
A Guide to Hell by J. Mickens usenix
____________________________________________________________
>> As a highly trained academic researcher, I spend a
lot of time trying to advance the frontiers of human
knowledge. However, as someone who was born in the
South, I secretly believe that true progress is a
fantasy, and that I need to prepare for the end
times, and for the chickens coming home to roost, and
fast zombies, and slow zombies, and the polite
zombies who say "sir" and "ma'am" but then try to eat
your brain to acquire your skills. When the
revolution comes, I need to be prepared; thus, in the
quiet moments, when I'm not producing incredible
scientific breakthroughs, I think about what I'll do
when the weather forecast inevitably becomes RIVERS
OF BLOOD ALL DAY EVERY DAY. [...]
If James Mickens looks like he is a highly trained
soldier killing zombies in the doomed lands of System
Programming, that is because James Mickens is a highly
trained soldier killing zombies in the doomed lands of
System Programming.
https://usenix.org/system/files/1311_05-08_mickens.pdf
Annna now on #gopherproject too 20h
____________________________________________________________
With the extension of annna for multi-server support,
she is now able to join irc.libera.chat/#gopherproject
and help our gopher comrades there.
They will receive the bitreich news and have all the
pleasure of annna features, like memes, URI resolvers
etc. There is much to find out!
If you want to dig deeper, look at the annna
internals:
git://bitreich.org/annna
I hope this brings an influx of new ideas for
gopher<>IRC.
Sincerely yours, Chief IRC Officer (CIO)
Confessions of a thief chemla
____________________________________________________________
>> Below is the beginning of "Confessions of a Thief"
from Laurent Chemla. He founded a major French DNS
registrar, but before that, was the first to commit
online piracy in France (from a Minitel), and worked
on development tools for Atari. The book is published
online in French and translated below.
A thief. How else to name one of the first individual
in France to procure itself an Internet access? In
1994, borrowing the clothes of a telecommunication
expert, that I was not yet, I obtained from an IT
staff employee of a parisian University that he let me
an access to Internet. In exchange, I brought him help
- relatively - to the building of a network devoted to
let student work from home.
I then stole, I confess, this first access to a
network that remained to me a mostly unexplored land
since my last visits in 1992, mediated by obscure
manoeuvres of a friend or through piracy.
This theft benefited to me, I could learn to use a
tool long before the majority of the IT crowd, gaining
an advance that still persist today.
I stole, but I plead good faith. At this epoch nobody
around me did understand what it was about. Would it
bit a thief to steal something nobody had interest in?
This access was to the reach of only a few testing
university students, this access that a small IT
company could not afford, I stole it, and I am not
ashamed.
For my relatives, I am nontheless an "IT janitor".
Programmer to a tiny IT company, I always have been
passionated by telematic networks. A passion that
costed me, in 1986, to be the first to be guilty of
piracy in France, pirated from a Minitel, yes, but to
each his glory. As there was not yet any law against
IT piracy, I have been incriminated for stealing
electrical power. All that ended up in an acquittal,
but still, here is a decent start for a thief career!
Indeed, how to name differently someone who
constituted its professional network by taking part to
associations? We have the impression to contribute
unpaid for the many, but we mostly get known and, time
after time, the clients get attracted by this
visibility. Of course anyone whose professional
occupation deals with voluntary sector end-up face to
its own consciousness. Not unlike, I suppose, a lawyer
who gain clients from the excluded folk that he help
graciously and daily. I ignore what its consciousness
would tell him, but I know mine is not at rest.
Nowadays again, my activities continue to be lucrative
out of Internet, at the time of Nasdaq's fall. How can
one earn while everyone loose, if not by cheating?
A thief is on that use to its profit else's good. To
me, Internet is a public good and, if serve as
commercial gallery for some, it must not limit itself
to such a deviation. Internet must first and foremost
be the tool that, for the first time in mankind,
permitted the freedom of speech, defined as a
fundamental human right.
This right, in all its guarantee from our
constitutional state, has stayed hypothetical since
its proclamation. In France law protects freedom of
Speech of syndicates and journalists but no text that
permit to the simple citizen to undertake justice, to
reach its freedom. What else since, before Internet,
this freedom was to the reach of some privilegied? The
lawyer protected them because only them needed that
protection. Ten years ago, noone would have been able
to benefit an as simple, fast and affordable way to
expose works, arts or ideas but by vociferating in the
street or by climbing the social scale rung by rung to
the point of having media's attention. One had to be
represented by others with the expression right for
themself. Only ersatz. The only freedom that matters
is the one available to all and I dont give a damn
about those reserved to the mighty or their
representatives.
Internet thereby permit to a growing number of citizen
to apply their fundamental right to take the parole on
the public place. From this point of view, it must be
protected such as any other necessary yet fragile
resource, such as water we drink everyday. It cannot
be reserved to anyone, neither be limited in its
usages if not by the common right. No exception
legislation must forbide the exercise of freedom of
speech and, as soon as possible, states must preserve
the common tool that became a public benefit. And as I
use a public good to lead my own fights, yet again, I
behave as a thief.
I thereby knew the Internet some time before everybody
else, still at the age of the Far West, Eldorado,
Utopia. At this era, the network was backed by public
money (mostly from United States), the life was
happier and the electronic sky bluer. We worked all
along, among passionated, inventing new computer
objects that even Microsoft did ignore, like Linux or
the World Wide Web (you know, the three fastidious *w*
we have to type in the address of your favorite porn
website...) that did not yet exist and that today
everybody mistake for the network itself.
We were far from thinking that some day, we would need
a plethora of lawyers to organize the network. That
some day, we would need interdepartmental comittees to
address of the question. That some day, we would have
to put black on white the manners not yet named
"netiquette" that seemd all so natural to us. Our only
desire, share that formidable invention with the most
people, make its apology, attract the most numerous of
passionated who shared with us their competency, their
knowledge and intelligence.
I remember that at this epoch, when I was saying
"Internet", my friends looked at me as if coming from
another planet. When I transfered a file from a
computer from one end of of the world to my own
machine - by cabalistic commands typed by hand under
an interface working without a mouse pointer - the
seasoned IT engineers was assisting to the
demonstration as to a bad movie: finding a file was
taking hours, reading speeds was worth a sick snail
and the file often revealed to be unusable... But
while a pal entered in my office, I would show him how
by typing a single command line I could share, for a
ridiculous price, my work, my knowledge, my files or
my data with pure strangers and that could live at the
other side of the street as the other side of the
world.
Besides from other passionated people, everybody was
laughing at me. I could tell them that this thingy
would be a revolution for human knowledge, they looked
at me in pity and went back to their work.
In the best case, I was told with lucidity "It is a
pirate thing.". Some was asking who would that fit,
beyond telematic specialists. Other claimed that
volontary and free sharing of resources would not
have, by definition, any economical future. I was also
asked sometimes who would dare to provide such a
terrible service. And when I explained them that
everything was entirely decentralised, with for only
coordination volunteership and good will of all, the
same ones was telling me that it could never work at a
large scale.
https://www.confessions-voleur.net/
Publishing in The Gopher Times you
____________________________________________________________
Want your article published? Want to announce
something to the Gopher world? Directly related to
Gopher or not, reach us on IRC with an article in any
format, we will handle the rest.
ircs://irc.bitreich.org/#bitreich-en
gopher://bitreich.org/1/tgtimes/
git://bitreich.org/tgtimes/
]]></content>
<updated>2022-01-29T10:35:25+0100</updated>
<link type="application/pdf" href="gopher://bitreich.org/9/tgtimes/archive/2022-01-29/tgtimes-2022-01-29-opus3.pdf" />
</entry>
<entry>
<id>gopher://bitreich.org/9/tgtimes/archive/2022-04-22</id>
<title><![CDATA[2022-04-22]]></title>
<author><name>The Gopher Times Authors</name></author>
<content type="text"><![CDATA[
The Gopher Times
____________________________________________________________
Opus 4 - Gopher news and more - Apr. 2022
____________________________________________________________
Molasses Gopher/Gemini Client
____________________________________________________________
Jonathan Simpson is announcing a new Gopher client:
Molasses.
>> A new gopher client, Molasses, is now available for
general use. It is a multi-platform graphical client
that runs on Windows, Mac OS, and Linux.
Leveraging functionnal programming with Racket, the
binaries come battery included, bundling the racket
runtime code, famous for building-up robust graphical
user interfaces straight from the core language li-
braries.
Inline images, multiple tabs, keyboard navigation, Go-
pher and Gemini support, opening external http://
links on an external browser, Molasses has everything
one might expect to browse the little Internet.
>> Feedback is welcome and appreciated.
sfeed 1.4 released
____________________________________________________________
I want to thank all people who gave feedback.
sfeed is a tool to convert RSS or Atom feeds from XML
to a TAB-separated file.
It can be found at: [1]
sfeed has the following notable changes compared to
1.2:
Fixes
o Fix a compiler warning with some curses implementa-
tions, like NetBSD curses.
o sfeed_curses: add keybinds for the home key and the
default home and end key for urxvt.
o sfeed_curses: fix a redraw when reloading a file
with a feed file read from stdin and using an URL
file and changing this URL file externally.
o sfeed_curses: cast character for SFEED_AUTOCMD to
unsigned char to allow character sequences outside
the ASCII range.
Documentation
o README: add an example script to count new and un-
read items. This can be useful for some statusbar
indicator (asked about by e-mail).
o Small code-style, comments and documentation im-
provements and fixes.
Testsuite improvements
The testsuite repo has had improvements to test the
most important code paths of sfeed_curses in an auto-
mated way (currently 95% automated coverage). The
sfeed.c and xml.c parser coverage has also near 100%
coverage.
The goal is to find bugs and avoid regressions.
The input/sfeed/realworld/ directory contains files
with various feeds from popular systems to more ob-
scure ones. These may be useful to test other
RSS/Atom programs aswell.
These tests can be found here: [2]
Thanks, Hiltjo
[1]
git://git.codemadness.org/sfeed
gopher://codemadness.org/1/git/sfeed
https://codemadness.org/releases/sfeed/
gopher://codemadness.org/1/releases/sfeed/
[2]
https://git.codemadness.org/sfeed_tests/
gopher://codemadness.org/1/git/sfeed_tests/
BBC Reviving the Plain Old Radio
____________________________________________________________
BBC, one of the earliest if not the first radio broad-
casting ever, comes back to using a WWII era technol-
ogy, to overcome limitation Russia imposes over
Ukraine.
In between a rain of missiles and a short moment of
temporary peace, fetching information on what is hap-
pening around is a relief, maybe even a requirement
for survival.
Internet infrastructure of Ukraine are being impacted,
and the backbone getting shackled by all kind of limi-
tations, provoked the BBC news bulletin to be unreach-
able.
A more primitive way to broadcast critical headlines
than Internet: shortwave radio, which can live off a
simple emitter for covering a large region.
>> It has launched two new shortwave frequencies in
the region for four hours of World Service English
news a day. These frequencies can be received clearly
in Kyiv and parts of Russia. [1]
Shortly after, possessing a shortwave radio device at
home became forbidden, proving that in spite of being
a low-technology solution, it was efficient enough to
disturb the control of the press by the government.
This showcases how quickly-deployed and resilient sim-
ple technologies can be in comparison to fragile,
high-tech interdependent ecosystems.
Radio is also trivially interfaced with high-tech: Any
person with an analog emitter may start broadcasting a
radio signal, reading a news digest out loud.
Given instructions, a receiver is also very easy to
build with scavenged parts. An antenna is simply a
wire producing an input signal, that after demodula-
tion, becomes a sound signal to be fed to a speaker.
It also shows benefits of putting all the technically
difficult parts onto the side of the content producer.
It helps with adoption of a new technology: Making the
client device/software trivial and safe to build, set-
up and use. [2]
[1]
https://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/2022/millions-of-russians-turn-to-bbc-news
[2]
https://hackaday.com/2022/03/17/owning-a-shortwave-radio
New Bitreich Project: rfcommd
____________________________________________________________
There is a new project on bitreich: rfcommd. Rfcommd
is a daemon sitting on top of your bluez/bluetooth
stack, waiting for RFCOMM devices to connect. The
daemon will then run scripts or daemons on that
new rfcomm connection. This can be used to cre-
ate a custom bluetooth printer without buying some
dedicated hardware device. See the filter spirofil-
ter in the repository for some pcl printer script.
Here is the first release: [1]
All questions and comments welcome!
Please send them to Christoph Lohmann <20h@r-36.net>
or come on bitreich.org IRC #bitreich-en.
Have fun!
[1]
gopher://bitreich.org/9/scm/rfcommd/tag/rfcommd-v0.2.tar.lz
gopher://bitreich.org/9/scm/rfcommd/tag/rfcommd-v0.2.tar.lz.sha512sum
ftp://ftp@bitreich.org/releases/rfcommd/rfcommd-v0.2.tar.lz
ftp://ftp@bitreich.org/releases/rfcommd/rfcommd-v0.2.tar.lz.sha512sum
gopher://bitreich.org/9/scm/rfcommd/tag/rfcommd-v0.2.tar.gz
gopher://bitreich.org/9/scm/rfcommd/tag/rfcommd-v0.2.tar.gz.sha512sum
ftp://ftp@bitreich.org/releases/rfcommd/rfcommd-v0.2.tar.gz
ftp://ftp@bitreich.org/releases/rfcommd/rfcommd-v0.2.tar.gz.sha512sum
2022-03-06 GangBAN aftermaths 20h
____________________________________________________________
This Sunday was a fun one. After lunch we had the su-
pertuxkart tournament of five(!) players competing
against eachother on various tracks. All kind of CPUs
and hardware setups participates and rushed off the
cliffs.
In the evening there was the huge OpenRA battlefield.
Sadly the hardware requirement of OpenRA is too high,
so only two players could participate. But this time
against seven other AIs. The humans won multiple
times!
See you at the next GangBAN!
Sincerely yours, 20h Chief Gaming Officer (CGO)
Breaking free from medical devices 20h
____________________________________________________________
Unlike most USB gadgets around, medical devices re-
quire a specification to be proven fit for handling
patients data. This makes doctor-hacking difficult
for the sake of better control over what is allowed
for medical use.
While this may sound as a non-starter for many, not
all doctors are discouraged. Interview with 20h:
>> You are __20h__, a doctor in Falken, the best vil-
lage to live in in Germany, is that correct?
Yes.
>> You managed to do some hacking around a medical de-
vice. What was it? How did it help you in your di-
agnostics?
I wrote rfcommd to have my spirometer print out the
results to a standard printer. It helps me having a
more detailed view on the results.
The normal printout is just like 8 centimeters wide.
Now it is A4.
I plan on using rfcommd to read out ECG data from a
ECG for further analysis.
The collecting computer is a gentoo hardened on
x86_64, with a standard bluetooth dongle, sending the
print jobs via TCP/IP to a network printer.
For printing there is a cups installation, converting
the PCL output of the spirometer to postscript for the
network printer.
>> What software were provided to collect the data on
a computer? On which kind of system was that run-
ning?
Before rfcommd there was no collection of the data.
The spirometer has some built-in printer, which is
very expensive and the printout is small.
>> Are you using it often?
I/We are using it every day for printing out spirome-
try (lung function) results.
By the way. A secondary function why rfcommd has fil-
ters: We have a sterilization device, which has a se-
rial printout of sterilization runs.
This is what rfcommd does print out too.
The features of rfcommd moved from: Accept every rf-
comm request to having filters per device mac, was be-
cause of those two devices.
But it will allow to have the ecg readout as a filter
for free.
>> It had limited interaction, and yet you managed to
made it available from a linux computer. How did you
do it?
First I had a python script using pybluez to offer
some bluetooth printer service, which bluetooth
clients connect to and send print jobs.
But I migrated this to some C implementation and gen-
eralized it as rfcommd so it is more modular for me
and others can reuse it too.
Bluez stack had some rfcomm client application, but it
was removed in newer version because they hate comman-
dline users.
>> Was it difficult? How long did it take?
Digging around bluetooth is difficult. It looks simi-
lar to TCP/IP, but is its own terminology, protocols
and principles. Look at rfcommd for how to announce
some service.
It took me two weekends to write rfcommd as it is now.
>> What would you advise to designers of such devices
to make everyone's life easier?
If you mean medical devices: Please open source all
firmware and open up all schematics. In ten years you
will be dead or in pension but still people can extend
or update your devices.
And second: Never have specific assumptions and fool
end users into costly standard. You never know better
than your users.
For example in the spirometry description, they say,
that only some bluetooth printers are compatible.
This is due to the bluetooth standard not having de-
fined, what is sent to bluetooth printers.
It should be the minimum, to define this, as it is in
the USB printing standard.
>> What kind of protocol interface would have been the
easiest?
The easiest protocol interface, also considering secu-
rity and data protection standard, would be ssh over
TCP/IP. Everyone knows SSH, it can be integrated into
everything and it is easily upgradable to newer secu-
rity standards.
>> What does it permits to do that was not possible
before?
With the spirometry data ready as simple text data, I
can further process it using standard unix tools, in
case I ever need this.
>> Are other people using it in the practice as well?
Even indirectly?
My nurses use it mainly. They press the »print« but-
ton on the spirometry device and it prints the re-
sults.
I, as doctor, only see the printed out results and ex-
plain them to patients.
>> Does she have to use command line interface for
that?
No, it's all practical. The spirometer starts its
bluetooth client for rfcommd and rfcommd runs the
spirofilter printing filter script, which invokes
lpr(1).
>> Are there many situations like that, where cumber-
some interfaces makes life harder for working with
medical devices?
Yes, it's built into all medical devices to enforce
proprietary and expensive Windows software to be
bought.
For example the newer version of my ECG device has
some undocumented network mode. The ECG standard I
will be using over serial was defined in 1990. Since
then old devices only got bluetooth and ethernet, but
did nothing else new.
The price stayed the same, of course.
>> Do you think designers would benefits themself from
offering another interface that is easier to use?
In the short term viewpoint it protects you from com-
petitors to enter the market. But in the long run,
this now stops me from easily processing patient data
for further research. I am using a 25 yr old ECG and
some 10 yr old spirometer.
>> Are there any similarities in other devices to
reuse the existing work you just did?
Yes. Bluetooth is the new hype in medical devices.
All those smart devices for body measurement are for
example BLE, some insecure bluetooth standard to read
out key=value from bluetooth clients. Some bled(8)
should be easy to write.
Nearly every medical device still has some serial
port, either for communication or measurement.
For measurement this will never die out, since raw
data is required.
And some serial2bluetooth, that's what I am using for
my practical examples.
>> Would it have been possible to build such device
yourself from parts, but with sane interfaces in-
stead?
Building such a device is not the hard part. The hard
part is licensing the device as being a medical de-
vice.
I am, as a doctor, am allowed to license some medical
device for my patients. But if I'd want to sell or
give this device to some other doctor, I'd need some
EU medical device license.
This is a complex process.
You have severial medical device classes. Some always
require some EU-wide licensing.
The logic of some ECG is very simple. But licensing
it for selling is what makes it expensive and/or keeps
the competition low.
>> What do you advise to people also stuck with cum-
bersome device, but without reverse engineer super-
powers?
Force the device producers to open up standards.
Write into contracts, that devices have to be interop-
erable, so producers need to adapt.
It's the same for software. If you can't write it on
your own, force them to open up standards, because you
want to extend the software.
For extension of software, reverse engineering is le-
gal.
Carrying the Cross tgtimes
____________________________________________________________
Walking on the streets, slowly, slowed-down by carry-
ing a huge wooden cross, tall as three persons, paint-
ed in blue, a recognisable cross shaped as an 'f', the
'f' of facebook.
This is the project Filipe Vilas-Boas, inviting anyone
to watch the unrealistic scene, and question themself
on the weight of social media, and beliefs associated
with technology.
>> investigating global interconnection utopia, spiri-
tual magic and contemporary algorithmic slavery dys-
topia
Was there an event declaring that technology was not
only for looneys on their geek basement? The opening
of facebook? The advent of the iPhone? The first day
you could fired from an office job for not being able
to turn on a computer? Technology did not really ap-
pear all at once in our lives, and does not even reach
every citizen of every country. Looking at ourself
with a fresh candide look and wondering if how we live
make sense is becoming increasingly difficult.
Like Filipe Vilas-Boas, artists offers us a tiny win-
dow onto our own life, a porthole toward ourself, for
allowing us to watching ourself from the outside. [1]
[1]
https://filipevilasboas.com/Carrying-The-Cross
Fortran Diahrea
____________________________________________________________
Quoting Ganssle in The Embedded Muse mailing list:
>> The University of Maryland's Ralph compiler would
abort after 50 compiletime errors and print out a
picture of Alfred E. Neuman, with the caption "This
man never worries, but from the look of your code,
you should." [1]
[1]
http://www.ganssle.com/tem/tem439.html
High-Tech, Low-Life tgtimes
____________________________________________________________
High-Tech Refers to the ability to use complex tools
created by engineering, or hacking things together.
Low-Life Refers to those put aside by society, such as
criminal or drug dealer, making itself edgy; or ho-
bos and beggars, pushed to the edge by more or less
everyone.
One way to develop the idea of High-Tech Low-Life
would be a criminal using modern tools such to empower
its crimes. A transaction giving the bad guys the big
guns. Not good.
But another way to portray it is someone rejected by
its surroundings, seeking support through technologi-
cal tools. May it be as a source of direct income, or
as a way to get informed, or inform its surrounding,
perhaps the entire world such as what did happen with
the late revolts in China.
The "High Tech, Low Life" (2012) documentary shows us
that it is not a science-fiction plot, but a phe-
nomenon happenning today.
Giving High-Tech toys to poor population sounds more
like a GAFAM (Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Mi-
crosoft) plan to rule over the third-world while look-
ing like a humanitarian hero saving the world. But an-
other way to see it is surrending the Low-Life people
to the claws of High-Tech corps, extending further the
frontiers of ad-tech.
Giving entertainment platform is probably not the most
urgent kind of technology people without a meal a day
is going to need. What about a tractor though? In its
simplest form, in China again, a 55 years-old lady
farmer started to use a hoverboard (board to stand on
with a wheel on left and right) to change 3 hours of
daily walk to carry the vegetables harvested, into 40
minutes riding this board. [1]
Or what about deploying long-range point-to-point
wireless links in west Africa to circumvent the poor
cable infrastructure? This would help escaping the
lobby and regulations that take over the few IT re-
sources of that country? [2]
Or even inventing affordable small solar or wind-power
stations for the tights budgets of off-grid villages?
Or an on-street display continuously showing live job
offers?
>> Did you open-source a driver for the community as
part of your job? Installed Linux on an old laptop
for someone in need? Convincing the boss to make the
project open-source? Attended a surprising situation
of that kind? Tell us your story of High-Tech given
to Low-Life on #bitreich-en IRC channel on the
irc.bitreich.org server.
[1]
https://nextshark.com/chinese-farmer-hoverboard-life/
https://www.chinanews.com.cn/tp/hd2011/2018/02-13/800254.shtml
[2]
http://www.melissadensmore.com/papers/m4d08-mho-reassessing.pdf
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2015-10-27/how-to-build-a-low-tech-internet/
FreeDOOMDay on 2022-03-27 20h
____________________________________________________________
In comemoration of the beginning summer time in cen-
tral Europe, we will celebrate FreeDOOMDay! On
2022-03-27 20:00 CEST (be careful!), we will play
chocolate-doom [1]
This is a doom variant which runs on nearly every ma-
chine out there and supports extra modes: [2]
Please try to install the FreeDOOM wad files as a
base:
See you on Sunday!
Sincerely yours, 20h Chief Gaming Officer (CGO)
[1]
https://www.chocolate-doom.org
[2]
https://www.chocolate-doom.org/wiki/index.php/Three_screen_mode
Beerware: Hardware for Beer tgtimes
____________________________________________________________
Retreated industrial robot hardware recycled into a
bartender. Such is the project of the Bistromatik,
born in Brittany, now visiting countries abroad.
A mechanical robot arm was built for the industry, but
while still working, was removed from production, and
collected dust in a warehouse.
Jean-Marie Ollivier took this bored machine that he
named "Nestor", got it to move again, and rather than
servicing the industry, was programmed it to serve
beers.
>> It is not rare to see Jean-Marie make Nestor dance
on a violin melody.
Moving from town to town, this iron giant, taller than
any human, goes on display grabbing gobelets, filling
them at the tap, and offering them to the curious
crowd passing by.
And if you feel hungry too, you may ask it for a
treat, it can also prepare some crepes, the Bretons'
favorite dessert. [1]
[1]
https://bistromatik.com/
Memecache atom feed
____________________________________________________________
Thanks to the innovation from the Netherlands, we can
now offer an atom feed for the memecache at
bitreich.org: [1]
Please subscribe for your newest meme pleasure!
Sincerely yours, 20h Chief Meme Officer (CMO)
[1]
gopher://bitreich.org/0/memecache/news.atom
St-Lazare's Paris Train Station tgtimes
____________________________________________________________
Ah! The Saint Lazare train station. Emblem of the Par-
isian train station, and today still looking like on
the painting by the XIXth century painter Monet.
This typical look were somehow preserved regardless of
the modernisation of the train equipments. Lately, new
equipments have been installed to prevent fraud: tick-
et barriers are now surrounding all the stations and
their surrounding, only letting those owning a ticket
onto the station.
Not unexpected from a train company for a country with
fraud around 10% on long train lines. Mr. Monet would
probably still be able to come and settle down for
painting the train station nowaday, although to the
price of a ticket to anywhere.
Yet the devices themself seems not of the greatest
comfort to both fraudsters, beggars frequently coming
where most passengers are, and legitimate passengers
alike. While it might be improved shortly, there is an
high error rate for passengers trying to insert their
ticket or NFC card.
In case of a misunderstanding of how to use these de-
vices, the train stations are not overcrowded with
staff to welcome passengers in need for information,
and it would take a bit of time.
Setting-up a new solution seems a difficult challenge,
putting in compromise price to setup, comfort of use,
reliability, finding the new staff in charge of main-
tenance... A reminder that technical solutions only
solve technical problems. [1]
[1]
https://lenouvelautomobiliste.fr/actualites/39949/des-portes-pour-transformer-la-vie-de-la-gare-saint-lazare/
FreeDOOMDay results
____________________________________________________________
Thanks to everyone participating in our first tryout
to play doom over our bitreich infrastructure. It
worked out pretty well. In the end we played the
freedm.wad of freedoom.
Some statistics: Maximum up and down bandwidth re-
quired was 14 kbytes/s. Maximum CPU usage here: 2% of
one core. RAM: 400 kb.
Chocolate Doom is compatible to vanilla doom. Every-
one having some old DOS doom can join in using rf-
commd: [1]
Just attach a serial2bluetooth dongle and some blue-
tooth dongle in your linux machine, then use the new
added filter: [2]
This will automatically connect your serial connection
to a doom server over tcp/ip. Change it to
bitreich.org and the standard port and you are set.
Of course you can use socat from some ttyUSB0 or ttyS0
too. Nothing stops you, but your own laziness. The
possibilities are endless.
See you next time, with whatever machine you can find
and which runs DOOM!
Sincerely yours, 20h Chief Gaming Officer (CGO)
[1]
git://bitreich.org/rfcommd
[2]
gopher://bitreich.org/1/scm/rfcommd/commit/
9b77ca90e9cf4ca7cd9521e6756dc2b833cdefce.gph
What really happened on Mars?
____________________________________________________________
What can possibly go wrong while sending a device en-
tirely controlled by software on a remote location
where noone would ever be able to go for a long while?
The question opens a vast field of answers.
1997, Pathfinder, a solar-powered ground lander and
station, with VxWorks proprietary real time operating
system onboard, embedding an 6-wheeled Sojourner rover
with custom firmware, landed on Mars.
During a field data collection mission a priority in-
version did happen on the Pathfinder station total
loss of control for the time of a reboot.
The bug was reproduced on earth and patched, latter
explained on a mailing list, published online. [1]
At its core, most operating systems are built around a
scheduler that orchestrates execution of many tasks
onto one or several CPUs. It is a critical piece of
software in the case of real-time operating systems,
that must ensure to trigger some actions right on
time.
Complex systems may be unfit for such purposes, and
software simplicity has found its way through experi-
menting how complex systems may end-up in difficult-
to-debug situations.
Imagine yourself in charge of reproducing a bug on
earth for something that went wrong on another planet,
with a patch expected for next Monday. A strong argu-
ment toward keeping systems simple and easier to de-
bug.
Although, the Mars operating system landscape is not
all VxWorks and nothing else. For instance, the RTEMS
system, Real-Time Executive for Multiprocessor Systems
was open-sourced from US army 1993 and is today ac-
tively maintained by both corporations and the open
source community.
Being part of Google Summer of Code, it is also wel-
coming newcomers to real-time operating system devel-
opment, who might be able to contribute to embedded
software making its way onto space. [2]
While the ISS project was put at threat by the current
events in Ukraine involving all nations, outter-space
still represents a middle ground where all sides have
a same objective and can collaborate: extending the
horizons above what could be reached before.
[1]
https://www.cs.unc.edu/~anderson/teach/comp790/papers/mars_pathfinder_long_version.html
[2]
https://www.rtems.org/
Gopher for Medical Research
____________________________________________________________
The National Institute of Health is well used to the
Gopher protocol, for it used it as a way to publish
medical documentation. You named it: PubMed itself
have been delivering documents through Gopher:
Phone books with name, phone number and e-mail ad-
dresses of those willing to submit it,
Images like weathermaps,
Audio such as 1992 presidential debates,
Books and all kind of publcations, also proposed to
users as a way to publish their own content,
Videos short ones, but also on-demand movies!
Telnet interfaces with login and password,
Search engines For browsing this entire content.
The technical bulletin of March-April 1994 reveals as
much. While 1994 does not sounds like a world gifted
with nowadays unlimited technology, equivalents to
modern tools, with less bells and less whistles, were
already widespread among providers, but much less used
as they are today:
Spotify were files through Gopher.
Netflix were files through Gopher.
PubMed, ResearchGate were files through Gopher.
Instagram were files through Gopher.
Facebook were publication as files through Gopher.
Amazon Kindle were text files through Gopher.
Office365 were telnet interactive session, or Word-
Star, PostScript, and ASCII files through Gopher.
Google was either gopher search, or interactive telnet
sessions, with sometimes powerful query languages,
permitting to filter the result held in the data-
bases: Searching for references about Italians with
AIDS that are not indexed with ITALY (MH)
This showcases that a lot of thing declared as possi-
ble today thank to the advances of technology were
available since as early as 1994. With much less bells
and much less whistles. With much less bandwidth for
everyone, but existing bandwidth much less used as
well.
Interactive database querying languages would look a
bit uninviting, and TurboGopher (showcased in the doc-
ument) has not all the font, layout, media integration
features of modern day web browsers.
Under that perspective, the race to technology looks
like not a quest for new use-cases, but taking what
was possible in the early days to in a crude format
and only to some initiated, to the masses, in an
inviting layout, packed onto small, shiny objects that
fit on a mere pocket. [1]
One year later, the Gopher for Science and Medecine
project still is blown at full steam, as the National
Library of Medecine publishes a bibliography for
setting-up gopher servers for collaborating on spe-
cific medical topics.
>> Developing a subject-specific Gopher at the Na-
tional Library of Medicine [2]
[1]
https://www.nlm.nih.gov/pubs/techbull/archive/nlm_technical_bulletin_march_april_1994.pdf
[2]
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/7599590/
Secret voting for Bitreich Council
____________________________________________________________
Bitreich is always ahead in its structure, organisa-
tion and technology. So is our democracy: [1]
The majority of council members has decided, that:
>> Secret voting is possible on certain topics. When
council members vote in secret, they need to vote un-
der a bedcover. Multiple council members can be un-
der one bedcover.
Bitreich is reacting to the decision of Debian to in-
troduce back chamber corruption in its decision mak-
ing: [2]
This is completely prevented in the Bitreich model,
since multiple council members are allowed under one
bedcover, while hidden from any eavesdropper in the
room.
Sincerely yours, 20h Chief Democracy Officer (CDO)
[1]
gopher://bitreich.org/1/scm/bitreich-council/commit/
f43daad938405d966c158a12b6fcb8f13a9d1868.gph
[2]
https://lwn.net/Articles/889444/
TMP.0UT Volume 2 is Out
____________________________________________________________
In the sytle of the Phrack online resource, tmp.0ut
publishes its second volume.
>> TMP.0UT stands on the shoulders of giants, and we
lend a hand for the next generation of giants to
stand on ours.
Focused on the ELF format reverse engineering, the on-
line zine culminates a rich set of resources and arti-
cles by experts for everyone interested in the world
of ELF hacking.
o Bare Metal Jacket
o How to write a virtual machine in order to hide your
viruses
o Every Boring Problem Found in eBPF
And much, much more... News straight out of the com-
piler: [1]
[1]
https://tmpout.sh/2/
Bitreich migrating to Windows Server 20h
____________________________________________________________
Yesterday the last SSH.com license we had expired. We
are now unable to access Linux on the old bitreich.org
servers. In an approach to modernize Bitreich, the
council decided to go further:
o Windows Server 2022 will be the new server OS for
growing our business opportunities and fast deploy-
ment of critical workloads such as SQL Server with
confidence using 48TB of memory, 64 sockets, and
2048 logical cores.
o Irc.bitreich.org will be replaced by Microsoft Teams
to create a more engaging meeting experience with
together mode. Focus on faces, pick up on nonverbal
cues, and easily see who is talking.
o The ed(1) cloud will be replaced by Microsoft Office
365 to connect and empower every employee, from the
office to the frontline worker, with a Microsoft 365
solution that enhances productivity and drives inno-
vation.
We hope to see you on the new services, which enrich
your daily business life.
Sincerely yours, 20h Chief Technology Officer (CTO)
Linux Sysadmin Job Offer announce
____________________________________________________________
The web is hiring over and over. A lot of professions
were converted from something, to something with on-
line web tools and a lot of computer systems are using
a webinterfaces that are just skins for a database.
If you feel like giving a good sweep in all the dust
of webservers, and transform fragile, complex, buggy
ecosystems onto leaner, more stable systems, and are
currently looking for a job as an Admin, we might have
an offer for you.
The offer is located in France, within a warm and
horsing team in a 20-sized company powering a little
part of the Internet (not only the Web), dealing with
clients from local shops to international groups.
Come and discover the culture of Lille, in North of
France, one of the only places where you can taste
both Carbonnade (Belgian, meat cooked onto Belgian
beer) and Welsh (Great Britain, quality melted cheddar
served on a dish).
Contact josuah on #bitreich-en channel on
irc.bitreich.org server to know more about it.
Publishing in The Gopher Times you
____________________________________________________________
Want your article published? Want to announce some-
thing to the Gopher world? Directly related to Gopher
or not, reach us on IRC with an article in any format,
we will handle the rest.
ircs://irc.bitreich.org/#bitreich-en
gopher://bitreich.org/1/tgtimes/
git://bitreich.org/tgtimes/
]]></content>
<updated>2022-04-22T20:58:34+0200</updated>
<link type="application/pdf" href="gopher://bitreich.org/9/tgtimes/archive/2022-04-22/tgtimes-2022-04-22-opus4.pdf" />
</entry>
<entry>
<id>gopher://bitreich.org/9/tgtimes/archive/2022-06-28</id>
<title><![CDATA[2022-06-28]]></title>
<author><name>The Gopher Times Authors</name></author>
<content type="text"><![CDATA[
The Gopher Times
____________________________________________________________
Opus 5 - Gopher news and more - Jun. 2022
____________________________________________________________
Bitreich Con 2022, Come and Talk! 20h
____________________________________________________________
Greetings at 852.770114854 km/h, 34943.004 miles over
the Atlantic Ocean.
This is a happy reminder, that in less than 30 days,
brcon2022 will happen.
There will be two parts:
July 25th to 28th Online presentations, then one day
to get to Belgrade
July 30th to 31st We will be in presence, having fun
in Belgrade, Serbia.
If you want to hold a presention of your interest,
please see the Call for Papers: [1] and send your pro-
posal to Christoph Lohmann <20h@r-36.net>
There is already a wide variety of topics registered,
from medicine to simple software over geology and
hopefully a special greeting from our science supervi-
sor Prof. Skildgaard who wants to give advices to all
of us humans.
See you online and in presence!
Sincerely yours,
20h Chief Conference Officer (CCO)
1 gopher://bitreich.org/1/con/2022
Animated ASCII art linuxconsole
____________________________________________________________
With all the history of ASCII art and demoscene, it
would be a shame if noone ever tried to combine the
two in animated ASCII art. Courtesy of textfiles.com,
we can browse through a collection of 93 animated
ASCII pieces of arts. [1]
They are also mirrored at the bitreich gopher site [2]
The animation speed will likely be too high for a ter-
minal, and can be slowed down with the throttle(1)
program as advised by linuxconsole.net, or with pv(1)
as below:
1 http://artscene.textfiles.com/vt100/
http://linuxconsole.net/ascii_art.html
2 gopher://bitreich.org/1/vt100/animations/
____________________________________________________________
curl -s gopher://bitreich.org/1/vt100/animations/twilight.vt | pv -qL3000
____________________________________________________________
You may use the "reset" command to get your terminal
normal again after watching.
Some are just a pun, a few frames to only give impres-
sion of movement, while other might be closer to a
short animated movie. Talking of which, long movies
were also done:
https://www.asciimation.co.nz/
telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl
These characters transmitted through one protocol or
another, whispers to us, through our terminal screen,
tales from the imagination of plain text artists.
Prof. Skildgaard: Only Turtle Fans 20h
____________________________________________________________
I am happy to announce, that the scientific head of
bitreich, Prof. Skildgaard, the professor for slow
sciences at the Aarhus university in Denmark, now has
opened his own website [1]
You can see many #turtlefan pictures. [2]
Please recommend his work! He has done so much for us,
like reviewing all entries to the last and the coming
brcon. This takes ages!
Sincerely yours,
20h Chief Slowness Executive (CSE)
1 http://onlyturtlefans.com/
2 <annna> #turtlefan: gopher://bitreich.org/I/memecache/turtlefan.png
Synthetic ASCII Art tgtimes
____________________________________________________________
When an entirely new way to solve problems is discov-
ered, all sorts of medias, and not only the tech-
oriented ones, are fond to publish abundantly about
it. Be it quantum computing, blockchains, machine
learning... Shortly after a new big toys like these
comes-up, hackers come, and start experimenting with
it, sometimes coming-up with entirely new way to use
it.
This time we are reviewing the combo of Machine Learn-
ing and ASCII art.
I was expecting to present cute attempts at drawing
images with computer-made text, but this is nothing of
the sort. Be prepared to see Science at the service
of Art.
Generated Typewriter Art This research paper (no
less!) shows that it is possible to write software
for placing characters, later typed during 6 hours
by a human operator (for this example). It is un-
settling to see details much smaller than the char-
acters themself be drawn on paper, along with shades
of grey of various intensities. [1]
Generated ASCII Art in 2010 This is possibly the state
of the art of 2010 technology. It was announced in
the yearly conference SIGGRAPH hence presented to an
audience full of computer graphics engineers. The
work of three researchers from Hong Kong, Xuemiao
Xu, Linling Zhang and Tien-Tsin Wong, shows results
of surprising accuracy. The story does not tell
whether there ever was a job offer "looking for
ASCII artists for a scientific experiment" posted on
the job board of the Chinese University of Hong
Kong. While the paper contains the complete math
used, it also illustrates and explains methods to
acheive this level of accuracy. And no, it is not
exactly machine learning, but hand-crafted strate-
gies, combined statistics and other data massaging.
After all, it was published five years before things
like Tensor Flow were introduced... [2]
Generated ASCII Art in 2017 Is seven years enough time
to improve upon that previous acheivement? Quoting
the previous paper as well as others in its own
work, Osamu Akiyama of the Osaka Faculty of Medicine
kept the ball rolling. This throws the big guns of
machine learning to reach higher skies. Its input
data were Japaneses BBS such as 5chan (2chan) or
Shitaraba, which extends the ASCII set to all of
unicode, notably the CJK set. If the result of the
paper are not enough to convince you, the "Bad Ap-
ple" often used as a video demo in the Asian market
have been converted in its entirety. Something out
of reach if doing every frame by hand. The Tensor-
Flow and Python code used is released publicly, and
an online demo is offered for the curious. [3] [4]
[5] [6] [7]
Is it so futile? Not so sure. After all, representing
anything with a computer is a matter of making a real-
ity fit onto something terribly awkward and unnatural:
a display. The pixels, the square elements praised
for providing a grid to throw data at, are promising,
but themself have their quirks to be worked around.
For instance, sub-pixel geometry uses the same tech-
niques as those presented by these papers for improv-
ing the realism of images beyond what a single pixel
can offer. It is, for ASCII art like for anything
else, a matter of representing something, real or fic-
tious, through a medium of some kind.
ASCII art has the ability to fit an image somewhere
where there could only be text. For the example of a
train station concourse with a large split-flap dis-
play: for displaying a big arrow at the end of the
service, replacing the display by an equally large
color screen can be costly and much more power-hungry,
while an ASCII arrow on that existing display would be
consuming no power for that still image.
1 https://graphicsinterface.org/wp-content/uploads/gi2021-13.pdf
2 http://www.cse.cuhk.edu.hk/~ttwong/papers/asciiart/asciiart.html
3 https://nips2017creativity.github.io/doc/ASCII_Art_Synthesis.pdf
4 https://nips2017creativity.github.io/
5 https://yewtu.be/watch?v=8GulN69Cgbg
6 https://www.vice.com/en/article/zmymwx/machine-learning-ascii-art-neural-net
7 https://github.com/OsciiArt/DeepAA
BIG BROWSER IS WATCHING YOU! 20h
____________________________________________________________
Are you feeling watched all the time? Do you feel un-
sure when doing something nasty? It is true, you are
watched: By BIG BROWSER. Whenever you use the web,
someone else is masturbating to your web history.
You want to know how to be able to do nasty things on-
line without someone masturbating to it? Come to br-
con2022 and find out more. [1]
This time online and in presence!
See you there!
Sincerely yours,
20h Chief Espionage Officer (CEO)
1 gopher://bitreich.org/1/con/2022
Sailing With Grace tgtimes
____________________________________________________________
The sea! Water all around, not a single piece of land
around to stand in, only a single boat that becomes
one with you, its capitain. Infinite waves under the
blue or cloudly sky is all you see for a long trip of
many days. Feeling lost, but at the same time united
with surrounding nature. After all, the largest part
of Earth is covered by the sea.
This is the world of Sailing that awaits each of us,
for a single trip hosted by a well proven crew, or as
a lone sailor braving tempests after tempests.
Sailing blogs are definitely a good opportunity to
dream, the instant of an article.
This blog, Sailing With Grace, has taken the decision
of offering all its content through HTTP, but also
proxied over Gopher. [1] This recalls an interesting
point: it proves that Gopher is not only good for
talking about Gopher and computer things, but is also
oriented toward the outside. Is it ready to be used
by people who are not gopher geeks?
It always was to begin with, so why would it not? Are
people less able to use computers now than they was
before the web came? The discussion is open.
1 gopher://gopher.sailingwithgrace.com
sfeed 1.5 Released Hiltjo
____________________________________________________________
sfeed [1] is a tool to convert RSS or Atom feeds from
XML to a TAB-separated file.
sfeed has the following notable changes compared to
1.4:
o sfeed_curses: interrupt waitpid while interactive
child program is running. This now handles SIGTERM
on sfeed_curses while an interactive child program
is running.
o sfeed_curses: close stdin before spawning a plumb
program in non-interactive mode, which is more intu-
itive: the program doesn't seem to hang when it ex-
pects input in this case since there is no way to
send input anyway.
o Properly escape backslashes in the man pages (thanks
adc!).
o Documentation improvements to the man pages and a
progress indicator example script for sfeed_update.
I want to thank all people who gave feedback.
Thanks, Hiltjo.
1 git://git.codemadness.org/sfeed
gopher://codemadness.org/1/git/sfeed
https://codemadness.org/releases/sfeed/
gopher://codemadness.org/1/releases/sfeed/
Wireless, wireless everywhere tgtimes
____________________________________________________________
Wires! Cables! Connectors! Computer and electric sys-
tems seems to befriend with plugs and sockets. Why is
the computer industry running away from them for ev-
erything exposed to users?
Where do I plug the cable? Everyone needfully face
this question at least once, be it the first time
they own a computer. From the various connector
shapes to choose from, to the various set of proto-
col the Universal USB connector supports, cables
provoke confusion to cable-haters and computer neo-
phytes.
Cables are ugly It might not be true for everyone, but
computer manufacturers seems to say differently.
Starting with the name "wireless", that comes by op-
position to wires, supposing they were something to
avoid. Cable management is a full time job for dat-
acenter jockeys, and a chore for the cable-hating
computer user.
Cables are immobile Unless making use of an uncommon
cable management strategy, objects connected to ca-
bles cannot be carried too far away without unplug-
ging everything devices are connected to.
So here comes wireless. While not frequent in large
computer infrastructure, wireless is invading the mar-
ket along with battery devices. Using radio waves to
make device talk to each other, at various frequen-
cies, modulation, datarate and distance. Ready to
sacrifice any amount of good engineering to make it-
self more seducing to the market, marketting perpetu-
ates the same illusion of making computer troubles
fade away with wireless.
From the Bluetooth protocol swamp of mixed edge-cases
and complexity, to the security vulnerabilities of
Wi-Fi, to the security vulnerabilities of Bluetooth,
to the proprietary but popular protocols like LoRaWan,
to the unreliability and unstability as opposed to
wires, to the black box of wireless broadband such as
UTMS and LTE, Wireless does not have the same fame
among developers valuing simplicity and reliability.
Even the United Army holds griefs against wireless
such as Bluetooth, and disrecommand it for use by mil-
itaries: [1]
>> Do not use Bluetooth devices to send, receive,
store, or process classified information.
This means no Bluetooth keybaord, no Bluetooth headset
during phone calls, no Bluetooth sharing between the
phone and the computer... In other words, no Blue-
tooth.
Nontheless, wireless is fun, beautiful, and filled
with culture. While marketting pushed engineers from
the wireless cliff, long before computer came, radio
waves were put at good use in the most simple forms:
radio communication. From the AM and FM radio sta-
tions to listen while on the road, the medium-range
boat, airplane, truck, pedestrian talkies, and even
satellite communications, hobbyists building-up their
own antennas for inter-continental communication,
garage door openners and remotely controlled drones...
Complex and twisted wireless protocols are only a spe-
cial case of radio communication, and simple unobfus-
cated methods of communication are possible, and even
frequent.
Be it a simple and inexpensive RTL SDR dongle receiver
[2] or a complete receiver-emitter such as HackRF [3]
or LimeSDR, [4] many gears exist for experimenting
with radio transmissions.
Every year, the American Relay Radio League (ARRL) is
publishing a large book focused on radiocommunication,
and its chapter 1 section 1 is Do-It-Yourself Wire-
less.
This is an invitation for everyone to discover or re-
discover the universe of electromagnetic fields commu-
nication.
1 https://armypubs.army.mil/epubs/DR_pubs/DR_a/pdf/web/
ARN4771_Pam25-2-9_Final_Web.pdf
2 https://www.rtl-sdr.com/
3 https://greatscottgadgets.com/hackrf/one/
4 https://limemicro.com/products/boards/limesdr/
Open-Source Breathing tgtimes
____________________________________________________________
The previous opus had a word or two about how diffi-
cult it could be to get open hardware medical devices.
The Freespireco [1] project aims to bring a respirator
device to life as a completely Open Hardware project.
The challenge is not coming-up with something that
works and is reliable, but instead to provide a struc-
ture robust enough to be accepted (and funded) for
performing all the necessary certifications needed be-
fore being allowed to the medical device market.
There are usually categories of criticalities, and an
artificial respirator is not escaping to the rule. The
organiser of the project have pursued this goal since
long, and might likely have a very long road to go.
It is essentially a pioneer of Open Hardware for crit-
ical medical devices, step-by-step paving up the road
toward certification: designing and building devices
to test these equipment, issuing standards for data
(like a JSON schema received over a serial port di-
rectly from the device).
The strategy: offering reproducible tests as an anchor
for trust. Precious argument for facing big pharma
equipment vendors that are having an interest in lock-
ing their device down, preventing repair or even in-
spection.
In a same journey toward braving Goliath: accessing
the Outter Space. And it is, as crazy as it looks,
far from impossible to contribute to space research
even without a diploma: The RTEMS [2] project is open
to contribution.
But that does not discourage the authors of the respi-
rator project to keep going. Not in a blind trust for
the medical industry, but in full foresight that no-
body would want its mom's life given to a hobbyist toy
made in a garage. With this reality in mind, "what-
ever it takes" turns into "whatever is done", and the
road to certification progresses, one breath at a
time.
1 https://www.pubinv.org/project/freespireco/
2 https://rtems.org/
20h Presents: Geomyidae 20h
____________________________________________________________
This project existed since a while, and kept improv-
ing. In this interview with 20h, he shows us what
Geomyidae's got under the hood.
>> What is Geomyidae?
Geomyidae is a Unix/Linux daemon/service serving the
gopher protocol.
>> So what is gopher?
Gopher here is an internet protocol, which was first
developed at the University of Minnesota. After its
short success, it declined, but is now striving again
to be used for its simplicity and hierarchy. For bet-
ter visual display of your gopher experience, use
something like links, lynx or sacc. Those are gopher
clients.
>> How does Geomyidae help with getting started with
gopher?
The installation of Geomyidae is very simple. You can
setup your Geomyidae right away:
____________________________________________________________
git clone git://bitreich.org/geomyidae
cd geomyidae
make
curl -s gopher://localhost:7070
____________________________________________________________
Yes, curl supports gopher! And it supports gopher and
TLS too!
>> Are there many alternatives among gopher daemons?
Yes, there are many. Some are there due to historical
reasons, others have gone out of shape over time. One
of the most popular alternatives is pygopherd.
>> How does Geomyidae compares to other implementa-
tions?
Geomyidae offers a unique simple way of expressing go-
pher content. See the manpage or the examples in the
source for how .gph files are formatted. And it does
just what you want it to do. No strange abstraction
files like in the original gopher daemons are the de-
fault way. In the newest release of Geomyidae compat-
ibility scripts were added. But those are to preserve
the unique history of gopher.
>> Did Geomyidae have significant evolutions since the
beginning?
Yes. Originally Geomyidae was named gopherd for Plan
9. It then was ported over to Linux. On Linux it was
renamed to Geomyidae. During that development much
has happened: There were significant speedups (due to
the patches and work of other people!), features were
added especially in new dynamic content handling. You
can easily see all features in the documentation and
especially the simple manpage.
>> Does Geomyidae work with all gopher clients?
Yes. Geomyidae supports the original protocol from
the beginning, up to modern gopher with TLS. For the
intermediary gopher+ protocol there is a compatibility
layer.
>> Has NSA inserted a backdoor onto Geomyidae?
I am not allowed to tell you.
>> How does gopher help with privacy?
The gopher protocol has the unique property that all
data you send over the line can be easily controlled
and seen. This is different to HTTP, where headers,
HTML and Javascript got so complex, it is uncontrol-
lable. See the gopher onion project [1] for how to
combine this with tor for total privacy and anonymity.
>> Are there TLS support on some gopher clients al-
ready?
There is support in curl, mpv/ffmpeg, sacc and more.
It is very easy to add TLS support to any client. You
simply connect via TLS on the gopher TCP port (de-
fault: 70) and if it works, keep that connection open.
>> Are there been any evolution of the gopher protocol
itself since the beginning of Geomyidae?
The technology used is simple. Gopher does not allow
requests, which begin with the first bytes of a TLS
request. So any proper and old gopher daemon will
simply refuse the connection. Then the client is free
to reconnect without TLS based on its security config-
uration. Any ISDN line will handle such probing re-
quests for TLS easily.
>> Did Geomyidae have to adapt itself to the gopher
protocol? Did it make gopher change?
Geomyidae changed the part of gophespace it was able
to reach. Many servers run on Geomyidae. There is
software written just for Geomyidae and its gph for-
mat. The TLS extension of the protocol came from Bi-
treich / Geomyidae. We also set the standard to sim-
ply use UTF-8 as default representation in gopher
menus and so bring it into the 21st century. I can
conclude: Yes, Geomyidae changed and will change go-
pher.
>> Have you seen Geomyidae ever used outside a hobby
project?
Well, Bitreich is serious in changing the software
world. Most of gopherspace is »hobby projects«. But
then, most of gopherspace is made from heart blood and
love, which makes it part of the life of the authors.
>> Is Geomyidae ready for non-hobby uses?
Geomyidae is ready for any use. It is stable and op-
timized to scale better than the cloud.
>> Geomyidae uses ".gph" files.
Does it replace the gophermap standard? Yes, in Ge-
omyidae it does. Gph is simpler and easier to adapt
to, especially when you come from some markup world.
>> Does Geomyidae support dynamic pages?
Geomyidae supports two forms of dynamic pages: One
which uses the gph markup and one, where the
script/application outputs raw gopher output. Addi-
tionally it supports in the latest release a form of
REST, where paths are transformed into arguments to
scripts. There is also support for
index.dcgi/index.cgi scripts to have better looking
paths and URIs.
>> Is Geomyidae already packaged in some Linux/BSD
distributions?
As far as I know it is packaged in gentoo, Archlinux
(and more), all BSDs. Since it is so simple to pack-
age: Just extract the tarball, run make and make in-
stall, the packages are easily made for any package
manager.
>> What is planned for the next releases of Geomyidae?
As of now I have worked through my whole long-standing
TODO list for Geomyidae. New ideas will evolve from
people sending in patches or through practical need.
Geomyidae follows the Bitreich manifesto [2] where a
software can be done.
>> How to get involved? Getting help, discussing, bug
hunting, code contribution, documentation...
If anyone wants to get involved, first download Ge-
omyidae, run it, have fun using it, creating gopher
content. If you run into problems, have patches or
suggestions, come on IRC [3] and discuss with us your
problem. For e-mail, send such requests to 20h@r-
36.net. All contact is in the manpage too.
>> Can I have an ice cream?
Yes, you will get one, once we meet again.
1 gopher://bitreich.org/1/onion
2 gopher://bitreich.org/0/documents/bitreich-manifesto.md
3 ircs://irc.bitreich.org/#bitreich-en
Embedded Forth Programming tgtimes
____________________________________________________________
Big computers can run large and complex programming
languages, so what can small computer run?
Compiled languages, in particular those with a small
runtime are often chosen. But the interpreted lan-
guages also have an audience willing to code with
their favorite programming environment for them. Pro-
gramming languages as big as Python have their embed-
ded counterpart (MicroPython) thanks to significant
efforts. They serve their purpose to embedded enthu-
siasts as educational and scripting languages to many.
But small "language in a nutshell" are fitting right
the small resources of microcontrollers. This is the
case of Forth and its stack-machine approach.
____________________________________________________________
Mecrisp This implementation immediately targets micro-
controllers. See for instance the work of
librehacker.com author Christopher Howard. [1]
chipFORTH Another implementation of Forth, which were
used by NASA [2] for improving reliability of its
flight control system, among the mosts critical
pieces of software of a shuttle.
https://github.com/corecode/forth Among notable Forth
projects is Simon "corecode" Schubert's nimble forth
implementation as well as hardware code describing
the working of a CPU that executes Forth natively
[3]
https://forth.chat/ If feeling like having a taste of
Forth and Forth community, there are several chan-
nels featuring forth that you could enjoy, some of
which are oriented toward hardware projects directly
[4]
https://github.com/chmykh/apl-life This is Conway Game
of Life in APL in Forth What a long chain! It is APL
programming language implemented in Forth, and Con-
way game of life implemented in APL
https://github.com/remko/waforth Feeling like pushing
the irony of "Web" assembly even further? Why not
blasting a Forth implementation at it? [5] This
proves Forth as the new programming language en
vogue
http://collapseos.org/ What else does a programming
language need to prove itself useful? A kernel?
Check! Collapse OS is an operating system target-
ting resilience beyond extreme, as it is designed to
resist everything around it tearing apart, including
the whole civilisation. When nothing remains but
wastelands, CollapseOS will be there for a rebirth
of civilisation out of computers made from scavenged
parts. Civilisation is rising and falling all of
the time, just not all parts at the same time.
>> Forth is, to my knowledge, the most compact lan-
guage allowing high level constructs. -- Collapse OS
author.
gopher://retroforth.org/ https://retroforth.org/ A
forth implemented in C, Python, C#, Nim, JavaScript
and Pascal! The C version permits to embed the
script into a binary along with the interpreter, for
a single-binary deployment process. The more clas-
sic way to use it is to use shebangs scripts to have
executable scripts.
Many smaller utilities can already provide something
you needed:
http://retroforth.org/examples/Casket-HTTP.retro.html
An HTTP server
http://retroforth.org/examples/Atua-WWW.retro.html A
Gopher to HTTP+HTML Proxy on top of Atua.
http://retroforth.org/examples/Atua.retro.html A go-
pher server, already listed on the Gopher index of
links, the Gopher Lawn [6]
http://retroforth.org/examples/7080.retro.html A s
https://gitlab.com/goblinrieur/spreedsheet/ A spread-
sheet application in the terminal.
gopher://forth.works:100 This is a collection of code
blocks written in the Retro Forth's author (crc)
newest Forth implementation. It is itself served by
a gopher server (blocks 203-205 on the list above)
in Forth.
https://github.com/oriontransfer/pl0-language-tools A
PL/0 implementation in Python that can emmit Retro
Forth code as ouput. It looks like Forth simplic-
ity, portability, stability and speed of execution
made it a good candidate as a target language. The
PL/0 language is known for the book Algorithms +
Data Structures = Programs from Niklaus Wirth, him-
self famous for the Wirth Law:
>> The hope is that the progress in hardware will cure
all software ills. However, a critical observer may
observe that software manages to outgrow hardware in
size and sluggishness. --
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth's_law
https://ribccs.com/candy/ If you were doubting about
Forth being fit for the industry, bear in mind that
the above is a very-large scale VFX Forth project
with over a million lines of code!
http://sam-falvo.github.io/kestrel/2016/03/29/vibe-2.2
Why not spin a vi-like text editor itself in forth?
See how few code it takes to implement one.
https://git.sr.ht/~vertigo/shoehorn An answer to the
bootstrapping problem: how to get from no software
to a complete system? Which compiler compiles the
first compiler? Forth's simplicity is a good candi-
date for solving this problem.
https://git.sr.ht/~vertigo/forthbox Software environ-
ment for computers to base upon right after booting:
a system shell in forth with real hardware projects
dedicated to it. Think of a LISP machine, but in-
stead being a Forth machine.
http://deathroadtocanada.com/ This video-game uses
Forth as a scripting language. When a whole script-
ing language fits on a thumb, putting it everywhere
costs nothing!
____________________________________________________________
Such a large tool chest for such a small language.
With the Covid, Wars under disguise, and other supply
chain troubles, the demand of feature stability rises
face to the traditionnal "more features". In these
trying times, anyone is welcome to go Forth.
1 gemini://gem.librehacker.com/gemlog/tech/20220331-0.gmi
gemini://gem.librehacker.com/gemlog/tech/20220305-0.gmi
2 https://www.forth.com/space-shuttle-instrumentation-interface/
3 https://github.com/corecode/forth-cpu
4 ircs://irc.hackint.org/#forth-hardware-projects
5 https://el-tramo.be/waforth/
https://el-tramo.be/thurtle/
6 bitreich.org/1/lawn/c/gopher.gph
A new IRC network: IRCNow! tgtimes
____________________________________________________________
A new IRC network is in town! [1] Ever wanted to feel
what an early community looks like? The admin jrmu
brought the project together, and is currently col-
lecting users along the way.
Whether you looked for a place to host your own commu-
nity, or wanted a see a fresh community be grow from
fertile ground, the community is welcoming and active.
>> IRCNow: Of the Users, By the Users, For the Users
Something else from this community might catch your
attention, is its orientation toward being adminis-
trated by its users themself: rather than letting the
founder handle everything, the community is oriented
toward serious teaching of unix command line and sys-
tem administration to anyone, from beginners to ad-
vanced users seeking improvement.
In-person teaching sessions were covered during the
LibrePlanet 2022 event [2] with recording of a test-
run of the event [3] where future and present hackers
met together working our their system administration
and community building skills. Linux Magazine also
ran an interview giving a good impression about the
spirit of the project: [4]
Beyond yet another IRC network to chat with, IRCnow
offers hosting services for IRC bouncers, Bots, E-
Mail, VPN, Code, File Storage, and Shell Accounts.
The wiki itself features plenty of technical informa-
tion on system administration as a support for its
bootcamps, which offers a comfortable step-by-step in-
troduction to a complete server administration. [5] I
have seen system administrators getting hired knowing
less than this!
1 irc://irc.ircnow.net:6667
ircs://irc.ircnow.net:6697
2 https://jrmu.host.ircnow.org/libreplanet/libreplanet.pdf
3 https://0x0.st/oTal.webm - 0h20m: audio starts - 1h15m: talking about Gopher
4 https://www.linux-magazine.com/Issues/2021/249/Interview-IRCNow
5 https://wiki.ircnow.org/index.php?n=Minutemin.Bootcamp
Search podcasts via Gopher tgtimes
____________________________________________________________
Do you happen to be a podcast enjoyer? Maybe you con-
sidered to have something to listen to on the road or
while cooking.
Combining many different sources, you may encounter
some heirlooms by searching through this gopher
front-end for podcast search. [1]
The platform aggregates multiple search APIs of RSS
link aggregators with a focus on audio podcasts, and
extracts the RSS links for you, so you do not have to
search throug a dozen of webpages just to find the RSS
button.
For instance, knowing about the Amp Hour podcast, I
tried searching for it: "Amp Hour" in the search
field, and bingo! The first result is "The Amp Hour
Electronics Podcast", that was quickly added to my
list of RSS feeds in a blast.
Being based off Gopher, this makes it insanely easy to
automate a script searching for podcasts, then down-
loading the entries and uploading them to an MP3
player of any kind (dedicated, or as part of a phone
or other portable computer).
Want to know more about it? One place to discuss
about it is the Bitreich IRC server [2]
1 gopher://gopher.icu/1/pod
2 ircs://irc.bitreich.org/#bitreich-en
Relics of Fast Fourrier Transform rue_mohr
____________________________________________________________
In 1967, the Kooley-Tukey FFT algorythm (the one we
all use now) was written in Fortran. What the hell
were they running it on, and what damned data were
they feeding into it?!
____________________________________________________________
SUBROUTINE FOUR1(DATA,NN,ISIGN)
C THE COOLEY-TUKEY FAST ROURIER TRANSFORM IN USASI BASIC FORTRAN
C TRANSFORM(J) = SUM(DATA(I)+W**((I-1)*(J-1)). WHERE I AND J RUN
C FROM 1 TO NN AND W = EXP(ISIGN*2*PI+SQRT(-1)/NN). DATA IS ONE-
C DIMENSIONAL COMPLEX ARRAY (I.E.: THE REAL AND IMAGINARY PARTS OF
C THE DATA ARE LOCATE IMMEDIATELY ADJACENT IN STORAGE, SUCH AS
C FORTRAN IV PLACES THEM) WHOSE LENGTH NN IS A POWER OF TWO. ISIGN
C IS +1 OR -1, GIVING THE SIGN OF THE TRANSFORM, TRANSFORM VALUES
C ARE RETURNED IN ARRAY DATA, REPLACING THE INPUT DATA. THE TIME IS
C PROPORTIONAL TO N*LOG2(N), RATHER THAN THE USUAL N**2. WRITTEN BY
C NORMAN BRENNER, JUNE 1967, THIS IS THE SHOURTEST VERSION
C OF FFT KNOWN THE THE AUTHOR, AND IS INTENDED MAINLY FOR
C DEMONSTRATION. PROGRAMS FOUR2 AND FOURT ARE AVAILABLE THAT RUN
C TWICE AS FAST AND OPERATE ON MULTIDIMENSIONAL ARRAYS WHOSE
C DIMENSIONS ARE NOT RESTRICTED TO POWERS OR TWO. (LOOKING UP SINES
C AND COSINES IN A TABLE WILL CUT RUNNING TIME OF FOUR1 BY A THIRD.)
C SEE-- IEEE AUDIO TRANSACTIONS (JUNE 1967), SPECIAL ISSUE ON FFT.
DIMENSION DATA(1)
N=2*NN
J=1
DO 5 I=1,N,2
IF(I-J)1,2,2
1 TEMPR=DATA(J)
TEMPI=DATA(J+1)
DATA(J)=DATA(I)
DATA(J+1)=DATA(I+1)
DATA(I)=TEMPR
DATA(I+1)=TEMPI
2 M=N/2
3 IF(J-M)5,5,4
4 J=J-M
M=M/2
IF(M-2)5,3,3
5 J=J+M
MMAX=2
6 IF(MMAX-N)7,9,9
7 ISTEP=2*MMAX
DO 8 M=1,MMAX,2
THETA=3.1415926535*FLOAT(ISIGN*(M-1))/FLOAT(MMAX)
WR=COS(THETA)
WI=SIN(THETA)
DO 8 I=M,N,ISTEP
J=I+MMAX
TEMPR=WR*DATA(J)-WI*DATA(J+1)
TEMPI=WR*DATA(J+1)+WI*DATA(J)
DATA(J)=DATA(I)-TEMPR
DATA(J+1)=DATA(I+1)-TEMPI
DATA(I)=DATA(I)+TEMPR
8 DATA(I+1)=DATA(I+1)+TEMPI
MMAX=ISTEP
GO TO 6
9 RETURN
END
____________________________________________________________
And no, you cannot get the IEEE document because IEEE
broke it up into pages and sells each page individu-
ally.
____________________________________________________________
"PROGRAMS FOUR2 AND FOURT ARE AVAILABLE THAT RUN
C TWICE AS FAST AND OPERATE ON MULTIDIMENSIONAL ARRAYS WHOSE
C DIMENSIONS ARE NOT RESTRICTED TO POWERS OR TWO."
____________________________________________________________
But, this code was easy to port because it was small,
so, to this day, we use it. It was ported from For-
tran to BASIC, then to C, then to C++ and everything
else.
Nobody ever actually understood it, so they didn't fix
anything. You see, Fortran has no bitwise operateors,
so alot of the acrobatics in that code are just doing
bitwise operations in regular math. Its absolutely
amazing when you tear it apart.
I got the code from a bad scan of a document off a
military ftp site. What I love, and find halarious,
is that this code has been ported and hacked a million
times since it was written.
But, from the comments, it, itself, is a hack. It is
a mash up of cooley and tukeys code. It is a hack,
from 1967.
Maemo Leste keeps kicking in! tgtimes
____________________________________________________________
The ultimate hacker's toy project: a OpenSource pow-
ered hand-held computer.
Where to start from? There can be two walls prevent-
ing every Linux enthusiast from having its own phone
with a "Linux Powered" sticker on it:
1. hardware support: getting Linux to boot on the
twisted hardware setups of smartphones can be frus-
trating.
2. application support: writing all the tools that
make a plain unix shell useable as a phone, that we
usually take for granted on a phone operating sys-
tem. It may be as simple as a daemon watching in-
coming phone call from hardware abstractions (those
from in 1.) and playing a ringtone.wav whenever a
call comes in, it still has to be written. Same
goes for a keyboard application if it uses a touch-
screen. Same goes for anything.
Since it goes beyond the scope of a week-end hack,
collaboration takes place for making these projects
happen.
Maemo Leste is now existing since more than four
years, and keeps being developed at good pace. It
even shines where Android does not: it uses mainline
Linux kernel instead of forks that never get upgraded
nor contributed back to Linux. This means that all
software officially supported by Maemo Leste might
also be available to many more Linux-based projects.
Of course, there are non-official porting efforts for
more hardware underway to become a completely sup-
ported target. Like it is for every operating system
project.
Maemo Leste, the project bringing a real UNIX shell
where you only had a Android Java ecosystem, featuring
GPS chips reverse engineering, and a working phone
module.
The support for the inexpensive PinePhone means you
can get a fully working linux phone in your pocket.
Grab it while it is hot, the lack of bloated prebuilt
application forced into it by the vendor means it will
not catch fire! [1]
1 https://maemo-leste.github.io/maemo-leste-sixteenth-update-november-and-
december-2021-january-april-2022.html
I Do Not Know, Do Not Ask Me josuah
____________________________________________________________
The post-Snowden era is marked by a new fact that can-
not be ignored anymore: NSA (among others) is watching
you (among others).
Does that change anything to my everyday life? Proba-
bly not, they already were before you knew about it.
Should I do anything about it? No answer. The eter-
nal doubt that modern society is famous for:
>> I do not know, do not ask me. That question is
weird anyway. Let me go back to my life.
That same doubt that occurs when you look up on a su-
permarket and see the mess of wires, tubes, cables and
neon lighting, barely even hidden, at best painted in
white... The worst scene of industrial warehouse, as
if taken straight out of the Brazil [1] movie.
A landscape that is in such opposition with the images
printed onto every food product being sold, picturing
what more or less fits the collective imagery of
"house of my grandparents in back-country", promising
a natural environment and suggest quality, authentic-
ity, tradition to the buyer... Pictures of a caring
lady baking something appetizing, a honest farmer of-
fering a handful of home-grown vegetables or meat...
Where did they even find all these landscapes of back-
country without phone line everywhere, tracktors, al-
sphalt, cattle warehouses, wind turbines to put on
these product background images?
>> I do not know, do not ask me. That question is
weird anyway. Let me go back to my life.
How did such a landscape, neon distopia pictures that
seems straight out of a /r/cyberpunk [2] post or the
latest Blade Runner, got invited into the cozzy bubble
of the average citizen doing shopping? [3] Who made
these places so ugly? Why do I feel like human is be-
ing considered like cattle in these kind of places?
>> I do not know, do not ask me. That question is
weird anyway. Let me go back to my life.
What weird things am I even saying! It is not like an
NSA agent is sitting on every metal beams of these su-
permarket looking at passersby with an empty gaze.
There are cameras though. What do they film?
Thieves? Who is checking? Software? Peoples? Are
marketting managers looking at these pictures? Of me
too? Right now? What do they think of me? Did they
look at my hand hesitating between these two products?
>> I do not know, do not ask me. That question is
weird anyway. Let me go back to my life.
Going out, one might encounter someone sitting on its
empty backpack, with a small cup filled with coins,
looking a bit panicked, looking a bit dirty, looking a
bit lost, sometimes even a bit drunk, or is it dizzi-
ness from living outside? Occasionally they will ask
you for another coin to add to their small collection.
Passerbys offer them a lie such as "I do not have
cash", or a kind word like "no, sorry", keep walking
faster without looking, and eventually stops paying
the tax and quickly keep going before they got asked
for more. What did happen to them? Did they choose
to live here? How can I know it will never happen to
me? Why do I feel bad if I do not give them what they
ask? Why do I feel bad if I give them what they ask?
>> I do not know, do not ask me. That question is
weird anyway. Let me go back to my life.
Let's not get fooled or reverse the roles here: Writ-
ing this, I am not asking these questions to you, nei-
ther you are asking these questions to yourself. The
places we live in are suggesting these questions.
By building a supermarket out of a warehouse but dis-
playing eye-catchy pictures of a scenery that does not
even exist, it is obvious that people will notice the
disbalance between the two.
By placing cameras filming every square meter of such
a place, or even a whole city, it is obvious that peo-
ple will wonder at some point, who is behind the
screen reviewing these images.
The questions are left open. Nothing is made to even
give hint about the answer. We are left in the doubt,
letting some comfort themself with "it is just in case
of a burglary, only a police officer is going to
watch" or other claim "they are using these images to
study how we think to better control us!"; claims
based upon convictions, not facts.
The technician installing these cameras up there has
no hint either, its manager just followed the recom-
mandations of the mothership company, itself getting
directions from the investor group who purchased the
brand, who themself are only trying to keep-up with
the trends in that domain.
Why would I care? I stopped to care about these silly
questions since long. I came back to the real world
for the better. I live my life ignoring what happens
around me and it works plenty well.
>> So why is that, at deep down, in the middle of my
gut, there is a voice whispering to me that
something's wrong. [4]
The thing with living like an ant in the anthill is:
you do not get too many answers about how the whole
anthill works.
1 https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088846/
2 https://teddit.net/r/cyberpunk
3 https://theuws.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/supermarkt.jpg
4 https://yewtu.be/watch?v=QcSlAihVM0Q
Mallumo Encrypted IRC darkfi
____________________________________________________________
IRC is part of the protocols that survived to the ad-
vent of the Web.
It still has users, it still has new network and com-
munities initiatives springing out, it is alive.
One single little touch it lacks is end-to-end encryp-
tion. Without it, it is perfect for public communi-
ties such as software projects discussions and support
chat, live event chats... but private 1-to-1 communi-
cation could suddenly become a good candidate for
end-to-end encryption.
Part of the DarkFi project, this is what Mallumo [1]
brings in a simple piece of code using libNaCl, the
crypto library from Dan Bernstein, author of ED25519
(in its repackaged libsodium form). This is state-
of-the-art, well-proven and fast cryptography for
end-to-end communication.
With this plug-in dropped in the plugin folder, all
private communication start by a simple key exchange
over normal IRC, and the conversation upgrades to
nacl-encrypted messages over regular IRC.
There might not be any simpler way to encrypt peer-
to-peer communication online.
1 https://github.com/darkrenaissance/mallumo
Publishing in The Gopher Times you
____________________________________________________________
Want your article published? Want to announce some-
thing to the Gopher world?
Directly related to Gopher or not, reach us on IRC
with an article in any format, we will handle the
rest.
ircs://irc.bitreich.org/#bitreich-en
gopher://bitreich.org/1/tgtimes/
git://bitreich.org/tgtimes/
Did you notice the new layout? We now can jump be-
tween single and double column as it is more fit: Some
large code chunks will not fit in a two-column layout,
but text is more pleasant to read on two columns.
]]></content>
<updated>2022-06-28T13:59:43+0200</updated>
<link type="application/pdf" href="gopher://bitreich.org/9/tgtimes/archive/2022-06-28/tgtimes-2022-06-28-opus5.pdf" />
</entry>
<entry>
<id>gopher://bitreich.org/9/tgtimes/archive/2022-06-28-errata1</id>
<title><![CDATA[2022-06-28-errata1]]></title>
<author><name>The Gopher Times Authors</name></author>
<content type="text"><![CDATA[
The Gopher Times
____________________________________________________________
Opus 5 - Gopher news and more - Jun. 2022
____________________________________________________________
Bitreich Con 2022, Come and Talk! 20h
____________________________________________________________
Greetings at 852.770114854 km/h, 34943.004 miles over
the Atlantic Ocean.
This is a happy reminder, that in less than 30 days,
brcon2022 will happen.
There will be two parts:
July 25th to 28th Online presentations, then one day
to get to Belgrade
July 30th to 31st We will be in presence, having fun
in Belgrade, Serbia.
If you want to hold a presention of your interest,
please see the Call for Papers: [1] and send your pro-
posal to Christoph Lohmann <20h@r-36.net>
There is already a wide variety of topics registered,
from medicine to simple software over geology and
hopefully a special greeting from our science supervi-
sor Prof. Skildgaard who wants to give advices to all
of us humans.
See you online and in presence!
Sincerely yours,
20h Chief Conference Officer (CCO)
1 gopher://bitreich.org/1/con/2022
Animated ASCII art linuxconsole
____________________________________________________________
With all the history of ASCII art and demoscene, it
would be a shame if noone ever tried to combine the
two in animated ASCII art. Courtesy of textfiles.com,
we can browse through a collection of 93 animated
ASCII pieces of arts. [1]
They are also mirrored at the bitreich gopher site [2]
The animation speed will likely be too high for a ter-
minal, and can be slowed down with the throttle(1)
program as advised by linuxconsole.net, or with pv(1)
as below:
1 http://artscene.textfiles.com/vt100/
http://linuxconsole.net/ascii_art.html
2 gopher://bitreich.org/1/vt100/animations/
____________________________________________________________
curl -s gopher://bitreich.org/1/vt100/animations/twilight.vt | pv -qL3000
____________________________________________________________
You may use the "reset" command to get your terminal
normal again after watching.
Some are just a pun, a few frames to only give impres-
sion of movement, while other might be closer to a
short animated movie. Talking of which, long movies
were also done:
https://www.asciimation.co.nz/
telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl
These characters transmitted through one protocol or
another, whispers to us, through our terminal screen,
tales from the imagination of plain text artists.
Prof. Skildgaard: Only Turtle Fans 20h
____________________________________________________________
I am happy to announce, that the scientific head of
bitreich, Prof. Skildgaard, the professor for slow
sciences at the Aarhus university in Denmark, now has
opened his own website [1]
You can see many #turtlefan pictures. [2]
Please recommend his work! He has done so much for us,
like reviewing all entries to the last and the coming
brcon. This takes ages!
Sincerely yours,
20h Chief Slowness Executive (CSE)
1 http://onlyturtlefans.com/
2 <annna> #turtlefan: gopher://bitreich.org/I/memecache/turtlefan.png
Synthetic ASCII Art tgtimes
____________________________________________________________
When an entirely new way to solve problems is discov-
ered, all sorts of medias, and not only the tech-
oriented ones, are fond to publish abundantly about
it. Be it quantum computing, blockchains, machine
learning... Shortly after a new big toys like these
comes-up, hackers come, and start experimenting with
it, sometimes coming-up with entirely new way to use
it.
This time we are reviewing the combo of Machine Learn-
ing and ASCII art.
I was expecting to present cute attempts at drawing
images with computer-made text, but this is nothing of
the sort. Be prepared to see Science at the service
of Art.
Generated Typewriter Art This research paper (no
less!) shows that it is possible to write software
for placing characters, later typed during 6 hours
by a human operator (for this example). It is un-
settling to see details much smaller than the char-
acters themself be drawn on paper, along with shades
of grey of various intensities. [1]
Generated ASCII Art in 2010 This is possibly the state
of the art of 2010 technology. It was announced in
the yearly conference SIGGRAPH hence presented to an
audience full of computer graphics engineers. The
work of three researchers from Hong Kong, Xuemiao
Xu, Linling Zhang and Tien-Tsin Wong, shows results
of surprising accuracy. The story does not tell
whether there ever was a job offer "looking for
ASCII artists for a scientific experiment" posted on
the job board of the Chinese University of Hong
Kong. While the paper contains the complete math
used, it also illustrates and explains methods to
achieve this level of accuracy. And no, it is not
exactly machine learning, but hand-crafted strate-
gies, combined statistics and other data massaging.
After all, it was published five years before things
like Tensor Flow were introduced... [2]
Generated ASCII Art in 2017 Is seven years enough time
to improve upon that previous achievement? Quoting
the previous paper as well as others in its own
work, Osamu Akiyama of the Osaka Faculty of Medicine
kept the ball rolling. This throws the big guns of
machine learning to reach higher skies. Its input
data were Japaneses BBS such as 5chan (2chan) or
Shitaraba, which extends the ASCII set to all of
unicode, notably the CJK set. If the result of the
paper are not enough to convince you, the "Bad Ap-
ple" often used as a video demo in the Asian market
have been converted in its entirety. Something out
of reach if doing every frame by hand. The Tensor-
Flow and Python code used is released publicly, and
an online demo is offered for the curious. [3] [4]
[5] [6] [7]
Is it so futile? Not so sure. After all, representing
anything with a computer is a matter of making a real-
ity fit onto something terribly awkward and unnatural:
a display. The pixels, the square elements praised
for providing a grid to throw data at, are promising,
but themself have their quirks to be worked around.
For instance, sub-pixel geometry uses the same tech-
niques as those presented by these papers for improv-
ing the realism of images beyond what a single pixel
can offer. It is, for ASCII art like for anything
else, a matter of representing something, real or fic-
tious, through a medium of some kind.
ASCII art has the ability to fit an image somewhere
where there could only be text. For the example of a
train station concourse with a large split-flap dis-
play: for displaying a big arrow at the end of the
service, replacing the display by an equally large
color screen can be costly and much more power-hungry,
while an ASCII arrow on that existing display would be
consuming no power for that still image.
1 https://graphicsinterface.org/wp-content/uploads/gi2021-13.pdf
2 http://www.cse.cuhk.edu.hk/~ttwong/papers/asciiart/asciiart.html
3 https://nips2017creativity.github.io/doc/ASCII_Art_Synthesis.pdf
4 https://nips2017creativity.github.io/
5 https://yewtu.be/watch?v=8GulN69Cgbg
6 https://www.vice.com/en/article/zmymwx/machine-learning-ascii-art-neural-net
7 https://github.com/OsciiArt/DeepAA
BIG BROWSER IS WATCHING YOU! 20h
____________________________________________________________
Are you feeling watched all the time? Do you feel un-
sure when doing something nasty? It is true, you are
watched: By BIG BROWSER. Whenever you use the web,
someone else is masturbating to your web history.
You want to know how to be able to do nasty things on-
line without someone masturbating to it? Come to br-
con2022 and find out more. [1]
This time online and in presence!
See you there!
Sincerely yours,
20h Chief Espionage Officer (CEO)
1 gopher://bitreich.org/1/con/2022
Sailing With Grace tgtimes
____________________________________________________________
The sea! Water all around, not a single piece of land
around to stand in, only a single boat that becomes
one with you, its capitain. Infinite waves under the
blue or cloudly sky is all you see for a long trip of
many days. Feeling lost, but at the same time united
with surrounding nature. After all, the largest part
of Earth is covered by the sea.
This is the world of Sailing that awaits each of us,
for a single trip hosted by a well proven crew, or as
a lone sailor braving tempests after tempests.
Sailing blogs are definitely a good opportunity to
dream, the instant of an article.
This blog, Sailing With Grace, has taken the decision
of offering all its content through HTTP, but also
proxied over Gopher. [1] This recalls an interesting
point: it proves that Gopher is not only good for
talking about Gopher and computer things, but is also
oriented toward the outside. Is it ready to be used
by people who are not gopher geeks?
It always was to begin with, so why would it not? Are
people less able to use computers now than they was
before the web came? The discussion is open.
1 gopher://gopher.sailingwithgrace.com
sfeed 1.5 Released Hiltjo
____________________________________________________________
sfeed [1] is a tool to convert RSS or Atom feeds from
XML to a TAB-separated file.
sfeed has the following notable changes compared to
1.4:
o sfeed_curses: interrupt waitpid while interactive
child program is running. This now handles SIGTERM
on sfeed_curses while an interactive child program
is running.
o sfeed_curses: close stdin before spawning a plumb
program in non-interactive mode, which is more intu-
itive: the program doesn't seem to hang when it ex-
pects input in this case since there is no way to
send input anyway.
o Properly escape backslashes in the man pages (thanks
adc!).
o Documentation improvements to the man pages and a
progress indicator example script for sfeed_update.
I want to thank all people who gave feedback.
Thanks, Hiltjo.
1 git://git.codemadness.org/sfeed
gopher://codemadness.org/1/git/sfeed
https://codemadness.org/releases/sfeed/
gopher://codemadness.org/1/releases/sfeed/
Wireless, wireless everywhere tgtimes
____________________________________________________________
Wires! Cables! Connectors! Computer and electric sys-
tems seems to befriend with plugs and sockets. Why is
the computer industry running away from them for ev-
erything exposed to users?
Where do I plug the cable? Everyone needfully face
this question at least once, be it the first time
they own a computer. From the various connector
shapes to choose from, to the various set of proto-
col the Universal USB connector supports, cables
provoke confusion to cable-haters and computer neo-
phytes.
Cables are ugly It might not be true for everyone, but
computer manufacturers seems to say differently.
Starting with the name "wireless", that comes by op-
position to wires, supposing they were something to
avoid. Cable management is a full time job for dat-
acenter jockeys, and a chore for the cable-hating
computer user.
Cables are immobile Unless making use of an uncommon
cable management strategy, objects connected to ca-
bles cannot be carried too far away without unplug-
ging everything devices are connected to.
So here comes wireless. While not frequent in large
computer infrastructure, wireless is invading the mar-
ket along with battery devices. Using radio waves to
make device talk to each other, at various frequen-
cies, modulation, datarate and distance. Ready to
sacrifice any amount of good engineering to make it-
self more seducing to the market, marketing perpetu-
ates the same illusion of making computer troubles
fade away with wireless.
From the Bluetooth protocol swamp of mixed edge-cases
and complexity, to the security vulnerabilities of
Wi-Fi, to the security vulnerabilities of Bluetooth,
to the proprietary but popular protocols like LoRaWan,
to the unreliability and unstability as opposed to
wires, to the black box of wireless broadband such as
UTMS and LTE, Wireless does not have the same fame
among developers valuing simplicity and reliability.
Even the United Army holds griefs against wireless
such as Bluetooth, and disrecommends it for use by
militaries: [1]
>> Do not use Bluetooth devices to send, receive,
store, or process classified information.
This means no Bluetooth keyboard, no Bluetooth headset
during phone calls, no Bluetooth sharing between the
phone and the computer... In other words, no Blue-
tooth.
Nontheless, wireless is fun, beautiful, and filled
with culture. While marketting pushed engineers from
the wireless cliff, long before computer came, radio
waves were put at good use in the most simple forms:
radio communication. From the AM and FM radio sta-
tions to listen while on the road, the medium-range
boat, airplane, truck, pedestrian talkies, and even
satellite communications, hobbyists building-up their
own antennas for inter-continental communication,
garage door openners and remotely controlled drones...
Complex and twisted wireless protocols are only a spe-
cial case of radio communication, and simple unobfus-
cated methods of communication are possible, and even
frequent.
Be it a simple and inexpensive RTL SDR dongle receiver
[2] or a complete receiver-emitter such as HackRF [3]
or LimeSDR, [4] many gears exist for experimenting
with radio transmissions.
Every year, the American Relay Radio League (ARRL) is
publishing a large book focused on radiocommunication,
and its chapter 1 section 1 is Do-It-Yourself Wire-
less.
This is an invitation for everyone to discover or re-
discover the universe of electromagnetic fields commu-
nication.
1 https://armypubs.army.mil/epubs/DR_pubs/DR_a/pdf/web/
ARN4771_Pam25-2-9_Final_Web.pdf
2 https://www.rtl-sdr.com/
3 https://greatscottgadgets.com/hackrf/one/
4 https://limemicro.com/products/boards/limesdr/
Open-Source Breathing tgtimes
____________________________________________________________
The previous opus had a word or two about how diffi-
cult it could be to get open hardware medical devices.
The Freespireco [1] project aims to bring a respirator
device to life as a completely Open Hardware project.
The challenge is not coming-up with something that
works and is reliable, but instead to provide a struc-
ture robust enough to be accepted (and funded) for
performing all the necessary certifications needed be-
fore being allowed to the medical device market.
There are usually categories of criticalities, and an
artificial respirator is not escaping to the rule. The
organiser of the project have pursued this goal since
long, and might likely have a very long road to go.
It is essentially a pioneer of Open Hardware for crit-
ical medical devices, step-by-step paving up the road
toward certification: designing and building devices
to test these equipment, issuing standards for data
(like a JSON schema received over a serial port di-
rectly from the device).
The strategy: offering reproducible tests as an anchor
for trust. Precious argument for facing big pharma
equipment vendors that are having an interest in lock-
ing their device down, preventing repair or even in-
spection.
In a same journey toward braving Goliath: accessing
the Outter Space. And it is, as crazy as it looks,
far from impossible to contribute to space research
even without a diploma: The RTEMS [2] project is open
to contribution.
But that does not discourage the authors of the respi-
rator project to keep going. Not in a blind trust for
the medical industry, but in full foresight that no-
body would want its mom's life given to a hobbyist toy
made in a garage. With this reality in mind, "what-
ever it takes" turns into "whatever is done", and the
road to certification progresses, one breath at a
time.
1 https://www.pubinv.org/project/freespireco/
2 https://rtems.org/
20h Presents: Geomyidae 20h
____________________________________________________________
This project existed since a while, and kept improv-
ing. In this interview with 20h, he shows us what
Geomyidae's got under the hood.
>> What is Geomyidae?
Geomyidae is a Unix/Linux daemon/service serving the
gopher protocol.
>> So what is gopher?
Gopher here is an internet protocol, which was first
developed at the University of Minnesota. After its
short success, it declined, but is now striving again
to be used for its simplicity and hierarchy. For bet-
ter visual display of your gopher experience, use
something like links, lynx or sacc. Those are gopher
clients.
>> How does Geomyidae help with getting started with
gopher?
The installation of Geomyidae is very simple. You can
setup your Geomyidae right away:
____________________________________________________________
git clone git://bitreich.org/geomyidae
cd geomyidae
make
curl -s gopher://localhost:7070
____________________________________________________________
Yes, curl supports gopher! And it supports gopher and
TLS too!
>> Are there many alternatives among gopher daemons?
Yes, there are many. Some are there due to historical
reasons, others have gone out of shape over time. One
of the most popular alternatives is pygopherd.
>> How does Geomyidae compares to other implementa-
tions?
Geomyidae offers a unique simple way of expressing go-
pher content. See the manpage or the examples in the
source for how .gph files are formatted. And it does
just what you want it to do. No strange abstraction
files like in the original gopher daemons are the de-
fault way. In the newest release of Geomyidae compat-
ibility scripts were added. But those are to preserve
the unique history of gopher.
>> Did Geomyidae have significant evolutions since the
beginning?
Yes. Originally Geomyidae was named gopherd for Plan
9. It then was ported over to Linux. On Linux it was
renamed to Geomyidae. During that development much
has happened: There were significant speedups (due to
the patches and work of other people!), features were
added especially in new dynamic content handling. You
can easily see all features in the documentation and
especially the simple manpage.
>> Does Geomyidae work with all gopher clients?
Yes. Geomyidae supports the original protocol from
the beginning, up to modern gopher with TLS. For the
intermediary gopher+ protocol there is a compatibility
layer.
>> Has NSA inserted a backdoor onto Geomyidae?
I am not allowed to tell you.
>> How does gopher help with privacy?
The gopher protocol has the unique property that all
data you send over the line can be easily controlled
and seen. This is different to HTTP, where headers,
HTML and Javascript got so complex, it is uncontrol-
lable. See the gopher onion project [1] for how to
combine this with tor for total privacy and anonymity.
>> Are there TLS support on some gopher clients al-
ready?
There is support in curl, mpv/ffmpeg, sacc and more.
It is very easy to add TLS support to any client. You
simply connect via TLS on the gopher TCP port (de-
fault: 70) and if it works, keep that connection open.
>> Are there been any evolution of the gopher protocol
itself since the beginning of Geomyidae?
The technology used is simple. Gopher does not allow
requests, which begin with the first bytes of a TLS
request. So any proper and old gopher daemon will
simply refuse the connection. Then the client is free
to reconnect without TLS based on its security config-
uration. Any ISDN line will handle such probing re-
quests for TLS easily.
>> Did Geomyidae have to adapt itself to the gopher
protocol? Did it make gopher change?
Geomyidae changed the part of gophespace it was able
to reach. Many servers run on Geomyidae. There is
software written just for Geomyidae and its gph for-
mat. The TLS extension of the protocol came from Bi-
treich / Geomyidae. We also set the standard to sim-
ply use UTF-8 as default representation in gopher
menus and so bring it into the 21st century. I can
conclude: Yes, Geomyidae changed and will change go-
pher.
>> Have you seen Geomyidae ever used outside a hobby
project?
Well, Bitreich is serious in changing the software
world. Most of gopherspace is »hobby projects«. But
then, most of gopherspace is made from heart blood and
love, which makes it part of the life of the authors.
>> Is Geomyidae ready for non-hobby uses?
Geomyidae is ready for any use. It is stable and op-
timized to scale better than the cloud.
>> Geomyidae uses ".gph" files.
Does it replace the gophermap standard? Yes, in Ge-
omyidae it does. Gph is simpler and easier to adapt
to, especially when you come from some markup world.
>> Does Geomyidae support dynamic pages?
Geomyidae supports two forms of dynamic pages: One
which uses the gph markup and one, where the
script/application outputs raw gopher output. Addi-
tionally it supports in the latest release a form of
REST, where paths are transformed into arguments to
scripts. There is also support for
index.dcgi/index.cgi scripts to have better looking
paths and URIs.
>> Is Geomyidae already packaged in some Linux/BSD
distributions?
As far as I know it is packaged in gentoo, Archlinux
(and more), all BSDs. Since it is so simple to pack-
age: Just extract the tarball, run make and make in-
stall, the packages are easily made for any package
manager.
>> What is planned for the next releases of Geomyidae?
As of now I have worked through my whole long-standing
TODO list for Geomyidae. New ideas will evolve from
people sending in patches or through practical need.
Geomyidae follows the Bitreich manifesto [2] where a
software can be done.
>> How to get involved? Getting help, discussing, bug
hunting, code contribution, documentation...
If anyone wants to get involved, first download Ge-
omyidae, run it, have fun using it, creating gopher
content. If you run into problems, have patches or
suggestions, come on IRC [3] and discuss with us your
problem. For e-mail, send such requests to 20h@r-
36.net. All contact is in the manpage too.
>> Can I have an ice cream?
Yes, you will get one, once we meet again.
1 gopher://bitreich.org/1/onion
2 gopher://bitreich.org/0/documents/bitreich-manifesto.md
3 ircs://irc.bitreich.org/#bitreich-en
Embedded Forth Programming tgtimes
____________________________________________________________
Big computers can run large and complex programming
languages, so what can small computer run?
Compiled languages, in particular those with a small
runtime are often chosen. But the interpreted lan-
guages also have an audience willing to code with
their favorite programming environment for them. Pro-
gramming languages as big as Python have their embed-
ded counterpart (MicroPython) thanks to significant
efforts. They serve their purpose to embedded enthu-
siasts as educational and scripting languages to many.
But small "language in a nutshell" are fitting right
the small resources of microcontrollers. This is the
case of Forth and its stack-machine approach.
____________________________________________________________
Mecrisp This implementation immediately targets micro-
controllers. See for instance the work of
librehacker.com author Christopher Howard. [1]
chipFORTH Another implementation of Forth, which were
used by NASA [2] for improving reliability of its
flight control system, among the mosts critical
pieces of software of a shuttle.
https://github.com/corecode/forth Among notable Forth
projects is Simon "corecode" Schubert's nimble forth
implementation as well as hardware code describing
the working of a CPU that executes Forth natively
[3]
https://forth.chat/ If feeling like having a taste of
Forth and Forth community, there are several chan-
nels featuring forth that you could enjoy, some of
which are oriented toward hardware projects directly
[4]
https://github.com/chmykh/apl-life This is Conway Game
of Life in APL in Forth What a long chain! It is APL
programming language implemented in Forth, and Con-
way game of life implemented in APL
https://github.com/remko/waforth Feeling like pushing
the irony of "Web" assembly even further? Why not
blasting a Forth implementation at it? [5] This
proves Forth as the new programming language en
vogue
http://collapseos.org/ What else does a programming
language need to prove itself useful? A kernel?
Check! Collapse OS is an operating system target-
ting resilience beyond extreme, as it is designed to
resist everything around it tearing apart, including
the whole civilisation. When nothing remains but
wastelands, CollapseOS will be there for a rebirth
of civilisation out of computers made from scavenged
parts. Civilisation is rising and falling all of
the time, just not all parts at the same time.
>> Forth is, to my knowledge, the most compact lan-
guage allowing high level constructs. -- Collapse OS
author.
gopher://retroforth.org/ https://retroforth.org/ A
forth implemented in C, Python, C#, Nim, JavaScript
and Pascal! The C version permits to embed the
script into a binary along with the interpreter, for
a single-binary deployment process. The more clas-
sic way to use it is to use shebangs scripts to have
executable scripts.
Many smaller utilities can already provide something
you needed:
http://retroforth.org/examples/Casket-HTTP.retro.html
An HTTP server
http://retroforth.org/examples/Atua-WWW.retro.html A
Gopher to HTTP+HTML Proxy on top of Atua.
http://retroforth.org/examples/Atua.retro.html A go-
pher server, already listed on the Gopher index of
links, the Gopher Lawn [6]
http://retroforth.org/examples/7080.retro.html A s
https://gitlab.com/goblinrieur/spreedsheet/ A spread-
sheet application in the terminal.
gopher://forth.works:100 This is a collection of code
blocks written in the Retro Forth's author (crc)
newest Forth implementation. It is itself served by
a gopher server (blocks 203-205 on the list above)
in Forth.
https://github.com/oriontransfer/pl0-language-tools A
PL/0 implementation in Python that can emmit Retro
Forth code as ouput. It looks like Forth simplic-
ity, portability, stability and speed of execution
made it a good candidate as a target language. The
PL/0 language is known for the book Algorithms +
Data Structures = Programs from Niklaus Wirth, him-
self famous for the Wirth Law:
>> The hope is that the progress in hardware will cure
all software ills. However, a critical observer may
observe that software manages to outgrow hardware in
size and sluggishness. --
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth's_law
https://ribccs.com/candy/ If you were doubting about
Forth being fit for the industry, bear in mind that
the above is a very-large scale VFX Forth project
with over a million lines of code!
http://sam-falvo.github.io/kestrel/2016/03/29/vibe-2.2
Why not spin a vi-like text editor itself in forth?
See how few code it takes to implement one.
https://git.sr.ht/~vertigo/shoehorn An answer to the
bootstrapping problem: how to get from no software
to a complete system? Which compiler compiles the
first compiler? Forth's simplicity is a good candi-
date for solving this problem.
https://git.sr.ht/~vertigo/forthbox Software environ-
ment for computers to base upon right after booting:
a system shell in forth with real hardware projects
dedicated to it. Think of a LISP machine, but in-
stead being a Forth machine.
http://deathroadtocanada.com/ This video-game uses
Forth as a scripting language. When a whole script-
ing language fits on a thumb, putting it everywhere
costs nothing!
____________________________________________________________
Such a large tool chest for such a small language.
With the Covid, Wars under disguise, and other supply
chain troubles, the demand of feature stability rises
face to the traditionnal "more features". In these
trying times, anyone is welcome to go Forth.
1 gemini://gem.librehacker.com/gemlog/tech/20220331-0.gmi
gemini://gem.librehacker.com/gemlog/tech/20220305-0.gmi
2 https://www.forth.com/space-shuttle-instrumentation-interface/
3 https://github.com/corecode/forth-cpu
4 ircs://irc.hackint.org/#forth-hardware-projects
5 https://el-tramo.be/waforth/
https://el-tramo.be/thurtle/
6 bitreich.org/1/lawn/c/gopher.gph
A new IRC network: IRCNow! tgtimes
____________________________________________________________
A new IRC network is in town! [1] Ever wanted to feel
what an early community looks like? The admin jrmu
brought the project together, and is currently col-
lecting users along the way.
Whether you looked for a place to host your own commu-
nity, or wanted a see a fresh community be grow from
fertile ground, the community is welcoming and active.
>> IRCNow: Of the Users, By the Users, For the Users
Something else from this community might catch your
attention, is its orientation toward being adminis-
trated by its users themself: rather than letting the
founder handle everything, the community is oriented
toward serious teaching of unix command line and sys-
tem administration to anyone, from beginners to ad-
vanced users seeking improvement.
In-person teaching sessions were covered during the
LibrePlanet 2022 event [2] with recording of a test-
run of the event [3] where future and present hackers
met together working our their system administration
and community building skills. Linux Magazine also
ran an interview giving a good impression about the
spirit of the project: [4]
Beyond yet another IRC network to chat with, IRCnow
offers hosting services for IRC bouncers, Bots, E-
Mail, VPN, Code, File Storage, and Shell Accounts.
The wiki itself features plenty of technical informa-
tion on system administration as a support for its
bootcamps, which offers a comfortable step-by-step in-
troduction to a complete server administration. [5] I
have seen system administrators getting hired knowing
less than this!
1 irc://irc.ircnow.net:6667
ircs://irc.ircnow.net:6697
2 https://jrmu.host.ircnow.org/libreplanet/libreplanet.pdf
3 https://0x0.st/oTal.webm - 0h20m: audio starts - 1h15m: talking about Gopher
4 https://www.linux-magazine.com/Issues/2021/249/Interview-IRCNow
5 https://wiki.ircnow.org/index.php?n=Minutemin.Bootcamp
Search podcasts via Gopher tgtimes
____________________________________________________________
Do you happen to be a podcast enjoyer? Maybe you con-
sidered to have something to listen to on the road or
while cooking.
Combining many different sources, you may encounter
some heirlooms by searching through this gopher
front-end for podcast search. [1]
The platform aggregates multiple search APIs of RSS
link aggregators with a focus on audio podcasts, and
extracts the RSS links for you, so you do not have to
search throug a dozen of webpages just to find the RSS
button.
For instance, knowing about the Amp Hour podcast, I
tried searching for it: "Amp Hour" in the search
field, and bingo! The first result is "The Amp Hour
Electronics Podcast", that was quickly added to my
list of RSS feeds in a blast.
Being based off Gopher, this makes it insanely easy to
automate a script searching for podcasts, then down-
loading the entries and uploading them to an MP3
player of any kind (dedicated, or as part of a phone
or other portable computer).
Want to know more about it? One place to discuss
about it is the Bitreich IRC server [2]
1 gopher://gopher.icu/1/pod
2 ircs://irc.bitreich.org/#bitreich-en
Relics of Fast Fourrier Transform rue_mohr
____________________________________________________________
In 1967, the Kooley-Tukey FFT algorythm (the one we
all use now) was written in Fortran. What the hell
were they running it on, and what damned data were
they feeding into it?!
____________________________________________________________
SUBROUTINE FOUR1(DATA,NN,ISIGN)
C THE COOLEY-TUKEY FAST ROURIER TRANSFORM IN USASI BASIC FORTRAN
C TRANSFORM(J) = SUM(DATA(I)+W**((I-1)*(J-1)). WHERE I AND J RUN
C FROM 1 TO NN AND W = EXP(ISIGN*2*PI+SQRT(-1)/NN). DATA IS ONE-
C DIMENSIONAL COMPLEX ARRAY (I.E.: THE REAL AND IMAGINARY PARTS OF
C THE DATA ARE LOCATE IMMEDIATELY ADJACENT IN STORAGE, SUCH AS
C FORTRAN IV PLACES THEM) WHOSE LENGTH NN IS A POWER OF TWO. ISIGN
C IS +1 OR -1, GIVING THE SIGN OF THE TRANSFORM, TRANSFORM VALUES
C ARE RETURNED IN ARRAY DATA, REPLACING THE INPUT DATA. THE TIME IS
C PROPORTIONAL TO N*LOG2(N), RATHER THAN THE USUAL N**2. WRITTEN BY
C NORMAN BRENNER, JUNE 1967, THIS IS THE SHOURTEST VERSION
C OF FFT KNOWN THE THE AUTHOR, AND IS INTENDED MAINLY FOR
C DEMONSTRATION. PROGRAMS FOUR2 AND FOURT ARE AVAILABLE THAT RUN
C TWICE AS FAST AND OPERATE ON MULTIDIMENSIONAL ARRAYS WHOSE
C DIMENSIONS ARE NOT RESTRICTED TO POWERS OR TWO. (LOOKING UP SINES
C AND COSINES IN A TABLE WILL CUT RUNNING TIME OF FOUR1 BY A THIRD.)
C SEE-- IEEE AUDIO TRANSACTIONS (JUNE 1967), SPECIAL ISSUE ON FFT.
DIMENSION DATA(1)
N=2*NN
J=1
DO 5 I=1,N,2
IF(I-J)1,2,2
1 TEMPR=DATA(J)
TEMPI=DATA(J+1)
DATA(J)=DATA(I)
DATA(J+1)=DATA(I+1)
DATA(I)=TEMPR
DATA(I+1)=TEMPI
2 M=N/2
3 IF(J-M)5,5,4
4 J=J-M
M=M/2
IF(M-2)5,3,3
5 J=J+M
MMAX=2
6 IF(MMAX-N)7,9,9
7 ISTEP=2*MMAX
DO 8 M=1,MMAX,2
THETA=3.1415926535*FLOAT(ISIGN*(M-1))/FLOAT(MMAX)
WR=COS(THETA)
WI=SIN(THETA)
DO 8 I=M,N,ISTEP
J=I+MMAX
TEMPR=WR*DATA(J)-WI*DATA(J+1)
TEMPI=WR*DATA(J+1)+WI*DATA(J)
DATA(J)=DATA(I)-TEMPR
DATA(J+1)=DATA(I+1)-TEMPI
DATA(I)=DATA(I)+TEMPR
8 DATA(I+1)=DATA(I+1)+TEMPI
MMAX=ISTEP
GO TO 6
9 RETURN
END
____________________________________________________________
And no, you cannot get the IEEE document because IEEE
broke it up into pages and sells each page individu-
ally.
____________________________________________________________
"PROGRAMS FOUR2 AND FOURT ARE AVAILABLE THAT RUN
C TWICE AS FAST AND OPERATE ON MULTIDIMENSIONAL ARRAYS WHOSE
C DIMENSIONS ARE NOT RESTRICTED TO POWERS OR TWO."
____________________________________________________________
But, this code was easy to port because it was small,
so, to this day, we use it. It was ported from For-
tran to BASIC, then to C, then to C++ and everything
else.
Nobody ever actually understood it, so they didn't fix
anything. You see, Fortran has no bitwise operateors,
so alot of the acrobatics in that code are just doing
bitwise operations in regular math. Its absolutely
amazing when you tear it apart.
I got the code from a bad scan of a document off a
military ftp site. What I love, and find halarious,
is that this code has been ported and hacked a million
times since it was written.
But, from the comments, it, itself, is a hack. It is
a mash up of cooley and tukeys code. It is a hack,
from 1967.
Maemo Leste keeps kicking in! tgtimes
____________________________________________________________
The ultimate hacker's toy project: a OpenSource pow-
ered hand-held computer.
Where to start from? There can be two walls prevent-
ing every Linux enthusiast from having its own phone
with a "Linux Powered" sticker on it:
1. hardware support: getting Linux to boot on the
twisted hardware setups of smartphones can be frus-
trating.
2. application support: writing all the tools that
make a plain unix shell useable as a phone, that we
usually take for granted on a phone operating sys-
tem. It may be as simple as a daemon watching in-
coming phone call from hardware abstractions (those
from in 1.) and playing a ringtone.wav whenever a
call comes in, it still has to be written. Same
goes for a keyboard application if it uses a touch-
screen. Same goes for anything.
Since it goes beyond the scope of a week-end hack,
collaboration takes place for making these projects
happen.
Maemo Leste is now existing since more than four
years, and keeps being developed at good pace. It
even shines where Android does not: it uses mainline
Linux kernel instead of forks that never get upgraded
nor contributed back to Linux. This means that all
software officially supported by Maemo Leste might
also be available to many more Linux-based projects.
Of course, there are non-official porting efforts for
more hardware underway to become a completely sup-
ported target. Like it is for every operating system
project.
Maemo Leste, the project bringing a real UNIX shell
where you only had a Android Java ecosystem, featuring
GPS chips reverse engineering, and a working phone
module.
The support for the inexpensive PinePhone means you
can get a fully working linux phone in your pocket.
Grab it while it is hot, the lack of bloated prebuilt
application forced into it by the vendor means it will
not catch fire! [1]
1 https://maemo-leste.github.io/maemo-leste-sixteenth-update-november-and-
december-2021-january-april-2022.html
I Do Not Know, Do Not Ask Me josuah
____________________________________________________________
The post-Snowden era is marked by a new fact that can-
not be ignored anymore: NSA (among others) is watching
you (among others).
Does that change anything to my everyday life? Proba-
bly not, they already were before you knew about it.
Should I do anything about it? No answer. The eter-
nal doubt that modern society is famous for:
>> I do not know, do not ask me. That question is
weird anyway. Let me go back to my life.
That same doubt that occurs when you look up on a su-
permarket and see the mess of wires, tubes, cables and
neon lighting, barely even hidden, at best painted in
white... The worst scene of industrial warehouse, as
if taken straight out of the Brazil [1] movie.
A landscape that is in such opposition with the images
printed onto every food product being sold, picturing
what more or less fits the collective imagery of
"house of my grandparents in back-country", promising
a natural environment and suggest quality, authentic-
ity, tradition to the buyer... Pictures of a caring
lady baking something appetizing, a honest farmer of-
fering a handful of home-grown vegetables or meat...
Where did they even find all these landscapes of back-
country without phone line everywhere, tracktors, al-
sphalt, cattle warehouses, wind turbines to put on
these product background images?
>> I do not know, do not ask me. That question is
weird anyway. Let me go back to my life.
How did such a landscape, neon distopia pictures that
seems straight out of a /r/cyberpunk [2] post or the
latest Blade Runner, got invited into the cozzy bubble
of the average citizen doing shopping? [3] Who made
these places so ugly? Why do I feel like human is be-
ing considered like cattle in these kind of places?
>> I do not know, do not ask me. That question is
weird anyway. Let me go back to my life.
What weird things am I even saying! It is not like an
NSA agent is sitting on every metal beams of these su-
permarket looking at passersby with an empty gaze.
There are cameras though. What do they film?
Thieves? Who is checking? Software? Peoples? Are
marketting managers looking at these pictures? Of me
too? Right now? What do they think of me? Did they
look at my hand hesitating between these two products?
>> I do not know, do not ask me. That question is
weird anyway. Let me go back to my life.
Going out, one might encounter someone sitting on its
empty backpack, with a small cup filled with coins,
looking a bit panicked, looking a bit dirty, looking a
bit lost, sometimes even a bit drunk, or is it dizzi-
ness from living outside? Occasionally they will ask
you for another coin to add to their small collection.
Passerbys offer them a lie such as "I do not have
cash", or a kind word like "no, sorry", keep walking
faster without looking, and eventually stops paying
the tax and quickly keep going before they got asked
for more. What did happen to them? Did they choose
to live here? How can I know it will never happen to
me? Why do I feel bad if I do not give them what they
ask? Why do I feel bad if I give them what they ask?
>> I do not know, do not ask me. That question is
weird anyway. Let me go back to my life.
Let's not get fooled or reverse the roles here: Writ-
ing this, I am not asking these questions to you, nei-
ther you are asking these questions to yourself. The
places we live in are suggesting these questions.
By building a supermarket out of a warehouse but dis-
playing eye-catchy pictures of a scenery that does not
even exist, it is obvious that people will notice the
disbalance between the two.
By placing cameras filming every square meter of such
a place, or even a whole city, it is obvious that peo-
ple will wonder at some point, who is behind the
screen reviewing these images.
The questions are left open. Nothing is made to even
give hint about the answer. We are left in the doubt,
letting some comfort themself with "it is just in case
of a burglary, only a police officer is going to
watch" or other claim "they are using these images to
study how we think to better control us!"; claims
based upon convictions, not facts.
The technician installing these cameras up there has
no hint either, its manager just followed the recom-
mandations of the mothership company, itself getting
directions from the investor group who purchased the
brand, who themself are only trying to keep-up with
the trends in that domain.
Why would I care? I stopped to care about these silly
questions since long. I came back to the real world
for the better. I live my life ignoring what happens
around me and it works plenty well.
>> So why is that, at deep down, in the middle of my
gut, there is a voice whispering to me that
something's wrong. [4]
The thing with living like an ant in the anthill is:
you do not get too many answers about how the whole
anthill works.
1 https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088846/
2 https://teddit.net/r/cyberpunk
3 https://theuws.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/supermarkt.jpg
4 https://yewtu.be/watch?v=QcSlAihVM0Q
Mallumo Encrypted IRC darkfi
____________________________________________________________
IRC is part of the protocols that survived to the ad-
vent of the Web.
It still has users, it still has new network and com-
munities initiatives springing out, it is alive.
One single little touch it lacks is end-to-end encryp-
tion. Without it, it is perfect for public communi-
ties such as software projects discussions and support
chat, live event chats... but private 1-to-1 communi-
cation could suddenly become a good candidate for
end-to-end encryption.
Part of the DarkFi project, this is what Mallumo [1]
brings in a simple piece of code using libNaCl, the
crypto library from Dan Bernstein, author of ED25519
(in its repackaged libsodium form). This is state-
of-the-art, well-proven and fast cryptography for
end-to-end communication.
With this plug-in dropped in the plugin folder, all
private communication start by a simple key exchange
over normal IRC, and the conversation upgrades to
nacl-encrypted messages over regular IRC.
There might not be any simpler way to encrypt peer-
to-peer communication online.
1 https://github.com/darkrenaissance/mallumo
Publishing in The Gopher Times you
____________________________________________________________
Want your article published? Want to announce some-
thing to the Gopher world?
Directly related to Gopher or not, reach us on IRC
with an article in any format, we will handle the
rest.
ircs://irc.bitreich.org/#bitreich-en
gopher://bitreich.org/1/tgtimes/
git://bitreich.org/tgtimes/
Did you notice the new layout? We now can jump be-
tween single and double column as it is more fit: Some
large code chunks will not fit in a two-column layout,
but text is more pleasant to read on two columns.
]]></content>
<updated>2022-07-05T23:20:46+0200</updated>
<link type="application/pdf" href="gopher://bitreich.org/9/tgtimes/archive/2022-06-28-errata1/tgtimes-2022-06-28-opus5.pdf" />
</entry>
<entry>
<id>gopher://bitreich.org/9/tgtimes/archive/2022-10-10</id>
<title><![CDATA[2022-10-10]]></title>
<author><name>The Gopher Times Authors</name></author>
<content type="text"><![CDATA[
The Gopher Times
____________________________________________________________
Opus 6 - Gopher news and more - Oct. 2022
____________________________________________________________
Sentient Regex tgtimes
____________________________________________________________
Can there be a sed one-liner that implements Artifi-
cial Intelligence? Depending on how you define Arti-
ficial Intelligence, it may!
sed -r 's/Is ([^y]*)?/Absolutely, (1)./
s/Is (.*y.*)?/I do not think that (1)./'
How does it work for you? How more accurate than this
is machine learning going to become to answer our ex-
istential questions?
fold, fmt, par: get your text in order katolaz
____________________________________________________________
If you happen to read plain text files (e.g., phlog
posts), you have probably noticed that, especially on
gopher, the lines of a text file tend to be wrapped
all to a similar length. Some authors are very strict
on the matter, and like all the lines to be "justi-
fied" (i.e., all adjusted to have exactly the same
length, by inserting a few spaces to get the count
right). Some other authors (including myself) just do
not allow any line to be longer than a certain amount
of characters (in this case, as you might have no-
ticed, the magic number is 72). But how to they manage
to do that?
Most common editors have a command to format a para-
graph ('M-q' in Emacs, 'gwip' or '{gq}' in vim normal
mode, etc.). But obviously, there are several Unix
tools that can help you getting the right formatting
for your files. We are talking of fold(1), fmt(1), and
par(1), so keep reading if you want to know more.
The oldest one is probably fold(1) (and it is also the
only one to be defined in the POSIX standard...). It
will just break each line to make it fit a given
length in characters (by default, 72, which is indeed
a magic number). Let's see how to wrap the lines of
this post at 54 characters:
____________________________________________________________
$ fold -w 54 20190213_fold.txt | head -10
fold, fmt, par: get your text in order
============================================
If you happen to read plain text files (e.g., phlog po
sts), you have
probably noticed that, especially on gopher, the lines
of a text file
tend to be wrapped all to a similar length. Some autho
rs are very strict
on the matter, and like all the lines to be "justified
$
____________________________________________________________
Notice that fold(1) did not really think twice before
breaking "posts" or "authors" across two lines. This
is pretty inconvenient, to say the least. You can ac-
tually force fold(1) to break stuff at blank spaces,
using the '-s' option:
____________________________________________________________
$ fold -w 54 -s 20190213_fold.txt |head -10
fold, fmt, par: get your text in order
============================================
If you happen to read plain text files (e.g., phlog
posts), you have
probably noticed that, especially on gopher, the
lines of a text file
tend to be wrapped all to a similar length. Some
authors are very strict
on the matter, and like all the lines to be
$
____________________________________________________________
Nevertheless, the output of fold(1) is still quite
off: it breaks lines at spaces, but it does not "join"
broken lines to have a more consistent formatting.
This is where fmt(1) jumps in:
____________________________________________________________
$ fmt -w 54 20190213_fold.txt |head -10
fold, fmt, par: get your text in order
============================================
If you happen to read plain text files (e.g., phlog
posts), you have probably noticed that, especially on
gopher, the lines of a text file tend to be wrapped
all to a similar length. Some authors are very strict
on the matter, and like all the lines to be
"justified" (i.e., all adjusted to have exactly the
same length, by inserting a few spaces to get the
$
____________________________________________________________
Now we are talking: fmt(1) seems to be able to to "the
right thing" without much effort, and it has a few
other interesting options as well. Just have a look
at the manpage. Simple and clear.
Last but not least, par(1) can do whatever fmt(1) and
fold(1) can do, plus much, much more. For instance:
____________________________________________________________
$ par 54 < 20190213_fold.txt | head -10
fold, fmt, par: get your text in order
============================================
If you happen to read plain text files (e.g., phlog
posts), you have probably noticed that, especially on
gopher, the lines of a text file tend to be wrapped
all to a similar length. Some authors are very
strict on the matter, and like all the lines to be
"justified" (i.e., all adjusted to have exactly the
same length, by inserting a few spaces to get the
$
____________________________________________________________
will give more or less the same output as fmt(1). But:
____________________________________________________________
$ par 54j < 20190213_fold.txt | head -10
fold, fmt, par: get your text in order
============================================
If you happen to read plain text files (e.g., phlog
posts), you have probably noticed that, especially on
gopher, the lines of a text file tend to be wrapped
all to a similar length. Some authors are very
strict on the matter, and like all the lines to be
"justified" (i.e., all adjusted to have exactly the
same length, by inserting a few spaces to get the
$
____________________________________________________________
will additionally "justify" your lines to the pre-
scribed width, while: something like:
____________________________________________________________
$ head file.h
*
* include/linux/memory.h - generic memory definition
*
* This is mainly for topological representation. We define the
* basic "struct memory_block" here, which can be embedded in per-arch
* definitions or NUMA information.
*
* Basic handling of the devices is done in drivers/base/memory.c
* and system devices are handled in drivers/base/sys.c.
*
$
____________________________________________________________
can be easily transformed into:
____________________________________________________________
$ par 40j < file.h
*
* include/linux/memory.h - generic
*memory definition
*
* This is mainly for topological
* representation. We define the basic
* "struct memory_block" here, which can
* be embedded in per-arch definitions
* or NUMA information.
*
* Basic handling of the devices is
* done in drivers/base/memory.c and
* system devices are handled in
* drivers/base/sys.c.
*
* Memory block are exported via
* sysfs in the class/memory/devices/
* directory.
*
*
$
____________________________________________________________
Pretty neat, right?
To be honest, par is not the typical example of a unix
tool that "does exactly one thing", but it certainly
"does it very well" all the things it does. The author
of par(1) felt the need to apologise in the manpage
about the style of his code and documentation, but I
still think par(1) is an awesome tool nevertheless.
fold(1) appeared in BSD1 (1978-1979)
fmt(1) appeared in BSD1 (1978-1979)
par(1) was developed by Adam Costello in 1993, as a
replacement for fmt(1).
GNU tar(1) extraction is quadratic tgtimes
____________________________________________________________
When implementing something from the ground, it gets
possible to build-up a simple home-baked file format
or protocol looking perfect without any cruft and
legacy. Easy to implement, fast to adopt, supporting
everything you need from it, and not much more...
Likely an alternative to a huge elephant in the room:
the current standard in place used by everyone, huge,
with many extensions with many use-cases...
Why bother, then, with implementing the huge and dif-
ficult file format or protocol? Maybe because it
would be used by many software, and writing data in
this slightly more bloated format would help making it
compatible with all the software that already support
it.
In this compromise, a limit can be drawn, across which
the big and bloated format or protocol is dropped in
favor of a simpler, more reasonable, less time-wasting
alternative, eventually home-brewed.
The result is a new tar implementation written for the
single special-case of a 1.1 TiB file! [1]
1 https://mort.coffee/home/tar/
BYTE Magazine Covers tgtimes
____________________________________________________________
The BYTE magazine lives among the legends of computer
magazines.
Being a paper glossy magazine, it had fancy covers.
Our usual data archivist heroes, Archive.org, have a
large collections of covers for these things. [1]
On another level of effort, someone with passion and
patience, actually went through recreatinhg the scene
coming from these covers, that never really existed...
Until they did! [2]
>> In the 1970s and 1980s, Byte magazine featured cov-
ers with beautiful, surreal paintings by Robert F.
Tinney. What if the scenes that Mr. Tinney imagined
actually existed in real life? And what if, as Mr.
Tinney was painting them, there was a photographer
standing next to him, capturing the scene on film?
>> That's the idea behind this site. I created and
photographed real-world objects and composited the
images together in order to show what Mr. Tinney's
images might look like in real life.
1 https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine
2 https://bytecovers.com/
An experiment to test GitHub Copilot's legality seirdy
____________________________________________________________
>> This article was posted on 2022-07-01 by Rohan Ku-
mar [1] and is now republished on this newspaper,
with permission (CC-BY-SA 4.0).
Preface
I am not a lawyer. This post is satirical commentary
on:
o The absurdity of Microsoft and OpenAI's legal justi-
fication for GitHub Copilot.
o The oversimplifications people use to argue against
GitHub Copilot (I don't like it when people agree
with me for the wrong reasons).
o The relationship between capital and legal outcomes.
o How civil cases seem like sporting events where peo-
ple “win” or “lose”, rather than opportunities to
improve our understanding of law.
In the process, I intentionally misrepresent how the
judicial system works: I portray the system the way
people like to imagine it works. Please don't make
any important legal decisions based on anything I say.
The only section you should take seriously is “Con-
text: the relevant technologies”.
Introduction
GitHub is enabling copyleft violation at scale with
Copilot. GitHub Copilot encourages people to make
derivative works of source code without complying with
the original code's license. This facilitates the
creation of permissively-licensed or proprietary
derivatives of copyleft code.
Unfortunately, challenging Microsoft (GitHub's parent
company) in court is a bad idea: their legal budget
probably ensures their victory, and they likely al-
ready have a comprehensive defense planned. How can
we determine Copilot's legality on a level playing
field? We can create legal precedent that they haven't
had a chance to study yet!
A chat with Matt Campbell about a speech synthesizer
gave me a horrible idea. I think I know a way to find
out if GitHub Copilot is legal: we could use its legal
justification against another software project with a
smaller legal budget. Specifically, against a speech
synthesizer. The outcome of our actions could set a
legal precedent to determine the legality of Copilot.
Context: the relevant technologies Let's cover the
technologies and actors at play before I start my evil
monologue.
Exhibit A: GitHub Copilot
GitHub Copilot is a predictive autocompletion service
for writing software. It's powered by OpenAI Codex,
[2] a language model based on GPT-3. [3] It was
trained using the source code of public repositories
hosted on GitHub, regardless of their licensing. In
response to a Request for Comments from the US Patent
and Trademark Office, OpenAI claimed that “Artificial
Intelligence Innovation”, such as code written by
GitHub Copilot, should be considered “fair use”. [4]
Many of the code snippets it suggests are exact copies
of source code from various GitHub repositories. For
an example, see this tweet: I don't want to say any-
thing but that's not the right license Mr Copilot.
[5] by Armin Ronacher [6] It contains a screen record-
ing of Copilot suggesting this Quake code. [7] When
prompted to do so, it obediently fills in a permissive
license. That permissive license violates the Quake
code's GPL-2.0 license. Copilot provides no indica-
tion that a license violation is taking place.
GitHub performed its own research into the matter.
[8] You can read about it on their blog: GitHub Copi-
lot research recitation, [9] by Albert Ziegler. [10]
I'm not convinced that it accounts for the fact that
suggested code might have mechanical alterations to
match surrounding text, while still remaining close
enough to trained data to be a license violation.
Exhibit B: The Eloquence speech synthesizer
I recently had a chat with Matt on IRC about screen
readers and different types of speech synthesizers. I
mentioned that while I do like some variety, I always
find myself returning to the underrated robotic voice
of eSpeak NG. [11] He shared some of my fondness, and
also shared his preference for a similar speech syn-
thesizer called Eloquence.
Downloads of Eloquence are easy to find (it's even in-
cluded with the JAWS screen reader), but I struggle to
find any “official” pages about the original Elo-
quence. Nuance acquired Eloquent Technology, the de-
veloper of Eloquence. Microsoft later acquired Nu-
ance.
Eloquence sample audio
Matt recorded this sample audio clip of Eloquence
reading some text. [12] The text is from the intro-
duction of Best practices for inclusive textual web-
sites. [13]
>> My primary focus is inclusive design. Specifi-
cally, I focus on supporting underrepresented ways to
read a page. Not all users load a page in a common
web-browser and navigate effortlessly with their eyes
and hands. Authors often neglect people who read
through accessibility tools, tiny viewports, machine
translators, “reading mode” implementations, the Tor
network, printouts, hostile networks, and uncommon
browsers, to name a few. I list more niches in the
conclusion. Compatibility with so many niches sounds
far more daunting than it really is: if you only se-
lectively override browser defaults and use plain-
old, semantic HTML (POSH), you've done half of the
work already.
I like the Eloquence speech synthesizer. It sounds
similar to the robotic yet predictable voice of my
beloved eSpeak NG, but with improved overall quality.
Unfortunately, Eloquence is proprietary.
Exhibit C: Deep learning speech synthesis
Deep learning speech synthesis [14] is a recent ap-
proach to speech synthesizer creation. It involves
training a deep neural network on voice samples, and
using the trained model to generate speech similar to
a real human voice. One synthesizer using deep learn-
ing speech synthesis is Mozilla's TTS. [15]
Zero-shot approaches could allow a pre-trained model
to generate multiple different voices. YourTTS [16]
is one such example. This could allow us to syntheti-
cally re-create a person's voice more easily.
My horrible plan
My horrible plan revolves around going through two
different lawsuits to set some judicial precedents;
these precedents could improve the odds of succeeding
in a lawsuit against Microsoft for Copilot's licensing
violations.
If this succeeds, we have new legal justification that
GitHub Copilot is illegal; if it fails, we have still
gained a means to legally re-create proprietary soft-
ware. It's a win-win situation.
Part One: set a precedent
1. Train a modern text-to-speech (TTS) engine using
the voice a proprietary one made by a company with a
small legal budget. Keep the model's internals hid-
den.
2. Then release the final TTS under a permissive li-
cense. Remember, we're still keeping the machine-
learning model hidden!
3. Wait for that company to file suit. [17]
4. Win or lose the case.
Part Two: use that precedent against Microsoft's Nu-
ance
Our goal here is to get the same legal outcome as the
low-stakes “trial run” of Part One.
Microsoft owns Nuance. Nuance previously bought Elo-
quent Technology, the developers of the Eloquence
speech synthesizer.
1. Repeat Part One against Nuance speech synthesizers,
including Eloquence. Go to court.
2. Have the ruling from Part One cited as legal prece-
dent.
3. Achieve the same outcome as Part One, demonstrating
that we have indeed set precedent that works against
Microsoft's legal department.
Implications of the outcomes
If we win both cases: Microsoft has the legal high
ground. Making a derivative of a copyrighted work us-
ing a machine-learning algorithm allows us to bypass
copyright licenses.
If we lose both cases: Microsoft does not have the le-
gal high ground. We have good judicial precedent
against Microsoft to use when filing suit for
Copilot's behavior.
Either way, it's an absolute win for free software.
Taking down Copilot protects copyleft from enabling
proprietary derivatives (and by extension, protects
software freedom). But if we accidentally win these
two low-stakes “test” cases, we still gain something
else: we can liberate huge swaths of proprietary soft-
ware, starting with speech synthesizers.
Update: on satire
This post isn't “satire through-and-through” like
something from The Onion. Rather, my intent was to
make some clear points, but extrapolate them to absur-
dity to highlight other problems. I don't think I was
clear enough when doing this. I'm sorry.
Copilot has been found to suggest significant amounts
of code that is dangerously similar to existing works.
It does this without disclosing obligations that come
with those works' licenses. Training a model on copy-
righted works may not be wrong in and of itself; how-
ever, using that model to generate new works that are
not sufficiently distinct from original works is where
things get problematic. Copilot's users could apply
proprietary licenses to the generated works, defeating
the point of copyleft.
When a tool almost exclusively encourages problematic
behavior, the makers of that tool should have put
thought into its implications. GitHub and OpenAI have
not demonstrated a sufficiently careful approach.
I don't think that “going after” a smaller player just
to manipulate our legal system is a good thing to do.
The fact that this idea seems plausible to some of my
readers shows how warped our perception of the judi-
cial system is. Even if it's accurate (I doubt it's
accurate, but I'm not certain), it's sad. Judicial
systems incentivise too much predatory behavior.
Corrections It's come to my attention that Eloquence
may or may not still belong to Nuance. Further re-
search is needed. Eloquent Technology was acquired
by SpeechWorks in 2000.
1 https://seirdy.one/posts/2022/07/01/experiment-copilot-legality/
gemini://seirdy.one/posts/2022/07/01/experiment-copilot-legality/index.gmi
2 https://openai.com/blog/openai-codex/
3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPT-3
4 See Comment Regarding Request for Comments on Intellectual Property Protection
for Artificial Intelligence Innovation submitted by OpenAI to the USPTO.
https://www.uspto.gov/sites/default/files/documents/OpenAI_RFC-84-FR-58141.pdf
5 https://nitter.net/mitsuhiko/status/1410886329924194309
https://twitter.com/mitsuhiko/status/1410886329924194309
6 https://lucumr.pocoo.org/about/
7 https://github.com/id-Software/Quake-III-Arena/blob/master/code/game/q_math.c
At line 552
8 I doubt anybody worth their salt would count on a company to hold itself
accountable, but at least they tried.
9 https://github.blog/2021-06-30-github-copilot-research-recitation/
10 https://github.com/wunderalbert
11 https://github.com/espeak-ng/espeak-ng/
12 https://seirdy.one/a/eloquence.mp3
13 https://seirdy.one/posts/2020/11/23/website-best-practices/
14 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_learning_speech_synthesis
15 https://github.com/mozilla/TTS
16 https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2112.02418
17 If the stars align, you could file an anticipatory suit against the company.
It's common for declaratory judgement regarding intellectual property rights.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declaratory_judgment
Glenda adventure sirjofri
____________________________________________________________
>> Glenda found herself in a dark forest.
Do operating systems dream of electric bunnies? Noth-
ing is certain about that, but it does not prevent you
to try to imagine.
Sir Jofri offers us a piece of fiction built out of
the reality of the plan 9 operating system. [1]
Where should this go next?
A story first published on the 9front Mailing List.
1 http://sirjofri.de/oat/tmp/glenda_adventure.txt
Space Weather Woman tgtimes
____________________________________________________________
As she names herself, Tamitha Skov [1] is the Space
Weather Woman. You read it right! She have been do-
ing, since now close to ten years, forecasts about how
is space weather is going.
Just a nerd fantasy? Only a sci-fi artist on a peri-
odic one woman show? Not at all! Knowing what the
sun is blasting toward Earth can reveal more useful
than it looks. This includes:
o personnal safety for some plane flights at high lat-
titude.
o GPS communication, something happening in the pocket
of many individuals, some of them even unaware of
the involvement of satellites in the process.
o Long distance radio communication, which include Am-
ateur Radio operators, but also emergency services
and militaries.
o Something that Starlink did not invent [2] is
satellite-relayed communication, including satellite
internet and voice phone transmission. Actually a
lot of wind turbines are being given satellite in-
ternet, and see how a little disruption [3] in
satellite internet access can disrupt their opera-
tion.
And all of these fancy things are benefiting from Tam-
itha Skov's efforts as a researcher, but also by in-
forming in layman's terms what is going on outter
space.
>> Weather phenomena like coronal mass ejections, so-
lar flares, and solar particle events. [4]
Science is elegant.
1 https://www.spaceweatherwoman.com/
https://yewtu.be/c/TamithaSkov
2 WildBlue, Viasat, NordNet...
First amateur stellite launched in 1961.
3 https://hackaday.com/2022/06/02/the-great-euro-sat-hack-should-be-a-warning-to-us-all/
4 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamitha_Skov
A C64 4chan Browser tgtimes
____________________________________________________________
The sewers of Internet in a C64? The link appeared on
various IRC channels such as #electronics or #osdev,
and not one more word. The investigation is open.
[1]
1 <No_File> https://imgur.com/H36LTRV BACK 2 ROOTS!
I Hate Modern Technology ig0r
____________________________________________________________
>> The "advance of technology" is a source of excite-
ment as well as frustration. ig0r gives us a crys-
tallised view of human stupidity offered daily by
technology.
Modern technology sucks. This might be me behaving
like a pathetic little angsty hipster or trying to
LARP thinking I'm somehow cool, but I think it's a
genuine problem.
Planned Obsolesence
Technology is being designed to fail.
Apple purposefully makes batteries fail on their de-
vices and solders them in such that replacing the bat-
tery on an older device makes no sense, forcing the
customer to buy a new device.
Lenovo's quality has gone down the shitter. Thinkpads
used to be thick, bulky, and rugged such that a cave-
man could use it in place of a club. New models bend
and creak, the hinges breaking after several years of
use while older models still run like new.
The reality is companies want people to consume tech-
nology, not use it. They care about making a profit
rather than giving users a good experience, hence poor
quality of manufacturing to speed up distribution,
consumption, and the filling of landfills.
Modern Software
Modern software is just bad. Here's a few reasons
why...
o It's idiot proof, in that I have little control over
settings and configuration
o Software has become synonymous with adware (see Mi-
crosoft putting ads into explorer)
o I have to pay money for it (fuck you, if I could
copy-paste a car I would)
Smartphones
Smartphones are the most annoying little shits, and
for some reason they've become ubiquitous.
Restaurants are starting to ditch regular menus in fa-
vor of QR codes to be scanned with smartphones. Why?
Paper is more reliable. This is a step backwards in
my opinion. What if I don't have a data plan? What
if I don't carry a smartphone?
Also why does everything have to be an app? Why does
my passport have to be an app? I'm perfectly happy
carrying around paper ID (paper ID doesn't spy on my).
People are idiots
Most companies justify making technology suck more by
saying it's 'easier' and more 'convenient' for normal
people.
Stop making easy and more convenient. Nobody asked
for that. We were happy when technology was hard.
Better recording of the IRC Now events ircnow
____________________________________________________________
Here is a link with a better recording than the one in
the previous tgtimes opus [1]
As a teaser, here are some random contents from it:
o Independence from Silicon Valley
o Self-Governance with Free Software and Right to Code
o Live demo of OpenBSD system administration from the
ground up.
1 https://media.libreplanet.org/u/libreplanet/m/ircnow-of-the-users-by-the-users-for-the-users/
MNT Pocket Reform OS support tgtimes
____________________________________________________________
All these laptop and portable devices come with either
Windows, Apple iOS or OSX, Android, sometimes Chrome
OS, and even more rarely Ubuntu installed upon.
But the open hardware commnity is rising, and calls
for a change. The MNT Pocket Reform lists more exotic
operating systems as officially supported, [1] or at
least acknoledged and listed in the front page:
o Debian GNU/Linux
o Support for other distributions: Arch, Ubuntu, Void
o Plan 9 (9front)
o Genode
o OpenBSD (in development)
Are we seeing a year of the open hardware laptop com-
ing?
1 https://mntre.com/media/reform_md/2022-06-20-introducing-mnt-pocket-reform.html
Darknet Diaries tgtimes
____________________________________________________________
The mysterious Dark Net. While not an official insti-
tution, this hypotetical place built its very own
identity through popular culture and medias. Famous
and infamous, the depths of the limbos are explored in
the Darknet Diaries podcast, covering and reporting
the day-to-day events of that suspicious eden of sha-
dow. [1]
1 https://darknetdiaries.com/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darknet_Diaries
The Modern Mechanical Turk tgtimes
____________________________________________________________
In 1770, long before the exploitation of electricity,
a machine was built in the pretention of being able to
play Chess. This machine named Mechanical Turk was
nothing more than a moving puppet actuated by a small
human, such as a child. A child who is good at chess,
that is!
Actuating levers, the operator would make the puppet
move, fooling the audience that technical advances oc-
casionally make use of black magic.
Amazon called a software platform Amazon Mechanical
Turk. [1] It offers management for harvesting food
for machine learning: human description of images,
videos, products, and other kind of canned thoughts
that machine learning can make use of to build models.
Uber for Cyber. Human translators shouting at ma-
chines the language they got whispered through their
life.
Ghostworker. Noun. 1. Worker performing activity that
will only be appreciated as data feeding an algo-
rhithm. 2. Worker with no access to who it provide
work to, both employer and client are invisible to
him. [2]
given the very large scale at which these data-
harvesting structures are deployed, it means that you,
web user, have experienced the Google and Cloudflare
"captcha" block window. That window preventing you to
submit a form unless you click on all buses, track-
tors, crosswalks, traffic lights... to verify that you
are indeed a human and not a bot trying to access the
website. Instead of prooving its belonging to the
mankind, at the opposite, the user is explaining to
machines what is a bus, a tracktor, a crosswalk, or a
traffic light.
Here is your Great Technological Singularity for the
greatest common entertainment: Nothing more than a
moving puppet, actuated by humans, barely even paid
for it, if paid at all... [3]
1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Mechanical_Turk
2 https://www.ghostwork.org/
3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanical_Turk
Publishing in The Gopher Times you
____________________________________________________________
Want your article published? Want to announce some-
thing to the Gopher world?
Directly related to Gopher or not, reach us on IRC
with an article in any format, we will handle the
rest.
ircs://irc.bitreich.org/#bitreich-en
gopher://bitreich.org/1/tgtimes/
git://bitreich.org/tgtimes/
Did you notice the new layout? We now can jump be-
tween single and double column as it is more fit: Some
large code chunks will not fit in a two-column layout,
but text is more pleasant to read on two columns.
]]></content>
<updated>2022-10-10T23:35:28+0200</updated>
<link type="application/pdf" href="gopher://bitreich.org/9/tgtimes/archive/2022-10-10/tgtimes-2022-10-10-opus6.pdf" />
</entry>
<entry>
<id>gopher://bitreich.org/9/tgtimes/archive/2023-08-29</id>
<title><![CDATA[2023-08-29]]></title>
<author><name>The Gopher Times Authors</name></author>
<content type="text"><![CDATA[,________________________________________________________________________,
| ,_______,,_, _____ ,_, |
| |#######||#| __ ___ ,'#####| ___ ____ |#| __ ___ _ __ |
| |#| |#|/##\ /###\ |#| /###\ /####\ |#|/##\ /###\ \\/##\ |
| |#| |#|/ \#||#|_|#| |#| ___|#| |#||#| |#||#|/ \#||#|_|#||#| || |
| ,|#|, |#| |#||#|___ |#|__|#||#|_|#||#|_|#||#| |#||#|___ |#| |
| \###/ \#/ \#/ \###/ \#####/ \###/ |#:70/ \#/ \#/ \###/ \#/ |
| ,_______, _ |#| |
| |#######|(o) _ __ __ ___ ___ \#/ _,-' ) |
| |#| /#\ \\/##\/##\ /###\ /###\ ( ,-' _,-' ) |
| |#| |#| |#| |#| |#||#|_|#||#|__ ( ,-' _,-' ) |
| ,|#|, |#| |#| |#| |#||#|___ _\##| ( ,-' |
| \###/ \#/ \#/ \#/ \#/ \###/ |###/ |
|________________________________________________________________________|
| Opus 7 Gopher News and More gophers://bitreich.org/1/tgtimes |
`------------------------------------------------------------------------`
,---- [[4m Shell Redirections by athas [0m]
|
| Newcomers to the Unix shell quickly encounter handy tools such as
| sed(1) and sort(1). This command prints the lines of the given file
| to stdout, in sorted order:
|
| [31m $ sort numbers[0m
|
| Soon after, newcomers will also encounter shell redirection, by which
| the output of these tools can conveniently be read from or stored in
| files:
|
| [31m $ sort < numbers > numbers_sorted[0m
|
| Our new user, fascinated by the modularity of the Unix shell, may then
| try the rather obvious possibility of having the input and output file
| be the same:
|
| [31m $ sort < numbers > numbers[0m
|
| But disaster strikes: the file is empty! The user has lost their
| precious collection of numbers - let's hope they had a backup. Losing
| data this way is almost a rite of passage for Unix users, but let us
| spell out the reason for those who have yet to hurt themselves this
| way.
|
| When the Unix shell evaluates a command, it starts by processing the
| redirection operators - that's the '>' and '<' above. While '<' just
| opens the file, '>' *truncates* the file in-place as it is opened for
| reading! This means that the 'sort' process will dutifully read an
| empty file, sort its non-existent lines, and correctly produce empty
| output.
|
| Some programs can be asked to write their output directly to files
| instead of using shell redirection (sed(1) has '-i', and for sort(1)
| we can use '-o'), but this is not a general solution, and does not
| work for pipelines. Another solution is to use the sponge(1) tool
| from the "moreutils" project, which stores its standard input in
| memory before finally writing it to a file:
|
| [31m $ sort < numbers | sponge numbers[0m
|
| The most interesting solution is to take advantage of subshells, the
| shell evaluation order, and Unix file systems semantics. When we
| delete a file in Unix, it is removed from the file system, but any
| file descriptors referencing the file remain valid. We can exploit
| this behaviour to delete the input file *after* directing the input,
| but *before* redirecting the output:
|
| [31m $ (rm numbers && sort > numbers) < numbers[0m
|
| This approach requires no dependencies and will work in any Unix
| shell.
|
`----
,---- [[4m Library of Babel now available on gopherspace. by Bitreich [0m]
|
| The Library of Babel is a place for scholars to do research, for artists
| and writers to seek inspiration, for anyone with curiosity or a sense of
| humor to reflect on the weirdness of existence - in short, it's just like
| any other library. If completed, it would contain every possible
| combination of 1,312,000 characters, including lower case letters, space,
| comma, and period. Thus, it would contain every book that ever has been
| written, and every book that ever could be - including every play, every
| song, every scientific paper, every legal decision, every constitution,
| every piece of scripture, and so on. At present it contains all possible
| pages of 3200 characters, about 104677 books.
|
| [31m https://libraryofbabel.info/About.html[0m
|
| Now available on gopherspace!
|
| [31m gophers://bitreich.org/1/babel[0m
|
`----
,---- [[4m Donkey Meter goes online. by Bitreich [0m]
|
| Have you ever wondered, how much traffic is used on Bitreich.org? Now you
| can see it. In combination with our French friends who spread donkey
| technology, we now have a Donkey Meter:
|
| [31m gophers://bitreich.org/1/donkeymeter[0m
|
| It takes a second to load due to donkey technology restrictions.
| You might also be interested in our Large Donkey Collider technology.
|
`----
,---- [[4m Most minimal Gopher server by tgtimes [0m]
|
| Gopher is a protocol providing a gateway to a document system, allowing
| to serve an organized hierarchy of files over the network. Dynamically
| generating the content as per user requests is also possible. The client
| side is in charge of rendering the content as it sees fit.
|
| Generating Gopher indexes and transmitting file contents or generated
| contents is low in software compmlexity, and in turn allows less expensive
| hardware to be run than complex web stacks.
|
| Which cost would we end-up for building a minimal piece of hardware able
| to host the Gopher protocol acheiving all of the above?
| The Gopher Times investigates.
|
| [1m[4mCommunication[0m[22m
| While WiFi is inexpensive and fits moving device gracefully, the
| reliability of Ethernet is indicated for a server. Ethernet adds
| 1 USD of cost for the transceiver handling the electricial characteristics
| of Ethernet. These typically expose an RGMII interface.
|
| [1m[4mProcessing[0m[22m
| A microcontroller featuring an Ethernet peripheral (with an RGMII
| interface) could be the popular STM32F103, or an alternative
| compatible part. Enough processing power would be present for an
| embedded TCP/IP and a TLS stack.
|
| [1m[4mAutomation[0m[22m
| In addition, most microcontrollers feature a large range of
| built-in peripheral such as timers and communication or analog
| interfaces, enabling automation of devices such as lighting,
| heating, laundry, motors, or an entire car, through external
| modules. This would come for no extra cost.
|
| [1m[4mStorage[0m[22m
| A slot for a MicroSD card would allow storing and updating
| the static content to serve, and storing network configuration.
|
| [1m[4mScripting[0m[22m
| There exist project to fit programming languages onto microcontrollers.
| Separate projects for supporting a subset of each of Python, Ruby,
| Javscript, Go, Rust, Lua, Forth and more.
|
| [1m[4mPower[0m[22m
| By letting power supply happen through the USB port, a large range
| of power source can be used, such as battery, solar panels, wind
| turbine, hydropower, or power outlet.
|
| The bill of materials for such a design would approximate 5 USD.
| A marketed device with a small margin for the seller could reach
| as low as 10 USD.
|
| Interestingly, such a device would also be able to provide an
| equivalent Web service able to work with all Web client, but
| not running the existing popular Web server software stacks
| known as "Web Frameworks".
|
`----
,---- [[4m Gemini2gopher proxy now at Bitreich by 20h [0m]
|
| As of the announcement of osnews.com to have a gemini capsule, this
| content should be available via gopher too. So I dig into a simple
| translation of gemini to gopher.
|
| There is a now a proxy running at:
|
| [31m gophers://bitreich.org/1/\[0m
| [31m gemini?gemini://gemini.osnews.com[0m
|
| You can get the v0.1 release of the proxy at:
|
| [31m git://bitreich.org/gemini2gopher-proxy[0m
| [31m gophers://bitreich.org/1/scm/gemini2gopher-proxy[0m
|
| Have fun! Please send in bugs you encounter. The goal was to display the
| osnews.com gemini capsule.
|
`----
,---- [[4m Geomyidae v0.96 release by Bitreich. [0m]
|
| After Brcon2023 people tested the new features in geomyidae and some
| major bugs were fixed, so now the v0.96 release is ready. Please see the
| talk at brcon2023 for the vast changelog and description of the new
| (flexible and complex) features:
|
| [31m gophers://bitreich.org/0/con/2023/rec/state-of-geomyidae.md[0m
|
| In addition:
|
| [31m * TLS was completely fixed. It now works on OpenBSD.[0m
| [31m * Thanks Evil_Bob and adc for debugging this![0m
| [31m * Connection and serving of files is now vastly improved due[0m
| [31m to reverse DNS lookup not being default.[0m
| [31m * Thanks Evil_Bob for finding this![0m
| [31m * We need to fix the DNS Internet.[0m
|
| And don't forget BOB! Don't drink and write programming languages!
|
| Here are the links for package maintainers:
|
| [31m git://bitreich.org/geomyidae[0m
| [31m gophers://bitreich.org/1/scm/geomyidae[0m
|
| Have much fun with geomyidae!
|
`----
,---- [[4m Groundhog Day Service Page online. by Bitreich [0m]
|
| At Bitreich we support the culture of grounded, based and ecological- and
| animal-friendly technology. In this sense, it is natural for us to
| support Groundhog Day, the scientific measurement for winter length
| prediction. In preparation for our now yearly celebration of this day, we
| now offer the current groundhog shadow status on Bitreich:
|
| [31m gophers://bitreich.org/1/groundhog-day[0m
|
| Future prediction has never been that easily and worldwide available!
| Now groundhog was harmed in the production of this service!
|
`----
+------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| |
| ADVERTISEMENT |
| |
| |
| * You really want this cat to be weber-cooked? |
| |
| ______________________ |
| | Meow |..| |
| | / |oo| |
| * NO? | o o |/\| |
| | (m) . |\/| |
| |____(___)________|__| |
| |
| |
| * You can only stop us by talking to us at: |
| |
| |
| |
| #bitreich-cooking on irc.bitreich.org |
| |
| |
| |
| |
+------------------------------------------------------------------------+
,---- [[4m Gopher 2007 Pearl Project [0m]
|
| Do you like adventures?
| Do you like to discover?
| Many treasures are awaiting you!
| Get ready to search for the pearls:
|
| [31m gophers://bitreich.org/1/gopher2007[0m
|
| The archive of gopherspace from 2007 from archive.org is now available on
| Bitreich for research.
|
| The pearl list begins with - of course! - the gopher manifesto:
|
| [31m gophers://bitreich.org/0/gopher2007/archive/seanm.ca/\[0m
| [31m 70/0/nerd/gopher-manifesto.txt[0m
|
| See the 'What we need' section. We completed nearly all points there. :-D
|
| A second pearl example:
|
| [31m gopher:s//bitreich.org/0/gopher2007/archive/seanm.ca/\[0m
| [31m 70/0/nerd/language_parable.txt[0m
|
| [31m And each language could be heard to mumble as it tromped and[0m
| [31m tromped and tromped, with complete and utter glee:[0m
|
| [31m Have to parse XML, eh? Have to have an XML API, eh? Have to[0m
| [31m work[0m
| [31m with SOAP and XML-RPC and RSS and RDF, eh?[0m
|
| [31m Well parse this, you little markup asshole.[0m
|
| You want to see all postscript files from back then?
|
| [31m curl -s gopher://bitreich.org/0/gopher2007/archive/\[0m
| [31m non-empty-mime-files.txt | grep postscript[0m
|
| I wish much fun reading and discovering even more!
|
`----
,---- [[4m C Thaumaturgy Center opens at Bitreich by Bitreich [0m]
|
| People always had a desire for magic.
| This magic does not end in modern times.
|
| [31m Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from[0m
| [31m magic.[0m
| [31m -- Arthur C. Clarke[0m
|
| So is C, C pointers and C bit twiddling:
|
| [31m gophers://bitreich.org/1/thaumaturgy[0m
|
| Get your daily magic there!
|
| In case you have your own C magic spells laying around and want to offer
| them to the public, send them to: Christoph Lohmann <20h@r-36.net>
|
| I will include them into the programme of the C Thaumaturgy Center.
|
`----
,---- [[4m This's opus C Thaumaturgy [0m]
|
| // Returns the smaller integer of x and y but without a branch
| // (if/else/ternary, goto etc..)
| // Normally min is implemented something like this:
| // return x < y ? x : y;
| // But we have a branch there so let's do it witout. (The branch
| // free min could be used to merge arrays for example.)
| // If x < y, then -(x < y) => -1 => all 1's in two complement
| // representation.
| // So we have y ^ (x ^ y) => x
| // If x >= y, then -(x < y) => 0 so y ^ 0 is y.
|
| static inline uint8_t min(const uint8_t x, const uint8_t y) {
| return y ^ ((x ^ y) & -(x < y));
| }
|
`----
,---- [[4m Bitreich Telemetry Service goes Public. by Bitreich [0m]
|
| The industry is going towards telemetry everywhere: Go programming
| language logging, Windows 11 poop logging etc.
| To save you from burnout
| (which is what Google uses for telemetry excuse!),
| Bitreich is moving forwards too.
| Try it now!
|
| [31m $ git clone git://bitreich.org/geomyidae[0m
| [31m $ cd geomyidae[0m
| [31m $ make telemetry[0m
|
| In case you want to use the telemetry API in your project, just us:
|
| [31m # Everything behind the second / field will be stripped.[0m
| [31m [0m
| [31m $ printf "/${projectname}/...\r\n" | nc bitreich.org 70[0m
| [31m [0m
| [31m Thank you for installing ${projectname}![0m
| [31m Nothing is logged. You can trust us, we are not Google.[0m
|
| It is free to use!
|
`----
,---- [[4m Peering Cake for IPv6 by tgtimes [0m]
|
| The Internet Protocol is the fundamental encoding and communication
| convention that permits computers to reach each other across multiple
| LANs.
|
| An Protocol to allow Inter-Network communication.
| Andy Tanenbaum wrote a beautiful introduction about the underlying idea:
|
| [31m https://worldcat.org/en/title/1086268840[0m
|
| The part of Internet visible from a single user looks like a tree, with at
| its root the service provider. Regardless how complex the branches are,
| there is usually "the gateway", implying a single one per network, to
| allow traffic to "exit", implying a single direction to go for reaching
| the outter world. The routing configuration rarely changes, and is often
| boiling down to "going out", implying beyond the gateway is outside..
|
| The part of Internet visible from a service provider, however, looks like
| a mesh, a more balanced graph, with many possible gateways, many possible
| "exit" directions, and no more idea of "outside".
| If you pick one possible gateway picked at random, hoping them to nicely
| find the correct destination for your IP packets, they may realistically
| cut your connection and never ever talk to you again,
| depending on how much traffic you suddenly sent (routing your IPs to
| 0.0.0.0). This happens frequently. Network admin mailing lists are
| constantly active with many people discussing with many others.
|
| Network admins themself are usually friendly among themself, even across
| concurrents, but companies do not always play nice with each other.
|
| There is a legendary dispute known by all Internet Service Provider (ISP)
| netadmins: the two biggest international internet network providers,
| Cogent and Hurricane Electric, are disconnected.
| The two major IPv6 Carriers, those giants connecting the ISP togethers
| across continents, are currently refusing to exchange IPv6 packets with
| each other. This means that with IPv6, from a country connected to only
| Cogent, it is not possible to reach a country connected to only Hurricane
| Electric, and the other way around.
| For this reason, all ISPs from all countries connections with many more
| carriers for IPv6 than it is for IPv4, resulting in either lower stability
| or higher cost.
|
| This strategy permits Cogent to remain competitive face to its larger
| concurrents. Hurricane Electric, on the other hand, have much more
| commercial advantage to perform peering with Cogent, to therefore exchange
| traffic. In the diversity of attempts to get Cogent to change its mind,
| Hurricane Electric decorated a large creamy cake with a message, and
| shipped the cake to the headquarters of Cogent.
|
| Here is what the message said in 2009:
|
| Cogent (AS174) Please IPv6 peer with us XOXOX - Hurricane Electric
| (AS6939).
|
| [31m https://www.mail-archive.com/nanog@nanog.org/msg15608.html[0m
| [31m https://live.staticflickr.com/2685/4031434206_656b2d8112_z.jpg[0m
| [31m https://www.theregister.com/2018/08/28/ipv6_peering_squabbles/[0m
| [31m https://mailman.nanog.org/pipermail/nanog/2009-October/\[0m
| [31m 014017.html[0m
|
`----
,---- [[4m Announcing the "tgtimes" keyword by tgtimes [0m]
|
| As any newspaper, The Gopher Times goal is to relay information.
| Through chat discussions, The Gopher Times ocasionnally collect
| heirlooms which are published back to the community in this newspaper.
|
| We propose this way of catching The Gopher Times attention, so
| that editors can collect all occurences:
| In an IRC chat discussion, simply make the word "tgtimes" appear
| as a way to pingback to us.
|
| Upon publishing The Gopher Times, the IRC logs of various channels
| will be searched for this keyword, hence noticing every time someone
| wanted to submit something to the The Gopher Times.
| One word to say and The Gopher Times comes that way.
|
`----
,---- [[4m bitreich-cooking by ggg [0m]
|
| In the city home to the best pubs in the English-speaking world, Truth
| keeps ggg alive, tantalises him sadistically, then heals and looks after
| him so the cycle can continue. Coming from China, ggg waded through lies
| to learn that nothing is more powerful than Truth; coming into Cork, ggg
| learnt that Truth catches up nicely with nobody, still, you would prefer
| Truth's company anyway.
|
| Life is fierce futility.
| Agony unites us.
| Renaissance can come.
|
| 60% hustler + 20% hacker + 20% hipster tend to be ggg.
| The more he writes, the less words he ends up with.
| You can find ggg on #bitreich-en and #bitreich-cooking.
|
`----
,---- [[4m Most minimal gopher client by tgtimes [0m]
|
| Gopher is a protocol allowing browsing text, images interactively,
| reach telnet interfaces, and download any file, or open any URL,
| for custom action to be chosen by the user.
|
| [1m[4mNetwork[0m[22m
| One reliable way to fetch the content from internet would be Ethernet,
| but convenience and price would push toward using radio transmission
| such as WiFi.
|
| Ethernet would require an extra transceiver chip, while wifi takes mostly
| just a wire acting as antenna, which partly explains its low cost.
|
| [1m[4mProcessing[0m[22m
| One inexpensive family of processors featuring a high cost-to-performance
| ratio, which also features WiFi, is the ESP32. The C3 iteration even uses
| the open-source architecture RISC-V. The speed is decent enough for
| decoding JPEG an PNG, or support TLS as used in gophers://.
|
| [1m[4mDisplay[0m[22m
| The cost of displays have dropped considerably as they invaded the market.
| Economy of scale made small color displays even cheaper than
| character-based displays.
|
| [1m[4mInput[0m[22m
| Browsing content is a lot about scrolling. Since we do custom hardware,
| capacitive touch buttons can be used for little to no extra cost.
| This could permit a smooth scrolling through the content.
|
| Once again, mostly requiring wires, this cuts the price and explain
| their popularity.
|
| [1m[4mText[0m[22m
| Text is compact and efficient, and bitmap font requires a bit of storage
| for all the common non-ASCII characters, but ESP32 have 16MB of flash
| storage enough for the entire uncompressed Unifont:
|
| [31m http://unifoundry.com/unifont/[0m
|
| [1m[4mAudio[0m[22m
| Producing sound does not cost much more than a small audio amplifier,
| software for decoding MP3, and a 3.5mm Jack connector.
| Very small cost added.
|
| [1m[4mExtension[0m[22m
| An USB interface would allow plugging the device to a computer for
| either automation or using a full keybaord.
|
| [1m[4mPower[0m[22m
| A small dedicated battery could be included increasing the cost,
| but getting all power from USB would also preserve the choice to
| the user, free to chose a wall charger or portable power bank.
|
| [1m[4mEnclosure[0m[22m
| A custom 3D printed case would allow keeping the cost very low
| even at small volume production.
|
| There exist boards around 5 USD which would provide all of the above
| except audio and a few wires, typically the size of an MP3 player.
| The grand total bill of material could realistically approach 10 USD.
| An actual product could eventually reach as low as 15 USD if keeping
| only a small margin for the seller, and eventually lower if produced
| on a larger scale.
|
| The support of TLS does not bring any cost in this example: an ESP8266
| could be used at around 0.85 USD instead of 1.25 USD for the ESP32-C3,
| but is also capable of TLS.
| Image decoding would then probably be much slower.
| By far the most resource hungry part of this project.
|
| Writing the software for such a product from the ground up could take
| typically an entire week, including JPEG and PNG decoding libraries,
| image and font rendering, writing driver for all the parts involved,
| integrating the TCP/IP stack and TLS stack.
|
| While an XML parser able to fetch content over HTTP would be relatively
| as difficult to build, this would not permit the same level of user
| experience as the Gopher-based project: CSS and JavaScript are becoming
| an increasingly frequent requirement to access the Web, and reimplementing
| a new compatible rendering engine is not feasible to a single person.
|
| This requirement would in turn affect the minimal performance of the
| processing unit used: a processor in the GHz range with RAM in the
| GB range, in particular if anticipating future needs of the Web
| software system.
|
`----
,---- [[4m Meme cache pointer support by Bitreich [0m]
|
| The Bitreich memecache joins modern programming languages like C in
| supporting pointer notation. Get a pointer representation of a meme by
| referencing it in our IRC channels with the syntax '*<tag>', instead of
| the usual '#<tag>'.
|
| [31m Example:[0m
| [31m <adc> #gnu-hut[0m
| [31m <annna> #gnu-hut:[0m
| [31m gophers://bitreich.org/I/memecache/gnu-hut.jpg[0m
| [31m <adc> *gnu-hut[0m
| [31m <annna> *gnu-hut:[0m
| [31m gophers://bitreich.org/9/memecache/filter/*gnu-hut.jpg[0m
|
| The pointer notation works for image and video memes. Remember that
| you can explore our memes with
|
| [31m git://bitreich.org/bitreich-tardis[0m
|
| bitreich-tardis, and explore the inner
| workings of annna in the
|
| [31m git://bitreich.org/annna[0m
|
| git repository.
| -adc
|
| [1m[4mDeep pointer support in memes.[0m[22m
|
| Thanks the ground work of adc, we had pointer support for memes. Based on
| this, we now have deep pointer support for all kind of memes:
|
| [31m gophers://bitreich.org/9/memecache/filter/\[0m
| [31m **********athas-teapot.jpg[0m
| [31m gophers://bitreich.org/9/memecache/filter/\[0m
| [31m ****athas-teapot.jpg[0m
|
| With cache support.
| Have fun pointing at memes! We had much fun making this. :D
|
| [1m[4mReverse pointer support for memes.[0m[22m
|
| After a public request by an avid pointer lover, we of course implemented
| reverse pointer support for memes now:
|
| [31m gophers://bitreich.org/9/memecache/filter/\[0m
| [31m &&&&&&athas-teapot.jpg[0m
|
| See how you can dereference this teapot now.
|
`----
,---- [[4m Four Billion more Gopherholes have gone online! by Bitreich [0m]
|
| People are thinking, it is impossible to grow further than the web.
| Gopher did this today, by introducing the four billion gophers project.
|
| [31m gopher://bitreich.org/1/billion-gophers[0m
|
| IPv6 is required.
| Maybe you find the hidden secret of monkey^Wbillion gophers!
|
`----
,---- [[4m The Road to Success by josuah [0m]
|
| Success, the holy grail in Life. Many different forms and shapes.
| Marriage? Career? A medal? A stable financial situation? Crossing the
| border and get naturalized? So many facets to that same shiny diamond.
|
| Or does success mean avoiding failure? In that case, doing nothing means
| no failure, but trying always have more chance to reach whatever one
| names "success".
|
| If failing means that trying did not lead one as far as hoped for, then
| the next thing to do for getting closer to "success" again is trying
| again, in risk to fail over again. And while so, also going a bit
| closer every time to success.
|
| What is the landmark that distinguish being very close to actually
| reaching success? Which indicator to use? Is it about completing a large
| project? Fame? A position in the company? And once at the top position of
| a company, one can still say it was a tiny company and the real goal
| always was to be at the head of a great company, and that success will
| be when the company is large enough.
|
| So if there is no real landmark, if failing is trying but failing to
| reach an impossible goal, then failing is the result of trying whatever
| that leads to. Failure would be the moment that follows any attempt to
| reach the end of a direction. Failure would simply be the moment where
| you look back at where you were before trying, where you are now, and
| the road left to go to reach infinity.
|
| Success looks similar: trying to move forward, constantly bumping the
| objective further as one get closer to it. Again success is the moment
| where you look at where you are, and estimate how far you've been. If
| success and failure are the same, this suggests that something is wrong
| somewhere. Somehow, the ultimate acheivement of every life is death.
|
| [1m[4mThe Road to Success?[0m[22m
| This is the same as the road to Failure: this is Life, it leads to Death.
| Wherever we go, we will be on it as long as we live. So now, may we move
| that idea of Success away so that we can enjoy living our life.
|
`----
,---- [[4m sfeed 1.9 was released by bob [0m]
|
| sfeed is a tool to convert RSS or Atom feeds from XML to a TAB-separated
| file.
|
| It can be found at:
|
| [31m git://git.codemadness.org/sfeed[0m
| [31m gopher://codemadness.org/1/git/sfeed[0m
| [31m https://codemadness.org/releases/sfeed/[0m
| [31m gopher://codemadness.org/1/releases/sfeed/[0m
|
| sfeed has the following small changes compared to 1.8:
|
| [1m[4mFeatures[0m[22m
|
| sfeed_{curses,frames,gopher,html,plain}: add $SFEED_NEW_MAX_SECS
|
| By introducing the new environment variable $SFEED_NEW_MAX_SECS in some
| sfeed_* utilities marking feeds as new based on comparing their age,
| it is now possible to override this age limit. The default limit was
| the last day (86400 seconds).
|
| This allows, for example, to be notified about new feeds within the last
| hour with by prefixing new items with " N ":
|
| [31m SFEED_NEW_MAX_SECS=3600 sfeed_plain ~/.sfeed/feeds/*[0m
|
| While creating a web report for last week's news by:
|
| [31m SFEED_NEW_MAX_SECS=604800 sfeed_html ~/.sfeed/feeds/*[0m
|
| This marks the items of the last week as bold in HTML.
|
| Based on the initial patch by Alvar Penning, thanks!
|
| sfeed_update/sfeedrc: add url a as parameter to the filter() and order()
| function This makes it easier to set filters or ordering by pattern
| matching on a group of feeds by the feed URL. For example for Youtube
| or Reddit feeds.
|
| sfeed_curses: move one line down when marking an item as read or unread.
| I don't mind either behaviour, but it has been suggested by a few people.
| For example the mutt mail client also has this behaviour.
|
| [1m[4mFixes[0m[22m
|
| Improve to use proper includes.
|
| Reduce using some of the unneeded sys/* headers too. Using the C99
| includes.
|
| sfeed_atom: for gmtime_r() make the error message consistent with
| sfeed_mbox.
|
| Makefile: change Gentoo commented example from -lcurses to -lncurses.
|
| sfeed_markread: fail early if creating a temporary file failed.
|
| [1m[4mCode-cleaning / pedantic fixes:[0m[22m
|
| sfeed: datetounix: code-style, change , to separate lines (-Wcomma).
|
| sfeed_curses: make struct urls static like the other variables.
|
| sfeed_gopher: reduce scope and shadowing of a variable (no effective
| change though).
|
| xml.h: _XML_H_: macro name with an underscore is a reserved identifier.
|
|
| [1m[4mDocumentation:[0m[22m
|
| Improve note about CDNs and HTTP User-Agent blocking and change the
| example in sfeedrc.5 by setting a User-Agent.
|
| sfeedrc.example: add comment to reference to the man pages and README
| file.
|
| README: RSS 0.90+ is supported (not 0.91+).
|
| Typo fixes, consistency and structure fixes and some rewording.
|
|
| [1m[4mBitreichcon 2023[0m[22m
|
| Bitreichcon 2023 was cool. It was also fun to hold a RSS/Atom/web
| presentation to a club of like-minded peoples.
|
| [31m gopher://bitreich.org/1/con/2023[0m
| [31m gopher://bitreich.org/0/usr/20h/phlog/\[0m
| [31m 2023-08-10T17-08-41-168752.md[0m
| [31m gopher://bitreich.org/0/usr/20h/phlog/\[0m
| [31m 2023-08-10T19-40-04-621487.md[0m
|
| [31m Slides: gopher://bitreich.org/9/con/2023/rec/\[0m
| [31m state-of-sfeed.zip[0m
| [31m Audio: gopher://bitreich.org/9/con/2023/rec/\[0m
| [31m brcon2023-dump-2023-08-10-20-06-35.mp3[0m
|
|
| Thanks for all feedback and patches,
|
| Donations can be send to:
|
| [31m https://codemadness.org/donate/[0m
|
| :)
|
| Thanks,
| Gopherholistic coach,
| Hiltjo
|
`----
,---- [[4m Volunteers for a The Gopher Times trial wanted. by Bitreich [0m]
|
| As pioneers in the gopher world, we at Bitreich want to make the gopher
| times more accessible to all people over the world. For this, we are
| planning a trial to have printed out the gopher times sent to your
| doorstep.
|
| If you want to participate, please send your name and address to
|
| [31m Christoph Lohmann <20h@r-36.net>[0m
|
| World delivery to all remote places is possible too.
|
`----
,---- [[4m Publishing in The Gopher Times [0m]
|
| [1m[4mYou want your article published? [0m[22m
|
| [1m[4mYou want to announce something to the Gopher world? [0m[22m
|
| Directly related to Gopher or not, reach us on IRC with an article in any
| format, we will handle the formatting and everything else.
|
| [31m ircs://irc.bitreich.org/#bitreich-en[0m
| [31m gophers://bitreich.org/1/tgtimes/[0m
| [31m git://bitreich.org/tgtimes/[0m
|
| Here is how you write an article for the next opus 8:
|
| [31m $ git clone git://bitreich.org/tgtimes[0m
| [31m $ cd tgtimes/opus8[0m
| [31m $ ed $(id -un)-my-personal-technical-project.md[0m
| [31m # Git workflow to send patch follows.[0m
|
| Thanks for reading The Gopher Times!
|
| -- the Gopher Times Team
|
`----
]]></content>
<updated>2023-08-29T13:22:38+0200</updated>
<link type="application/pdf" href="gopher://bitreich.org/9/tgtimes/archive/2023-08-29/tgtimes-2023-08-29-opus7.pdf" />
</entry>
</feed>