## State Of Gopher
State Of Gopher
by
Christoph Lohmann <
[email protected]>
## Veronica Statistics
2017: 133 gopher servers, 4.9 mio. unique selectors
2018: 260 gopher servers, 3.7 mio. unique selectors
2019: 320 gopher servers, 4.2 mio. unique selectors
2020: 395 gopher servers, 4.5 mio. unique selectors
2021: 361 gopher servers, 6.0 mio. unique selectors
2022: 325 gopher servers, 5.0 mio. unique selectors
2023: 319 gopher servers, 5.1 mio. unique selectors
Servers were lost, but selectors is growing again!
A huge difference to 2017, when we started!
## Gopher Lawn Stats
Up from 180 links in 2022 to 239 links yesterday and
242 today! 74% growth in one year!
Much work is going on there:
git://bitreich.org/gopher-lawn
We want to extend this today. See the hackathon and next slide.
:: Gopher Lawn presentation ::
## The Gopher Pearls
At
gophers://bitreich.org/1/gopher2007
Bitreich hosts the gopherspace archive from 2007. This has been done
before. But we want to connect the pearls project, the lawn and research
the archive for pearls people should be able to easily read from and find
their own excitement into this history.
## Tildeverse
* tildeverse.org
| we're a loose association of like-minded tilde communities. if you're
| interested in learning about *nix (linux, unix, bsd, etc) come check out our
| member tildes and sign up!
% printf "/\r\n" | nc tildeverse.org 70 | grep "^h" \
| grep website | sort | uniq | wc -l
36
The same like last year. They are running and are being used. The user
statistics and people coming into contact with gopher cannot be easily
measured.
## Gopher Specialities
Someone launched his personal computer company on gopher in 2023:
gopher://gopher.jonsharp.net:70/0/gl2/07-27-2023-frst-computer-launch-announcement.md
Maybe you need something for your computer?
## Gopher Specialities
The municipality Zermatt in Switzerland offers all services on gopher:
gopher://gemeinde.zermatt.ch/1/
All telephone numbers of town:
gopher://gemeinde.zermatt.ch/0/telefonliste.txt
Current news about construction sites and more:
gopher://gemeinde.zermatt.ch/0/news.txt
Will others follow? Precedence is here!
## Gopher Specialities
There is a band using gopher for their puzzle to get additional songs:
https://mbrserver.com/ip/
gopher://mbrserver.com
Can you crack the riddle?
## Gopher is at your hand.
The individuality of all users of gopher is represented in the way their
gopherholes are designed.
New people come and go, depending on interest.
A hard core stays! Thank you!
## Rememberance: Gopher Vulture Standard
The web is lying to you, gopher is not.
.-'`\-,/^\ .-. .-. /^\,-/`'-.
/ | \ ( ee\ __ __ /aa ) / | \
| | |__/,--.`"` `, ,' `"`.--,\__| | |
| / .__/ `"""",/ \,""""` \__. \ |
| / / | | \ \ |
.'.-' /__/ GOPHER VULTURE \__\ '-. '.
`"`| |';-;_` `_;-;'| |`"`
jgs |/ /-)))))) ((((((-\ \|
## Rememberance: The Gopher Vulture Standard
Gopher is lonely and needs to evolve towards new standards of robbing people
off their dignity, personal rights and sanity.
There is no way to make money off gopher and advertising YET.
Gopher Vulture is here to provide you with a standard for FULL EXPLOITATION
of all of your users for the gain of your bank account and your dogs.
## Rememberance: The Gopher Vulture Standard
If you introduce Gopher Vulture to your gopherhole, users are required
to send in one body part in a cooling box right to your front door. This
will prove that they are rightfully willing to participate in the experience
you are providing them over gopher.
The contract is signed with blood. No further procedure needed.
After this contract signing you can exploit the users as you like. No
restrictions, like filthy EU data laws, apply.
## The Web Vulture Standard / Web Environment Integrity
The web is going full commercial.
* They overdid annoying people and selling their privacy.
* Politics reacted and made laws.
* Advertisement income is decreasing.
* The companies need to react and save their income and jobs.
## Web Environment Integrity
Google hates all of its users. But they love money, so they proposed
something completely evil:
https://github.com/RupertBenWiser/Web-Environment-Integrity/blob/main/explainer.md
You, as a client, need to be attested ot be valid.
Who can be the attester?
## Web Environment Integrity :: How it works.
evil-google.com You Attester
| | |
|<--[ Please show me ] ----| |
|-----[ Javascript ]------>| |
| |--[ Is he integer? ]->|
| |<-[ Integrity Token ]-|
|<-[ token(Please show me)]| |
|-------[ content ]------->|
> The proposal calls for at least the following information in the signed
> attestation:
>
> * The attester's identity, for example, "Google Play".
>
> * A verdict saying whether the attester considers the device
> trustworthy.
Ok, a _verdict_.
## Web Environment Integrity :: User Reactions
https://github.com/RupertBenWiser/Web-Environment-Integrity/issues/123
> Proposal to go back to the 90s web standard
>
> [...]
> 9. HTML over Gopher (Because everyone knows Gopher was the superior
> protocol).
More fun:
https://github.com/RupertBenWiser/Web-Environment-Integrity/issues
## Privat Access Token
There was a similar proposal by Apple about this:
https://www.snellman.net/blog/archive/\
2023-07-25-web-integrity-api-vs-private-access-tokens/
> With both WEI and PATs, the website would be able to ask Apple to verify
> that the request is coming from a genuine non-jailbroken iPhone running
> Safari, and block the ones running Firefox on Linux. And in both, the
> intent is not for the API to be used for that kind of outright blocking.
> It's also not that PATs would somehow make it easier for people to spin
> up new attesters for small or new platforms. Want to run your own
> attester for PATs? You could, but the issuers you care about will not
> trust it. [2]
The HN discussion:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31751203
## Web Environment Integrity :: Summary
* The web is destroying itself.
* Noone is able to write its own browser without being dependent on
Google.
* Google knows this and uses this for profit.
* Their profit is your data.
* They get more data of you, if you are not free to choose.
## Gopher Summary
* We have been holding a gopher conference eight years now.
We will be older and longer lasting than the first gopher wave,
when it was born.
* We only need to watch for the web to bring us people wanting
working technology.
* We keep on having fun and this is what keeps us here.
On to the fun ...
## Gopher Pearls Hackathon
Please check out:
git://bitreich.org/brcon2023-hackathons
:: Demo of hackathon repository ::
## Thanks
Thank you for listening!
If you have further comments, contact me at
Christoph Lohmann <
[email protected]>
