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What is this Gemini thing, and why am I excited about it? (2020)

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Re: What is this Gemini thing, and why am I excited about it? (2020)

#31

Post by anigbrowl »

skybrian wrote: post #10

What’s something interesting to read that’s on Gemini?

I keep asking this question and not getting a useful answer. Someone made a Wikipedia bridge for it, which is the best thing I've seen so far, but it took me a while to find it.

Most Gemini users with their own pages seem to be coming at it from the perspective of 'you are someone who is already interested in me, so you be motivated to investigate my Gemini address.' But if I don't know anyone else who is using it, why do I want to click on a bunch of random links with no context in hopes of finding something interesting? The darkweb has a similar discoverability problem though there it's more reasonable to assume that page owners may not want to be found by casual users.

Re: What is this Gemini thing, and why am I excited about it? (2020)

#32

Post by jefftk »

LeoPanthera wrote: post #17
advisedwang wrote: post #12

I understand the desire to use trust-on-first-use to get rid of certificate authorities (some of the most dispicable and untrustworthy organizations around, and the largest security hole in TLS). However trust-on-first-use basically hands any long-term man-in-the-middle a complete victory. Authoritarian regimes are going to require ISPs to mitm every connection from first use, and hand over whatever data is desired t…

People, or businesses, that you know in real life could exchange certificate hashes in person. This is one of those things that usually garners the response "normal people would never do that", but honestly I'm surprised that no-one has even tried. Let's say that web browsers put a short hash of the certificate right in the URL bar. Amazon, for example, could print its hash on every shipping box. Banks could print th…

.onion addresses are hashes, but a hash long enough to prevent a brute forcing is also too long for people to consistently recognize. Is facebookwkhpilnemxj7asaniu7vnjjbiltxjghye3mhbshg7kx5tfyd.onion the right URL for Facebook or a clever near-collision?

Re: What is this Gemini thing, and why am I excited about it? (2020)

#33

Post by anigbrowl »

juice_bus wrote: post #3
Animats wrote: post #2

It's like Gopher, but dumber.

I think "dumber" is a feature in this case.

It really isn't. If you want people to use it, you have to provide some utility. If you just want to make a point about how things could be different, you may as well print up stickers that say 'get off the internet and talk to people in person'.

Re: What is this Gemini thing, and why am I excited about it? (2020)

#34

Post by Lammy »

advisedwang wrote: post #12

I understand the desire to use trust-on-first-use to get rid of certificate authorities (some of the most dispicable and untrustworthy organizations around, and the largest security hole in TLS). However trust-on-first-use basically hands any long-term man-in-the-middle a complete victory. Authoritarian regimes are going to require ISPs to mitm every connection from first use, and hand over whatever data is desired t…

Personally I've come to believe none of it matters and that encryption is a total waste of time, at least for the kind of stuff I would want to publish using Gemini (long-form text) where there's nothing interactive or user-specific in any request. Just the act of making a network connection gives away who you are, where you are, when you are online, and what you're reading: https://kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2013/06/09/using-metad...

Re: What is this Gemini thing, and why am I excited about it? (2020)

#35

Post by judge2020 »

ronsor wrote: post #16
advisedwang wrote: post #12

I understand the desire to use trust-on-first-use to get rid of certificate authorities (some of the most dispicable and untrustworthy organizations around, and the largest security hole in TLS). However trust-on-first-use basically hands any long-term man-in-the-middle a complete victory. Authoritarian regimes are going to require ISPs to mitm every connection from first use, and hand over whatever data is desired t…

Trust on first use combined with preloaded public key lists is the best of both worlds in my opinion. You may say that browsers made in authoritarian countries would sabotage the preload lists, but they could also bundle illegitimate CAs or break HTTPS in other ways anyway.

'HTTPS in other ways': https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kazakhstan_man-in-the-middle_a...

Re: What is this Gemini thing, and why am I excited about it? (2020)

#36

Post by sodality2 »

Lammy wrote: post #34
advisedwang wrote: post #12

I understand the desire to use trust-on-first-use to get rid of certificate authorities (some of the most dispicable and untrustworthy organizations around, and the largest security hole in TLS). However trust-on-first-use basically hands any long-term man-in-the-middle a complete victory. Authoritarian regimes are going to require ISPs to mitm every connection from first use, and hand over whatever data is desired t…

Personally I've come to believe none of it matters and that encryption is a total waste of time, at least for the kind of stuff I would want to publish using Gemini (long-form text) where there's nothing interactive or user-specific in any request. Just the act of making a network connection gives away who you are, where you are, when you are online, and what you're reading: https://kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2013…

Restricting Gemini to just long-form text (one way consumption) is really reducing the possibilities Gemini can have, IMO. Though the whole minimalist attitude would probably preclude most of them.

Re: What is this Gemini thing, and why am I excited about it? (2020)

#37

Post by LeoPanthera »

jefftk wrote: post #32
LeoPanthera wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People, or businesses, that you know in real life could exchange certificate hashes in person. This is one of those things that usually garners the response "normal people would never do that", but honestly I'm surprised that no-one has even tried. Let's say that web browsers put a short hash of the certificate right in the URL bar. Amazon, for example, could print its hash on every shipping box. Banks could print th…

.onion addresses are hashes, but a hash long enough to prevent a brute forcing is also too long for people to consistently recognize. Is facebookwkhpilnemxj7asaniu7vnjjbiltxjghye3mhbshg7kx5tfyd.onion the right URL for Facebook or a clever near-collision?

This is only true if you limit yourself to standard character based hash representations.

Re: What is this Gemini thing, and why am I excited about it? (2020)

#38

Post by tdeck »

When I was in high school, I was part of an online community that wrote graphical shells for DOS (really NTVDM) in QBasic. One of the things we all started to want was a web browser, but most of us had no idea how to write a parser, let alone deal with the complexities of HTML and JavaScript.

So we created our own markup language, where each "tag" was on it's own line, with the first character indicating the type of tag. Only HTTP GET requests were supported, all output was in color CP437 text, and there was really limited layout support.

After a while there were maybe 5 or 6 different clients and maybe 10 different people had created websites, including a forum, a chat app, an RSS reader, a search engine, and some pages advertising various software people created. Sometimes it can be really fun to start "from scratch" with something simple.

Re: What is this Gemini thing, and why am I excited about it? (2020)

#39

Post by vgb2k18 »

> Gemini is designed to be difficult to extend without breaking backwards compatibility, and almost all proposals for expansion on the mailing list are ultimately shot down.

This could lead to some interesting adaptations. I'm thinking like the way usenet, news-groups were adapted to store and transmit binary files in the form of NZB's. So while the underlying protocol remains pure and simplistic (relatively), the overlays and adaptations build upon it may bring unweildly levels of complexity. Not inherently good or bad, but interesting to think about.

Re: What is this Gemini thing, and why am I excited about it? (2020)

#40

Post by edflsafoiewq »

SilverRed wrote: post #30
haolez wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could create a client that uses a non-standard markup and be able to render inline images just fine... oops! I think I just broke the web again :)

Just put them in markdown and have compatible clients inline render an image and non compatible clients get a link.

Compare this thread with the thread about 30 years ago: http://1997.webhistory.org/www.lists/www-talk.1993q1/0182.ht...
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