2023-08-05, post № 276
software-design, #text-editor, #e-mail, #chain-of-trust, #web, #digital-politics
One of the saddest realisations I have come across while exploring the web on its protocol level over the past few years is how the majority of mineable data only crosses the wire due to compliance on the victim’s end: there is no ‘singular stateful backend’ that tracks; it is an oligarchic network of machines constantly fed back this state. Referer:, Cookie:, User-Agent:, client hints and from unfuzzed headers extractables as well as foreign-controlled scripts with a plethora of probes are all solely client-powered.
Techniques employing stochastics powered by the bits of leftover bits such as not explicitly client-informative headers, traffic correlation and profiling based on underlying IP properties is most likely still powerful enough to warrant hardening, yet undoubtedly the bulk is provided by clients.
This begs the question why so many clients are not subordinate to their users but a trojan window into a foreign-controlled service.
Yet this fight I leave to more politically-inclined folks such as the IETF, the Tor Project, Brave Software, the FreeBSD Foundation and what is left of the FSF, GNU and Mozilla to name a few. I wish them the very best but do not expect to be alive to witness their certain (!) victory.
Leaving aside the morally still inexplicit principals of data collection, what troubles me is another kind of clients’ breach of trust: forwarding unsanitised content heedlessly imbued by the client with the trust its user allotted it.
2023-07-08, post № 275
poetry, #elektronenhirnkritik
I doubt efficiency is understood:
I doubt it not to be a mere façade,
a ploy advancing niche technologies’ proliferation
in a habitus ill-suited.
They say, escape from bits is futile
⸺at least that’s what I’ve heard.
I doubt they ever truly tried
and doubt they stand above the ploy.
A ‘fight’, some call it, with vague ideals.
I doubt they’ll ever be understood.
To force grass roots into this wasteland
I doubt to be an endeavour proper.
So the right and only goal is invardly rejection,
the obstacle oneself precisely.
2023-06-10, post № 274
prose, #terse-story, #elektronenhirnkritik
“Come, put ingenuity into this box.” He gasped for he was doubtful. “Doubt not⸺for what doubts you must have of thy own feeblish nature.” She seemed to have struck a nerve. Initially wary of the obtuse object she had brought in to the extent of shying away from its sight, confronted with truths about himself he had forgotten how to accept, he seemed to ponder. “Ponder thy life to its bound but you cannot pretend not to feel the might which lurks herein.” Indeed, he had felt something. And she was right in that he had not felt frailty confined. He waged a peep.
She lifted the box slightly, leaving one edge resting on the ground. What once were sporadic glimmers he could barely make out became a beacon of white he stared down. Bedazzled by a future he told himself to see, his mind numbed. “Let loose,” she calmly whispered. Enamoured, he complied and fused in thought with what she brought.
2023-05-13, post № 273
prose, #terse-story
“Surely you jest,” the barman shouted as a shoddily clad older figure lept of his stool, heading for fresh air. In the melancholic tranquility of this Tuesday’s late evening, an every step on the worm-torn floorboards was a distinct event. It took him a while until reaching the door, situated in a dimly lit corner of Tom’s.
I took another sip of my broccoli-flavoured milk. The mild gust of air from when he had finally managed to push open the heavy ’20s era single-winged door reminded me of Dorothea. “Dorothea and her summits …,” I mumbled in overcome despair. The barman sighed in sympathy. Having polished the last of the recent batch of mugs, he came over to ask if I wanted a refill. I declined and began to leave myself when the ceiling light gave out with a bang.
One blinding flash followed by sense-numbing darkness.
“Glad to be on my way out,” I noted with a chuckle, but got no response. I knew this place too well not to be able not to get trapped in it. Curiously, even the street lights suffered an outage, rendering the sixth in utter darkness also.
With the dim shine of the night sky, I walked off into the night.
2023-04-15, post № 272
book-review, software, #ed
Depicted on the around eighty pages strong paperback ed Mastery [L18] is a grey-bearded Beastie in a study illuminated in a soft red. Sitting on a throne, eyes layed upon a lectern’s open book, Beastie smiles. When opened, one is greeted with three pages of justification for covering ed in this “bleak age” [L18, p. 3] we call ours. Though cheekily elitist in tone, it spells out this book’s intent to educate on one of the classics that make up a UNIX system.
In the next thirty pages, ed is seen in action. From core concepts of modes and addresses to commands and shell interaction, one is guided not just through what this editor can do but most importantly how it expects one to work with it. Being concise but not cryptic, it is at times as if one read the man page with someone by one’s side giving enough context to truly grok ed. As a basis for demonstrating editing functionality serves a poem in traditional UNIX-style text representation, the loose file format ed was designed to effectively manipulate, and later a ficticious, though humerous, list of chores and dreams.
Chapters five and six are dedicated to ed’s regular expression engine. Being a line-based editor, working with heterogenous or overly long lines is not a task ed excels at. Lamentably, Lucas does not address this weakness and gets carried away with an imprecise introduction of ed’s regular expressions exemplified by contrived examples followed by scatterbrained artificial workflows such as ASCII-underlining minutely and laboriously specified lines of text.
This low is only in parts resolved by the final six pages showing off ed’s power as a UNIX-universal scripting asset.
Unfortunately, ed Mastery was envisioned as an April Fools’ joke and appears not to be able to shed its provenance. Whilst ed’s historical significance and conceptual strengths in a world where metaphor sheer [S99] is an occurring phenomenon shimmer through at times, the work gets undermined by both said inception as buffoonery and its author’s play [L18b] into LoPresti’s interpretation of a comedic take on computing [L91] as well as the drudgingly kept-alive so-called editor wars.
Nevertheless, ed Mastery is a joyous read. If one does not let typesetting inattentiveness dampen the mood and focuses oneself on the book’s title, one is left with a sincere and informative guide through ed’s facilities. Furthermore, as I understand it, Lucas in his works tries to represent a non-tribal, pragmatic approach to computing; with this in mind and thus avoiding identity-entanglement, room is left for a skin thick enough to cope with the mockery.
2023-03-18, post № 271
software, opinion, #software-blacklist, #kde, #konsole
Is it of note which bits are present, orchestrate this hunk of plastics? For on its own a paper weight of lighter statute, these are the breathed-in life it needs to tick. Thenceforth its way, its prowess, morals set in stone: their origins all along still people. People whose ideologies can clash.
Not two months ago, a coy note with regards to project hate has been published, yet some betrayal oh so deep truly does uncork my inner hatr:
A garden gnome ne’er, for years I did entrust Konsole to relay my actions in the digital realm. Dazed by glamour emanated through a single letter K, artlessly I never questioned if I indeed did not look at a smoke screen conceiling beliefs awry and craftsmanship missing.
It all innocently started when on my journeys as un internaute, I crossed paths with a KDE developer and their plans to bloat Konsole out of proportion:
While the fanatic focus on the usager incompétent (cf. 265) itself did not phase me⸺as such is the sorry state of modern times’ reading of computing⸺the nigh conniving practice of not educating one’s pupils, not relieving them of their ignorance and thus crafting a test group exhibiting behaviour which underlines one’s argument, had me shook a little; for watching this explanation why Konsole eases use itself already empoweres enough not to be reliant on it.
Anyways⸺enough about the empty set⸺, what irked me truly were the speaker’s plans to stuff Konsole full of features, without a care in the world for project scope, implementability or security implications: an on-hover image preview for ls’ (however flavoured) output is neither what a fake glass teletype should be concerned with, nor is it⸺as they themself remark⸺possible to implement semantically correctly. Not every filesystem supports imperceptible stat(2) calls. More frighteningly still, it removes the only cautious way of viewing files in quarantine: when hd q.jpg one cannot dare for a mouse slip may incur an interpreted open, how is one to ever power on one’s own machine again?
But, alas, in e-mail correspondance no interest was echoed, only resting on laurels, repeating how Konsole was the best there is.
Annoyed, I dug a wee bit deeper to find how far this madness had been allowed to spread to find in src/Screen.cpp a genuinely horrifying sight: “// This should never happen [...] Do not let this code go to a release.” was botched in September of last year; and stayed there until now.
I had enough. My heart broken, I fled.
A few days later, with a working patchset under my belt, I expunged all K from my digital life and began using st. I have not looked back.
2023-02-18, post № 270
software, freedom, #email
Joyous as my rose-minded, bit-loving self of a few years past might have dreamt up the present decade, I achingly am in the process of alienating myself evermore from common-place software solutions: my ethically- and aesthetically-founded longing for freedom in thought and harbour in minimalism is recognised by few and respected by fewer.
More jarringly still, in ever-growing tergiversation I find some bits most dear to me in peril: exfiltrating works from walled-off, proprietary, sometimes cloud-only ecosystems is a labour-intensive undertaking as is prying in carelessness foreign-hosted repositories out of the hands of giants (cf. 261) no easy feat.
Though most resilient it turned out is a monopoly on my electronic correspondence which by and large is powered by e-mail.
Irk is felt at whim, a plan hatched with more thought. It is thus no wonder I brooded quite some time. And as the moon imperturbably completed its rounds, a desparate but not blatantly doomed scheme solidified: freezing IMAP data as tangible filesystem nodes followed by embracing POP3 with a home-brewed, tailor-made e-mail client.
Auspiciously my toils were not engulfed by scheming alone as imaptar is feature-complete, proved already useful as well as development on brief is currently in full swing.
May the day soon come when I can rest.
2023-01-21, post № 269
poetry, #poem, #winter
As specks of white from up above
diminish in their quantity,
too feeble now, soon overpowered;
disrobed the streets lay bare.
Their prior cloak
a veil of white,
their rugged faces
now too apparent:
In a bid to⸺yes⸺retreat,
the forest looms a sanctuary;
alas it’s known too distant.
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