#soylent | Logs for 2025-12-09

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[00:02:42] <halibut_> AlwaysNever: Interesting reading. I largely agree with it. I do like as much end-to-end encryption as possible to prevent snooping, but agree that the way it is implemented where pretty much all hosts are actually on just sitting on a few large content providers makes that less effective.
[00:03:11] <halibut_> There are plenty of cases where encryption of content really is not that important, and the fact that it makes it more stable is nice.
[00:03:41] <halibut_> I will say, though, that the authentication (which goes along with encryption, but actually does not require encryption) does prevent one attack that I did not see mentioned.
[00:04:23] <halibut_> The article does mention modifying content for manipulative purposes, but the author does not think that will happen with Gopher. Agreed---probably not.
[00:05:31] <halibut_> However, if Gopher were more popular, I think they might. After all, it has been done before. A quick search for ISPs inserting ads into unencrypted pages finds a lot of results.
[00:05:48] <halibut_> (I guess that might fall under the ``trying to manipulate'' category.)
[00:05:51] halibut_ is now known as halibut
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[03:05:39] <progo> > the way it is implemented where pretty much all hosts are actually on just sitting on a few large content providers makes that less effective.
[03:05:39] <progo> Gemini protocol (came a few years before the Google Gemini project stole its name and no one cares) uses encryption and trust-on-first-use key exchange like the default setup for SSH
[03:06:07] <progo> you don't need anyone's permission to join the gemini network; just a public hostname or IP address
[03:11:11] <halibut> Neat. I think you might have misinterpreted that comment, though. I was not critiqueing the TLS certificate authority system (although I do have critiques), which it sounds like Gemini might be able to help with.
[03:11:49] <halibut> Instead, I was pointing out that even with perfect end-to-end encryption, if all the servers you ever connect to are owned by one large congolmerate, that conglomerate can see everything you do.
[03:12:28] <halibut> I think the example in the article was CloudFlare. If every sever is hosted on CloudFlare, then CloudFlare gets to see an unencrypted version of all traffic.
[03:13:32] <halibut> I am aware not every server is sitting on CloudFlare, but from recent outages, it has been made obvious just how much of the Internet is (or, at least, is gated by CloudFlare, which I realize might not be the same thing---I have not paid enough attention to know how many servers are gated behind CloudFlare, but not actually hosted on CloudFlare).
[03:15:04] <ted-ious> Isn't it about a quarter of all sites are behind or hosted by cloudflare?
[03:23:59] <halibut> Probably? All I know is one of the more recent outages, I did not even notice. A lot of the work I was doing at the time was local, and my only Internet connections were to some Google stuff, some private boxes, and SN. It turns out none of that was affected.
[03:24:58] <halibut> I may have just outed myself as not a True Web Dev. I do not think they can work without constant high-speed connectivity to every corner of the web to download and update dependencies.
[03:26:16] <halibut> (Intentionally invoking this fallacy: https://en.wikipedia.org )
[03:26:17] <systemd> ^ 03No true Scotsman - Wikipedia
[03:29:08] <halibut> ... oh, and I guess I need to update that to include a constant paid subscription to multiple coding agents to help them be more efficient (i.e. do everything for them).
[05:34:23] <chromas> What does gopher do that http doesn't? :)
[05:43:50] <ted-ious> Satisfy a certain kind of hipster. :)
[07:52:55] <halibut> I got the impression that the answer is the question in reverse. What does HTTP+HTML do that Gopher does not? The answer is a lot and that, plus big companies plus people using flashy frameworks, leads to bloat and spying and tracking and and and ...
[07:53:25] <halibut> Gopher keeps it simple and straightforward. No bloat, no tracking, and so on. That was what I thought the author was saying.
[07:54:08] <chromas> no reason you can't just send plain text over http
[07:54:53] <chromas> so the appeal of gopher is purposely limiting what you can do with it? sounds like twitter
[08:20:09] <halibut> As I understand it, some people preferred Twitter when there were more limits. Seems like kind of an odd thing to criticize people preferring older, stable, less featureful protocols in an IRC channel in 2025.
[08:58:14] <chromas> Twitter was always retarded
[09:12:50] <chromas> plus http is more unixy
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[17:05:02] <AlwaysNever> chromas: gopher allows my Pentium 166 to browse the gopherspace, that machine has no RAM for the modern web.
[17:05:53] <AlwaysNever> the appeal of gopher is limiting what the web can RUN on your computer
[17:07:24] <AlwaysNever> and getting (potentially) exactly the same information, if it was serverd through gopher (which it is not, because they want to run their Javascript programs in your computer)
[17:16:12] <Ingar> you should have told me, I jsut threw away my pentium 200 MX
[17:16:25] <Ingar> *MMX
[21:38:56] <kolie2> at the dc
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