21–30 of 64 posts
It’s like religion - one of the reasons they say Christianity won over Judaism is because they didn’t require one to circumcise before the initiation. Yet both are equally rejecting of any other religion.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Judaism is also quite "racist". There is only one "chosen" people. Everyone else would be/is a second citizen. Who would join a religion to be 2nd citizen?
I'd encourage you to actually attend a synagogue service, or even just have a chat with a real-life Jewish person, before exposing yourself to ridicule as you have here. In my life as a Jewish person, I've never _once_ hear a rabbi even hint as such a sentiment. Converts are treated exactly as Jewish as those who are born into the faith. What leads you to think otherwise?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd encourage you to actually attend a synagogue service, or even just have a chat with a real-life Jewish person, before exposing yourself to ridicule as you have here. In my life as a Jewish person, I've never _once_ hear a rabbi even hint as such a sentiment. Converts are treated exactly as Jewish as those who are born into the faith. What leads you to think otherwise?
I'd suspect that OP was referring to the first century CE when Christianity could be said to have "won out" over Judaism, and yes then Jewish people often were racist in that way, just like people of most cultures then. Nowadays Jewish people aren't racist at all, or at least less so than the average American or European - and OP should have acknowledged and phrased that better.
Is this actually true?
# Denial of Service
Permitting zero or more whitespace characters in a request a introduces a denial of service because the request is no longer bounded. Just keep sending whitespace to keep the connection open. Mandating a single character closes this particular hole.
It's possibly a minor DoS considering other attack vectors, but why leave any low-hanging fruit?
# Caching, ETags and Tracking
Caching is great, and I'm sure Gemini devs wouldn't object to caching if it could be handled without introducing user-facing privacy issues. Here's a sketch for an ad network protocol that I think would work with Gemini:
1. Client requests URL X.
2. Server replies with a redirect to "X?tracking-id", where tracking-id is associated with a set of IP addresses.
3. All links in the document append the tracking-id to preserve it.
Anytime a client accesses a document in the ad network, the tracking-id quickly returns. People often have multiple IPs for their laptop, desktop, phone, tablet, etc. but there would be enough overlap in these sorts of requests to correctly tie a set of IPs to a unique client.
What cookies, etags, etc. permit on the WWW is doing this without requiring sharing the client IP database.
So maybe what we can do is still enjoy the benefits of caching while at least detecting when some shenanigans are at play. The ad network outline above is observable behaviour from which we might be able to infer shenanigans.
To reintroduce caching without amplifying the tracking powers, and add the ability for the client to verify the server's ETag is legit, rather than treating it as an opaque identifier. If an etag for content specified the hash function used, then the client can verify the integrity of the document. So take the HTTP ETag header to a syntax like "ETag(sha256): ..."
Like the ad network outlined above, malicious servers could craft slightly different versions of a document for each IP and so generate unique ETags that may permit some sort of tracking in a similar way. However, the gemini document has no notion of hidden data (like comments and hidden fields in HTML), so any such shenanigans will always be visible in some way in the document itself, eg. embedding a unique hash code at the end, for instance.
So in the end, adding caching in this way should improve efficiency without appreciably amplifying tracking.
# Transclusion
A language with a construct becomes more expressive if it also includes its dual. Gemini has document-level references, where a document points to another document, but it lacks transclusion which is a dereferencing operation, such that you can embed another document into the current document.
So links in Gemini are:
=> gemini://some/url
This is so intensely cool. Urbit was on its own island until recently - the only project challenging the domination of WWW. This + Tildeverse feels like the very, very, very early days of hackers starting to play with alternate protocols, and the style and format of WWW. It's fun, non-commercial, social, and aimed at hobbyists - just like the early WWW. Given another 10 years of experimentation, I could 100% imagine…
This is so intensely cool. Urbit was on its own island until recently - the only project challenging the domination of WWW. This + Tildeverse feels like the very, very, very early days of hackers starting to play with alternate protocols, and the style and format of WWW. It's fun, non-commercial, social, and aimed at hobbyists - just like the early WWW. Given another 10 years of experimentation, I could 100% imagine…
In what way?
I see that they've specified both a transport protocol, to replace HTTPS, and a document format, to replace HTML. BLUF: They should have just run the text/gemini format on top of HTTPS 1.1, make a gemini --> HTML formatter, and maybe a restricted subset of HTTPS, and called it a day. Replacing HTTPS is a waste of time. Also, most of the benefits of the document format could be gotten with a sane subset of HTML. There…
I've wanted to make something like this, and I'm happy to see its here because implementing a client looks like a lot of fun. Here is why I want a simpler web: The NewYorkTimes wont be there! Neither will google or facebook or shopify or influencers or clickbait even! I want a web that is hard to make money from. Something that doesn't support fingerprinting and ad tracking, where my interests aren't at odds with the…
“ In the same way that many people currently serve the same content via gopher and the web” Is this actually true?
Having played with this now via their "kiosk" [1] it's very cool and I think there's something here. I expect only the kind of people who visit HN will ever try it and fewer will ever use it, but the protocol is very nice and simple. I wish it would take off and that a nice GUI client was written so that it was easier to use. [1]: ssh kiosk@gemini.circumlunar.space
To the sibling comment: It's a bit non-obvious indeed. It allows you to use their AV-98 Gemini client. [0] The source seems to be basically the documentation here ;)
Try this:
AV-98> tour gemini://gemini.circumlunar.space/
Then add links that you want to visit (they're numbered) with, for example
AV-98> tour 1
and navigate there with
AV-98> tour
[0] https://tildegit.org/solderpunk/AV-98/src/branch/master/av98...)