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Gemini is Solutionism

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Re: Gemini is Solutionism

#141

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

bawolff wrote: post #112
1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #101

"Why couldn't one simply build on top of existing HTTP infrastructure, throw away all the baggage and instead implement a new Content-Type, which existing browsers then could parse?" Because escaping the annoyances of the "modern web" may require escaping from the "modern browser". The changes users want to "modern browsers" will never be made. The vendors of these programs do not answer to users. They answer to web…

> Not the type of simpler pages that some users want. And yet most of these users don't use lynx... > Only complaint I have about Gemini is the absolute requirement for SNI. Not every IP addresss will necessarily be hosting multiple Gemini sites. Under the current protocol, even addresses hosting only a single site must require SNI. That makes no sense. If you're only hosting 1 site, isn't the privacy leak negligible…

"If you're only hosting 1 site, isn't the privacy leak negligible because there is a 1:1 mapping from ip to domain so an attacker can easily determine it."

What if it is a company serving advertisers, not an "attacker".

Not sure why this myth of effortless, reliable translation from IP to domain name in "real-time" exists amongst HN commenters. Show us who is doing this for the purposes of advertising and how it is worth the effort and can be relied on. Even if this were possible, it still does not justify sending a plaintext hostname over the wire when it is not necessary to retrieve a page.^2 Not every site requires SNI (yet "modern" browsers send it anyway).

Tell us how to reliably^1 translate any IP to a domainname at the same speed as one can sniff SNI, and with no extra effort. Assume the use of TLS1.3 so one cannot simply examine a plaintext certificate sent over the wire for a CN or SAN. Then show us where and how this is routinely being done by various companies selling online ads or ad services.

1. PTR will not suffice

2. This is like arguing that because it is theoretically possible for a third party examining traffic to discover some private information through a process that requires referencing additional sources, the user should therefore broadcast the information with every request, despite that it serves no purpose for the user to do so.

Sniffing SNI is common practice.^3 Performing effortless 1:1 mapping from IP address to domain name for the entire www in real-time, for advertising purposes, is not. As long as browsers send SNI with every request, there is no need to do that, even if it were possible.

3. Encrypted Client Hello (ECH) will eventually prevent it. See https://defo.ie

There is no harm in Gemini making SNI optional instead of mandatory.

Re: Gemini is Solutionism

#142

Post by immibis »

southerntofu wrote: post #135
agumonkey wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a recurrent pattern. Cars used to be more diverse. Ecosystems tend to converge I do miss these days too.

It's only a recurrent pattern because the capitalist machine is destroying creativity/leeway. Just like nature produces tomatoes (and other fruits/vegetables) of every color, but good luck finding a tomato that's not red in a supermarket. Abolish capitalism and its central enforcement militia (the State) and suddenly diversity will be brought back to life. Without legal/physical threats (police/tribunals) and indoctr…

I noticed this with restaurants. Old location (Australia): you drive to a McDonald's and get a quarter pounder. New location (Europe): you walk down the street and there are heaps of little unique eating places and small chains.

What causes the difference? I don't know. It might be down to city planning causing people to walk more and reducing the friction of entering a random store to get lunch. It could be something to do with real estate laws. It might just be cultural expectations.

Point is, this "big chain culture" is not universal and not inevitable. It's something we humans created in certain areas.

Re: Gemini is Solutionism

#143

Post by immibis »

GoblinSlayer wrote: post #115
bscphil wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think abut it kind of like this (as someone who has never used Gemini): There are all sorts of uses for cryptographic proofs; e.g. you can sign a document and prove that you were the one who signed it, or you can do a bunch of double-SHA hashes and prove ownership of a Bitcoin, you can prove via a SSL certificate that the content that claims to come from somedomain.example actually does, etc etc. But there's no way…

Authors of Gemini admit scripts and tracking is possible on Gemini, just not implemented yet, like it wasn't implemented in Mosaic.

And how exactly do you plan to implement those? I assume by delivering HTML over Gemini?

Re: Gemini is Solutionism

#144

Post by immibis »

rPlayer6554 wrote: post #60
sergiotapia wrote: post #2

Nah - Gemini FORCES people to use a very strict small surface area. Building on top of existing tech you would need to trust people to do it right, and that ain't something you trust.

I think this is an interesting argument, but my question is why can't it just work in the browser I have with an extension? No matter what people say, modern websites with JS and HTML and such aren't going away. I can't just stick my head in the sand and only use this special browser since I use too many things that make my life better in meaningful ways that use the traditional protocols. Many of them wouldn't be po…

It can, but someone has to write that extension first.

Re: Gemini is Solutionism

#145

Post by immibis »

CyberRabbi wrote: post #98
ranger_danger wrote: post #76

Why a new protocol? Because modern browsers are massive, and we need something much, much lighter that doesn't need to support HTML and such.

You can build a minimal browser that uses HTTP and only renders special markdown files. You can use the Accept header to send special markdown to these minimal browsers and minimal HTML to normal browsers. A new protocol is unnecessary to accomplish the goals you mentioned.

Congratulations, you've invented Gemini with HTTP syntax. Since it's incompatible anyway, why does it need to be HTTP syntax?

Re: Gemini is Solutionism

#146

Post by krapp »

southerntofu wrote: post #135
agumonkey wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a recurrent pattern. Cars used to be more diverse. Ecosystems tend to converge I do miss these days too.

It's only a recurrent pattern because the capitalist machine is destroying creativity/leeway. Just like nature produces tomatoes (and other fruits/vegetables) of every color, but good luck finding a tomato that's not red in a supermarket. Abolish capitalism and its central enforcement militia (the State) and suddenly diversity will be brought back to life. Without legal/physical threats (police/tribunals) and indoctr…

But Gemini and its rigid, minimalist ethos wasn't created by capitalists, rather by anti-capitalists.

Re: Gemini is Solutionism

#147

Post by piaste »

DarylZero wrote: post #9
sergiotapia wrote: post #2

Nah - Gemini FORCES people to use a very strict small surface area. Building on top of existing tech you would need to trust people to do it right, and that ain't something you trust.

Exactly. It's similar to how, here in HN comments, you cannot embed a giant 300MB javascript advertisement monstrosity. Or even just an image. If people could do that, then the space would be destroyed by malicious actors. What if we eliminate HN and do the communication P2P? Where author hosts own content. How can I as author still guarantee you as reader that I won't do that? One answer is to publish over Gemini.

I wonder if instead of Minimal HTTP, it would have been more effective to create a Minimal ActivityPub instead.

Re: Gemini is Solutionism

#148

Post by tpoacher »

southerntofu wrote: post #133
tpoacher wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> is a beautiful animation not content? is an interactive map of a country showing how covid is affecting it not content? Gemini does not prevent you from having any of those things. It simply enforces a separation of those experiences from the text. The reason this is a bad thing, is because you cannot use interactive maps and animations to create rich user experiences. The reason this is a good thing, is because yo…

> Gemini does not prevent you from having any of those things. I strongly disagree. By willingly limiting the markup, gemini actively tries to prevent you from doing these things. In contrast, what's wrong with the web is everything JavaScript and some early design issues with CSS, but HTML is good (although it could be simplified/improved). xHTML more specifically is easy to parse and extensible so that different cl…

I respect your disagreement, but I feel like you're disagreeing against the wrong point here though.

The main difference between gemini (the protocol) and http, isn't that a gemini page need only contain text and be deprived of all other kinds of context. The gemini protocol does not stop you from interacting with specific filetypes or other protocols, any more than http does. It's a protocol. It's up to people implementing clients to the gemini protocol to decide how to handle such externalities.

E.g. the lagrange browser downloads images and displays then inline in the page, which I like. I haven't tried audio files, but I imagine they could probably work similarly if necessary.

Along similar lines, the gemtext specification is not intended as some sort of viable html alternative. It has completely different design goals.

So no, the point isn't about limiting the kind of content you can interact with. The point is, by enforcing a degree of separation between what is "content" (i.e. text), and what is "externalities", this makes simplicity of text (both in terms of presentation and production) the main driver, leaving externalities up to implementations (which may be as simple as encouraging actual external use, including an http browser for http content). More importantly, this allows the user to be in control over how these potentially abusable externalities should be handled, rather than ceding that control to the webmaster, whose agenda may not match yours as a user.

And some (including myself) actually like this separation.

Re: Gemini is Solutionism

#149

Post by foxfluff »

piaste wrote: post #140
dexwiz wrote: post #80

I find it ironic to read an English blog post deriding something for being inaccessible hosted on a domain containing Katakana, something most English keyboards would not be able to type. I cannot tell if the author is Japanese, but I am not sure it matters since the content appears to be exclusively English.

> a domain containing Katakana, something most English keyboards would not be able to type What browser are you using? Mine (Vivaldi) displays the domain as its standard Punycode ASCII representation: https://xn--gckvb8fzb.com

Here's how it looks for me in Firefox.

https://i.imgur.com/HJxJVJj.png

Re: Gemini is Solutionism

#150

Post by PinkMilkshake »

lmm wrote: post #113
PinkMilkshake wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting! I had never tried. Do you know if the Google IME has the same issue?

No idea, I've never used a Google OS on a machine with a real keyboard.

I meant this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Japanese_Input
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