The Gopher Times
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Opus 2 - Gopher news and more - Nov. 2021
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Amiga-style demos on microcontrollers ltf
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The demoscene is an UNESCO-recognised art where
computer are programmmed to display graphics and
soundtrack in real-time. Competitions challenges
everyone to build the most impressive demo out of the
same limited resources as everyone, such as venerable
computers like Comodore64 or Amiga computers.
While faster computers are being built everyday,
computer with even less resources than the early days
are still in massive production and used:
microcontrollers.
Linus Akesson, a demoer known for its "A Mind Is Born"
winning entry [1] is pushing the kind of CPU that
controll your elevator to its limits to produce waves
of colors and rivers of melodies.
https://www.linusakesson.net/pages/scene.php
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[1]
1st place on Revision 2017 competition
The aNONradio station sdf
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A non-radio is an independent radio blasting live
broadcasting from the sdf.org infrastructure: a group
of various UNIX-like system servers providing free
shell accounts among other services.
The presenter is well aware of the various UNIX-like
systems culture and operation, so do not be surprised
if you hear him talk about IRC channels or server
updates straight from the waves.
There are music from community DJ and artists
broadcast, weekly radio shows, handpicked tunes,
announce about upcoming shows, and even world news.
There are also Open MiC sessions where anyone may join
and discuss or broadcast, so drop them a word if you
want something played to that station.
Much like Bitreich conferences, live comments can be
sent to the presenter over IRC.
https://anonradio.net/
ircs://irc.sdf.org/#anonradio
Phrack Magazine fnord
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On the world of hacker, warez, and computer security
has a long-standing magazine respected by the
pioneers: Phrack.
May its crude plaintext aspect not mislead you in
thinking it is one of these retro computing group, as
cutting edge pentest strategies, defence strategy, or
reverse engineering material might likely be disclosed
in here:
• Android Kernel Rootkit
• Revisiting Mac OS X Kernel Rootkits
• Escaping from FreeBSD bhyve
• .NET Instrumentation via bytecode injection
Recent versions of the planet's most used operating
systems, terrific topics such as VM escape. Phrack is
not script kidding around!
Thanks to fnord.one gopher hole, each opus is also
available directly over gopher:
gopher://gopher.fnord.one/1/Mirrors/
FreeChess chess server telnet
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Chess has likely been there since forever, it might
have as well been there since longer than life on
earth [citation needed]. As such, software for
playing chess might have been around for a similarly
long amount of time.
Possibly one of the longest-running chess system
online for playing chess is FreeChess, the free online
chess server, and it is accessible over telnet:
$ telnet freechess.org 5000
A prompt offers to logon, and "guest" can be entered
for using it without an account, then <Enter> (then
once again later):
login: guest
By just staying here waiting, battle offers from other
players start to spawn:
GuestJZMS (++++) seeking 5 0 unrated blitz f \
("play 50" to respond)
GuestJZMS (++++) seeking 5 0 unrated wild/fr f \
("play 72" to respond)
GuestJZMS (++++) seeking 1 0 unrated lightning f \
("play 73" to respond)
fics%
Playing one of these games leads you to an ASCII
chessboard ready for white to play:
fics% play 72
---------------------------------
8 | *R| *N| *B| *Q| *K| *B| *N| *R|
|---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---|
7 | *P| *P| *P| *P| *P| *P| *P| *P|
|---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---|
6 | | | | | | | | |
|---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---|
5 | | | | | | | | |
|---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---|
4 | | | | | | | | |
|---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---|
3 | | | | | | | | |
|---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---|
2 | P | P | P | P | P | P | P | P |
|---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---|
1 | R | N | B | Q | K | B | N | R |
---------------------------------
a b c d e f g h
fics%
In complement to the raw telnet interface, a graphical
client may be used to join a game with the board shown
on-screen.
The Embedded Muse Newsletter ganssle
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Ever felt curious about the embedded world? These tiny
machines that are low-power enough to last all winter
powered by a potato battery? Then take a peek at the
Embedded Muse Newsletter.
This mail-based monthly publication is run by Jack
Ganssle since 1997. A well-known pioneer, but each
issue is turned toward the community, where everyone
submits its story that Jack publishes back.
You might find spicy UNIX and engineering humour.
http://www.ganssle.com/tem-back.htm
Mozilla, "OBEY" and 1988 movie jwz
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Surprisingly diverse themes. Just as diverse as Jamie
Zawinski's creations: Netscape, Mozilla, the DNA-
Lounge night club.
The 1988 movie offers a revelation about advertizing.
The "OBEY" Clothing Brand refers to that movie. The
Mozilla logo shares the same author as the "OBEY"
logo. Out of tihs, jwz narrates us a piece of our own
history.
Sometimes, ubiquitous, vastly popular, and highly
profitable projects have the most unexpected history,
in contradiction with what they became.
https://www.jwz.org/blog/2016/10/they-live-and-the
-secret-history-of-the-mozilla-logo/
Twtxt Over Gopher gopher ml
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The twtxt format is a plain text microbloggin format
that lives as a text file hosted on any server, in the
same style as RSS feeds.
The support
gopher://example.com/0/twtxt.txt is
already there! As prologic points out on the Gopher
Mailing list, it is possible to use gopher:// links
for twtxt, as showcased by the yarn.social search
engine.
This might as well be the case for many other twtxt
clients, given that libcurl supports gopher:// and
gophers://.
It will soon be difficult to find a single software
that does not support Gopher...
https://twtxt.net/
https://lists.debian.org/gopher-project/
https://yarn.social/
Hosting Providers Projects tgtimes
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While hosting a server at home has its benefits (and
its charms), some interesting hosting providers do a
good job at sharing all the fun that hosting servers
can have while still handling the long-winged work of
keeping the hypervisors up and running.
Efforts also coming from the community that sometimes
take part into the project, or in reverse, hosting
providers contributing to help community projects,
either through funds or bug-fixing.
sdf.org Around since as early as 1987, the Super
Dimension Fortress describes itself as a public
access supercomputing center. An invitation to jump
both foot into the UNIX culture featuring games,
email, usenet, chat, bboard, gopherspace, webspace,
programming utilities, archivers, browsers, and
more. A different sense of community than the one
offered by social networks.
sdfeu.org Joint effort with the north Amercian
sdf.org, the European counterpart will have a better
network lattency for European, Middle east, and
African users.
grex.org Grex brings democracy to hosting, a concept
little explored by commercial hosting providers:
open access, but also owned by its members who can
vote on what to plan next for Grex. Also a good
pretext to get around a good meal during the Grex
conferences.
openbsd.amsterdam A hosting provider running OpenBSD
for its entire stack, including the hypervisor
itself: vmm(4). It permits its user to connect
directly onto the hypervisor through SSH and run
commands such as vmctl vm02 restart.
blinkenshell.org Younger by a few years, this open
shell project lets you give Linux a try. Occasion to
make someone discover the world of command-line and
programming through the editor and compilers
installed up there.
prgmr.com While keeping a commercial model, this Xen-
based hosting provider offers a command-line
approach to hosting, and consider the user as a
respectable admin rather than a supermarket
custommer.
Nixers.net Con 2021 nixers
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On November the 7th, the second edition of the
nixers.net *NIX users community took place:
• Creating your own troff macros — seninha
• Keeping track of your things — venam
• Truly Federated Identity for the web — push-f
The video recording are already available:
https://nixers.net/Thread-Nixers-net-Conf-2021
A message to developers nitot
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While Mozilla keeps the web browser vendor race going
while a former founder moved elsewhere offering to try
a different take on technology.
Tristan Nitot is the of Mozilla Europe, who also
worked at Netscape before its decline. After he left
Mozilla, he published "surveillance://" defending
privacy, and went as far as offering alternative to
Google by joining the Qwant team (web serach engine).
Yes, this is a Google-funded conference.
During this web, mobile and cloud conference, under
OVH, Google, and Microsoft sponsorship, what message
would he have to spread to developers getting started?
Mind the Global Warming!
How unexpected but welcome. He simply shew the
numbers, and shew big newspaper headlines: explaining
that the poor performance of software have been
largely compensated by the Moore's law for the last 50
years, letting software fat to accumulate without dire
consequence on usability.
A call to developers to consider supporting the
existing hardware through providing reasonable
performance, considering removing features, would have
the greatest impact; most CO² emission of IT
originating from producing new end-user devices. He
blamed Windows 11 badly for that, refusing to support
older chips. Yes, this is a Microsoft-funded
conference.
>> Between the early web pages of a few kilobytes to
the web pages of today, the size was went up by a
factor of 150. Are web pages 150 times better than
they used to be?
At the beginning of its talk, Tristan Nitot quoted
Upton Sinclair:
>> It is difficult to get a man to understand
something when his salary depends upon his not
understanding it.
https://devfest.gdglille.org/
https://climatefresk.org/
https://standblog.org/blog/
cirosantilli, a rabbit hole on its own tgtimes
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Is this name familiar to you? Maybe you encountered
cirosantilli on a StackOverflow or remembered one of
the iconic profile picture he chose? Did you encounter
the name on GitHub? If so you may have immediately
noticed how he weaponized this popular code hosting
platform into a freedom of speech silver bullet
against China's censorship.
The entire user profile was turned into a long
document that can resist to the most ferocious
censorship. A vast amount of images and keywords
censored by China is published straight on the front
page, making it outstanding to the visitors.
Would china dare to try to take down the biggest code
hosting platform, harming most of IT companies in the
world? And even if it tries, would it succeed? And so
without provoking too much tension with the U.S.?
While China's government censorship violence is world
famous, so is GitHub's DDoS mitigation services
(provided by a dedicated company, not performed by
GitHub themself), after undertaking 1.3 Terabit per
second during a famous DDoS attack.
This Brazilian Italian turned Goliath against Goliath.
Are you curious about its practical plan to take down
China's great firewall? Or maybe you are interested
in one of the many computer-related topics he teaches
on its website?
This activist doubled as student and teacher might
take you down the rabbit hole of both computer science
and fight for freedom.
https://stackoverflow.com/users/895245/
https://cirosantilli.com/
https://github.com/cirosantilli
Digitalisation Evangelists Hymn 20h
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Original Text: Dieter Birr / Wolfgang Tilgner
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbQuauLn52c
>> Einem war sein Heim, war sein Haus zu eng
One was his home, his home was too narrow
>> Sehnte sich in die Welt
Strived for the world
>> Sah den Himmel an, sah wie dort ein Schwan hinzog
Saw the sky, saw how a swan directed there
>> Er hieß Ikarus und er war sehr jung
He was named Ikarus and he was young
>> War voller Ungeduld
He was full of impatience
>> Baute Flügel sich, sprang vom Boden ab und flog
Built wings for him, jumped off the ground and flew
>> Und flog
And flew
>> Steige Ikarus! Fliege uns voraus!
Strive Ikarus! Fly ahead!
>> Steige Ikarus! Zeige uns den Weg!
Strive Ikarus! Show us the way!
>> Als sein Vater sprach: "Fliege nicht zu hoch!
As his father said: "Do not fly too high!
>> Sonne wird dich zerstör'n"
sun will destroy you"
>> Hat er nur gelacht, hat er laut gelacht und schrie
He only laughed, he laughed loud and screamed
>> Er hat's nicht geschafft und er ist zerschellt
He didn't make it and he shattered
>> Doch der erste war er
But the first one he was
>> Viele folgten ihm, darum ist sein Tod ein Sieg
Many followed him, that is why his dead is a victory
>> Ein Sieg!
A victory!
>> Steige Ikarus! Fliege uns voraus!
Strive Ikarus! Fly ahead!
>> Steige Ikarus! Zeige uns den Weg!
Strive Ikarus! Show us the way!
>> Einem war sein Heim, war sein Haus zu eng
One was his home, his home was too narrow
>> Sehnte sich in die Welt
Strived for the world
>> Sieht den Himmel an, sieht wie dort ein Schwan
Sees the sky, sees how a swan
>> Sich wiegt
himself enjoys
>> Er heißt Ikarus und ist immer jung
He is called Ikarus and he is always young
>> Ist voller Ungeduld
Is full of impatience
>> Baut die Flügel sich, springt vom Boden ab und
fliegt
Builds himself wings, jumps off the ground and flies
>> Und fliegt
And flies
>> Steige Ikarus! Fliege uns voraus!
Strive Ikarus! Fly ahead!
>> Steige Ikarus! Zeige uns den Weg!
Strive Ikarus! Show us the way!
>> Steige Ikarus! Fliege uns voraus!
Strive Ikarus! Fly ahead!
>> Steige Ikarus! Zeige uns den Weg!
Strive Ikarus! Show us the way!
>> Steige Ikarus! Fliege uns voraus!
Strive Ikarus! Fly ahead!
>> Steige Ikarus! Zeige uns den Weg!
Strive Ikarus! Show us the way!
Publishing in The Gopher Times you
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Want your article published? Want to announce
something to the Gopher world? Directly related to
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format, we will handle the rest.
ircs://irc.bitreich.org/#bitreich-en
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