Kroovy's Phlog

# Thoughts on the Gopher Onion Initiative

I don't  want to repeat  the prudential  words that are  already written
down at bitreich.org:

The Gopher Onion Initiative

...so, in a nutshell:
Onion services are indeed the obvious choice to go for, in order to host
a gopherhole (and visit them!).


## Broken usability

My daily gopher workflow looks like this:
Typing the  word "sacc"  into the commandline  and adding  a memorizable
domain name right behind it.
Press "Enter".
Fine.
There is my page.

But how can  this work with onion  addresses? They are long  to type and
far beyond from being easy to memorize. The length will extend even more
of the  torproject switches to  an address  length of 54  characters, as
tthey plan.


## Fixing usability

There is a solution.

Everybody should  use tools  like eschalot to  mine themselves  an onion
address. That way, at least the  beginning of an address is memorizable.
For example,  if you would  like to visit  my gopherhole, you  would use
"kroovybwbzaagcen.onion".

Once that is achieved, we can use  the tab completion of our shell to do
the nasty part  of the onion address. I already  hacked an example using
bash.  It utilizes  the compgen  command  in combination  with a  simple
bookmark-file that  contains all of  the onion addresses you  visit (one
address per line).

You can check out the code that has to be added to your .bashrc here:

code

And also check out eschalot, which enables you to mine your own address:

eschalot - onion address miner

You can check out my asciinema recording. It displays the tab completion
workflow very well:

my asciinema recording

                                  ~
                                 /~
                           \  \ /**
                            \ ////
                            // //
                           // //
                         ///&//
                        / & /\ \
                      /  & .,,  \
                    /& %  :       \
                  /&  %   :  ;     `\
                 /&' &..%   !..    `.\
                /&' : &''" !  ``. : `.\
               /#' % :  "" * .   : : `.\
              I# :& :  !"  *  `.  : ::  I
              I &% : : !%.` '. . : : :  I
              I && :%: .&.   . . : :  : I
              I %&&&%%: WW. .%. : :     I
               \&&&##%%%`W! & '  :   ,'/
                \####ITO%% W &..'  #,'/
                  \W&&##%%&&&&### %./
                    \###j[\##//##}/
                       ++///~~\//_
                        \\ \ \ \  \_ 
                        /  /    \      (Berrito)