The Gopher Times ____________________________________________________________ Opus 2 - Gopher news and more - Nov. 2021 ____________________________________________________________ Amiga-style demos on microcontrollers ltf ____________________________________________________________ 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, computers with even less resources than the early days are still in massive production and used: microcontrollers. Linus Akesson, a demoer known for his "A Mind Is Born" winning entry [1] is pushing the kind of CPU that controls your elevator to its limits to produce waves of colors and rivers of melodies. https://www.linusakesson.net/pages/scene.php ____________________ [1] 1st place on Revision 2017 competition The aNONradio station sdf ____________________________________________________________ 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 ____________________________________________________________ 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 ____________________________________________________________ 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 (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 ____________________________________________________________ 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 ____________________________________________________________ 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 this, 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 ____________________________________________________________ The twtxt format is a plain text microblogging 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 ____________________________________________________________ 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 feet 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 latency 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 customer. Nixers.net Con 2021 nixers ____________________________________________________________ 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 recordings are already available: https://nixers.net/Thread-Nixers-net-Conf-2021 A message to developers nitot ____________________________________________________________ While Mozilla keeps the web browser vendor race going, a former founder moved elsewhere offering to try a different take on technology. Tristan Nitot founded Mozilla Europe, and 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 search 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 showed the numbers and big newspaper headlines: explaining that the poor performance of software has 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 ____________________________________________________________ Is this name familiar to you? Maybe you encountered cirosantilli on a StackOverflow or remember one of the iconic profile pictures he chose? Did you encounter the name on GitHub? If so you may have immediately recall 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 cirosantilli's 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 his website? This activist doubles 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 ____________________________________________________________ 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 ____________________________________________________________ Want your article published? Want to announce something to the Gopher world? Directly related to Gopher or not, reach us on IRC with an article in any format, we will handle the rest. ircs://irc.bitreich.org/#bitreich-en gopher://bitreich.org/1/tgtimes/