Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

drewdevault.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 211 posts

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

#91

Post by vagrantJin »

II2II wrote: post #60
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…

Many years ago, I was put into a situation where I had to start using online banking. Being skeptical about security, I asked for something along the lines of a certificate hash that could be verified in person. They couldn't answer that. So I tried asking how I could verify that the certificate displayed by the web browser was correct. They couldn't answer that. In the end, I ended up trusting the padlock icon and b…

> mostly about the illusion of security. To this day I'm left with the impression that some sort of MITM attack would be possible through the creative abuse of certificate issuers and proxies since there is no direct means of verifying the certificate is authentic

Why would a bank's customer support agent know about encryption? Usually IT is a siloed function in most banks.

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

#92

Post by LeoPanthera »

thewakalix wrote: post #88
LeoPanthera wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't the whole point of a hash that you can't "subtly" change it?

Would you notice if someone changed the "f" in the middle of that onion link to an "l"?

Again, it's impossible, or should be impossible, to easily change a single character in a hash. The avalanche effect means that small changes in the input data will result in huge changes to the hash.

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

#93

Post by zem »

LeoPanthera wrote: post #68
zem wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like whatever scheme you use, if it is too simple there won't be enough unique keys to go around, but if it is complex enough it can be subtly changed in ways a human would find hard to notice.

Isn't the whole point of a hash that you can't "subtly" change it?

that's the point of a machine-checked hash, because computers are really good at exact equality operations. humans have a much harder time with it.

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

#94

Post by BrightGlow »

savolai wrote: post #84
knowledge-clay wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With Gemini, the philosophy of intentional austerity means that everyone is going to be a bit unhappy, and want some feature added to it. Its "incompleteness" is a necessary consequence of its design philosophy -- it calls on us to accept it "as-is" rather than try and extend the spec. A mailing list for comments, as you describe, would be more "gemini philosophy". This is what the author does: => https://lists.sr.ht…

I find it laudable you're openly admitting making users unhappy. Of course, what's "added" and what's "simple" is a political value choice in an of itself. Using a mailing list for comments sounds like "returning to the golden days when we didn't need to take non-techies people seriously but could tell them what to use their cognitive capacity for" i.e. to learn arcane UI that never even tried to really take into acc…

I really don't think it's okay. I've noticed this type of "tech reactionarism" a lot recently in open source as a form of wishful thinking. This author in particular seems to write about it quite a lot. But it's misleading and not being fair to the users, who deserve to know that what they're doing is a waste of time. Unless someone wants to pull out the old teletype and modem connected to a phone line then we can't go back to the olden days. And honestly, nobody wants to do that in 2021.

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

#95

Post by R0b0t1 »

sodality2 wrote: post #36
Lammy wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Alternate streams for rich content.

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

#96

Post by knowledge-clay »

BrightGlow wrote: post #94
savolai wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it laudable you're openly admitting making users unhappy. Of course, what's "added" and what's "simple" is a political value choice in an of itself. Using a mailing list for comments sounds like "returning to the golden days when we didn't need to take non-techies people seriously but could tell them what to use their cognitive capacity for" i.e. to learn arcane UI that never even tried to really take into acc…

I really don't think it's okay. I've noticed this type of "tech reactionarism" a lot recently in open source as a form of wishful thinking. This author in particular seems to write about it quite a lot. But it's misleading and not being fair to the users, who deserve to know that what they're doing is a waste of time. Unless someone wants to pull out the old teletype and modem connected to a phone line then we can't…

> what they're doing is a waste of time.

I fundamentally disagree here. There are ways that people waste their time on the web that are far more pernicious than "learning how to write gemtext markup"

The web is in a seriously messed up state, and in many ways, things are getting worse. I think it's far more dangerous to shrug our shoulders and just let things continue as they are than to work on projects that attempt to present an alternative.

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

#97

Post by BrightGlow »

knowledge-clay wrote: post #96
BrightGlow wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really don't think it's okay. I've noticed this type of "tech reactionarism" a lot recently in open source as a form of wishful thinking. This author in particular seems to write about it quite a lot. But it's misleading and not being fair to the users, who deserve to know that what they're doing is a waste of time. Unless someone wants to pull out the old teletype and modem connected to a phone line then we can't…

> what they're doing is a waste of time. I fundamentally disagree here. There are ways that people waste their time on the web that are far more pernicious than "learning how to write gemtext markup" The web is in a seriously messed up state, and in many ways, things are getting worse. I think it's far more dangerous to shrug our shoulders and just let things continue as they are than to work on projects that attempt…

I don't see how you're disagreeing, you seem to acknowledge that it is a waste of time. And I don't see how any one of these is more pernicious than another, there can be bad actors, cyberstalkers, scammers, criminals everywhere on the net including on gemini.

Edit: A point I'd like to make here is that Gemini is not an alternative web and never will be, according to the designer's own statements. I share your frustration with some of the modern aspects of the web but the web also does a lot of things right that we may take for granted, let's not be so cynical as to forget that. I'm guilty of it myself in the past but no longer, and part of it was because people misled me.

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

#98

Post by mattlondon »

selfhoster11 wrote: post #52
Animats wrote: post #2

It's like Gopher, but dumber.

On the contrary, I would say a bit smarter than Gopher. For one, it has optional support for markdown, nicer native markup, and encryption support.

So for what it is worth, gopher has support for encryption these days, and some gopher browsers can also trivially auto-render markdown.

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

#99

Post by mattlondon »

cyounkins wrote: post #63

Is extensibility really the Pandora's box the author makes it out to be? Just because something is extensible doesn't mean it has to be extended in monstrous ways.

Yeah I agree with you here. Gopher had Gopher+ that allowed for quite rich extensions - the original gopher authors had early prototypes of a 3D "VR" interface for example.

No one really used it for anything though, and then most people moved on as technology moved on.

I think perhaps the Gemini folks are acting slightly paranoid here - like the minute they allow extensions they will be flooded with ads and tracking. I am reminded of https://xkcd.com/538/ - I suspect that really no one cares enough to flood Gemini sites with ads and tracking, and likely never will.

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

#100

Post by Y_Y »

knowledge-clay wrote: post #49
betwixthewires wrote: post #4

I've been a reader of this gemlog and a fan of Gemini, I have been looking at minimal featured Gemini servers (everyone seems to be building one) and looking for one specifically that offers an http mirror, text and maybe inline images only. Particularly I'd like to do everything in markdown, does anyone know of a good one?

Kineto might be what you're looking for: https://sr.ht/~sircmpwn/kineto/ Inline images is a violation of the Gemini spec: > clients MUST NOT automatically make any network connections as part of displaying links whose scheme corresponds to a network protocol (e.g. links beginning with gemini://, gopher://, https:// , ftp:// , etc.).

On a related note, it seems strange that I can't access sr.ht content over gemini. I know that it's not quite trivial to render something suitable if you're starting with DHTML (lol) but it seems like srcmpwn would be the kind of person to bother doing it.
Post reply on HN