I’m disappointed that a competitor doesn’t exist that uses longevity of IP routing as a reputation validator. I would think maintaining routing of DNS to a static IP is a better metric for reputation. Having unstable infrastructure to me is a flag for fly by night operations.
The German NSA intercepted the jabber.im server with a physical interposer device, issued themselves an LE certificate and MITMed this service for months
I wonder if this is a potential "off switch" for the internet. Just hit the root ca so they can't hand out the renewed certificates, you only have to push them over for a week or so.
People will learn to press all the buttons with scarry messages to ignore the wrong certificates. It may be a problem for credit cards and online shopping.
HSTS was specifically designed to block you from having any ignore buttons. (And Firefox refuses to implement a way to bypass it.)
But this is also why the current PKI mindset is insane. The warnings are never truly about a security problem, and users have correctly learned the warnings are useless. The CA/B is accomplishing absolutely nothing for security and absolutely everything for centralized control and platform instability.
The CA/B is basically some Apple and Google people plus a bunch of people who rubber stamp the Apple and Google positions. Everyone is culpable and it creates a self-fulfilling process. Everyone is the expert for their company's certificate policy so nobody can tell them it's dumb and everyone else can say they have no choice because the CA/B decided it.
Even Google and Apple from a corporate level likely have no idea what their CA/B reps are doing and would trust their expertise if asked, regardless of how many billions of dollars it is burning.
The CA/B has basically made itself accountable to nobody including itself, it has no incentives to balance practicality or measure effectiveness. It's basically a runaway train of ineffective policy and procedure.
British sports cars in the sixties for safety reasons had to remove toggle switches. The problem was that during crashes people were losing eyes or suffering puncture wounds. This was the story handed down to me by my uncle.
This is second hand account but here are my uncle's credentials...
I think the toggle switch ban can be lumped in with the bumper requirement on imports. Maybe with the rubber bumpers on MG’s. I think these imports requirements started in the 70’s.
I enjoy these types of documents that layout the issue. I was surprised by the description of the shortcomings of composites. I understand carbon fiber may be prone to the dielectric corrosion but the other fabrics he mentioned should be immune. The repairability should be straight forward and joining metals is pretty common. Fabrics in composites use different weaves and are laid up with different orientations depending on anticipated stressing. My experience with composites is in boat building and it’s limited but growing. I’m currently a novice but plan on pushing composite construction as far as I can. I’m not saying he is wrong but I’m surprised at the criticism of composites.
The CIA World Factbook was one of the major sites to access for information using Gopher. I discovered it using Gopher and it was proof to me of the usefulness of Internet. I would cite it as a reason that someone might want to access the internet.
Can you add context on what Gopher is for the unknowning? I searched for it but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_(protocol) is the only seemingly relavent thing I found not sure if thats exactly what your refering too?
This video [0] shows someone using Gopher (and other common pre-web Internet tools) in the early 90s.
I used Gopher when I did a high school summer science camp at Indiana University in 1994. It was a really interesting time of transition when the graphical Web was just coming on-line with Mosaic, but most tools were still textual/command line (FTP, pine/elm email/Usenet clients, MUDs, etc.)
It predated the World Wide Web as a client for browsing. It was developed at the University of Minnesota and named for the School's mascot.
The client was not graphical. I felt like it was like swinging from vine to vine with each vine being a gopher site. Once one was on a site one could drill down a directory structure of published data. One would access an initial site by typing in it's IP address or domain name. One could then follow the gopher links until exhaustion or all the links on that site were visited.
There was a period of time before the WWW was graphical and I found gopher far superior for browsing. One had to download files and then view them locally using local tools.
One could even follow a gopher link to the WWW. The splash page had the slogan "Welcome to the World Wide Web there is no top or bottom". This could not be said of Gopher sites where each site had to be connected to directly and all the links on the site could be visited.
Once IP addressees became available to the public WWW browser became graphical. This made the Gopher less useful since it was stuck as terminal browser. The IP address made the machine one was browsing from addressable to every host on the internet. This made inline graphics more practical because they could be rendered in line while browsing.
Gosh that actually sounds a amazing I am always annoyed that I have to leave terminal so much to explore I can understand the common person being daunted by that but a terminal accessible browser client sounds lovely for a lot of use cases
It's written in Golang and was last updated in 2022. There's a GIF on the Github page to give a feel of what Phetch & browsing Gopher in the terminal is like. I mostly use the Lagrange GUI client though, which is fantastic.
Gopher still exists. If you're starting out, you can get your own "gopherhole" and Unix shell account at https://sdf.org/ It's a long time since I updated mine, but I'm at gopher://sdf.org:70/1/users/syneryder/
I'm pretty nostalgic for Gopher. If the graphical web hadn't been so mind blowing I would have realized how great it was at the time. Before the web had graphical browser I thought it was pretty useless compared to gopher.
There was a time when only institutions were on the internet. Eventually one could get dial-up connection to a commercial entity. NYC's had an early commercial service provided by PANIX (Public Access Unix) and the San Francisco bay area had the Well.
This was just a terminal connection where one could connect to other hosts on the internet through a dial-up connection. The modem would connect to a computer that had a route to an internet gateway. PANIX provided a Unix user account one could dial into. One didn't need an IP address to get on the internet. The difference was that an internet host couldn't find/connect to the terminal one was browsing on. There was no "addressability". If one downloaded a file from the internet it didn't end up on the machine one was using. The file ended up in a directory on the computer one was dialed into. The second step of retrieving the file involved downloading the file from your home directory on the Unix machine one was dialed into. In my case I think I needed a modem that supported the Zmodem protocol.
Eventual the dial-up providers were able to provide IP addresses using the SLIP (serial link IP). Once one had an IP the machine was on equal footing of all the other internet hosts. The computers could exchange information directly. This provided an easy way for a web browser to directly connect from the machine one was using and the host one was connected to. This is when graphical browser became available to everyone with an IP address. The graphics became inline and could be rendered directly on the client.
I believe there were ways prior to this to inline render graphics I never experienced them. AOL used to be a closed network with graphics and no internet gateway. CompuServe may have been similar. I never used either of those systems.
Outside of my college's library connection I only accessed the internet through PANIX until the internet boom. I learned about PANIX through an ad in the back of Computer Shopper.
Mosaic, the first graphical browser was developed by National Center for Supercomputing Applications. They were of course not bound by dial-up or similar and probably didn't care for commercial offerings of connectivity in their priorities in development.
And before it, slip had been available and standardized for some time.
I would say what drove the adoption of commercial services was the graphical web, not the other way around.
I think the point I would want to make is the commercial availability of IP addresses drove the graphical browser adoption.
I read about graphical browsers in MacWeek in an article about SoundWire. This was a website that was selling music on the web. I believe fulfillment was through snailmail. There headquarters were in a Brooklyn apartment. I somehow contacted the owner (Joe a friend of Dang) and took the subway to his apartment to see a graphical browser in action. I don't know how long it took to actually get my own IP address but I know it took me a few days to get a MacPPP connection to actually work over slip.
That implies that you got on the bandwagon because it was a graphical web? At my department in Sweden it was an overnight adoption when we found Mosaic.
And I can see you struggle to get PPP to work over slip!
Prior to the Mosaic I thought Gopher was superior to a text based WWW. Once ISDN became available I used an Ascend Pipeline 50 and that made IP addresses available across an entire network. The office I was working at also immediately adopted Mosaic/Netscape at that time. Getting PPP to work was definitely heavy lifting for me. Getting an IP address as an individual was difficult in the early days.
Don't; I'm pretty old myself, and I've only a vague idea of what gopher is because it was never used in this part of the world, and internet access also came pretty late. Maybe GP is in a similar position.
The internet has provided tremendous access to news outside of the NYT. I have not seen the NYT editorial board doing anything to improve their status. Didn’t Paul Krugman leave the times for integrity reasons?
> That was more than 20 years ago. It's hardly relevant to the journalism landscape in 2026.
It is actually very relevant. If you read Chomsky & Herman's 'Manufacturing Consent', you'll get examples from the 1970s and 1980s, another 20 years earlier, and you will find that "plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose".
> It is actually very relevant. If you read Chomsky & Herman's 'Manufacturing Consent', you'll get examples from the 1970s and 1980s, another 20 years earlier, and you will find that "plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose".
You're stuck in the past, and letting the (non-existent) perfect be the enemy of the good. However imperfect the newspaper industry may have been, it was a whole hell of a lot better than the mix of social media and outright propaganda that's come to replace it.
Pretty soon you may have no place to find out what's going on in your city, country, or the world; except via the rumor mill and works similar to Melania. But I guess you think that's fine fine, because Chomsky & Herman said the NYT wasn't perfect?
What I mean by "stuck in the past" is you're stuck on old criticisms that seem more and more precious given how bad things are getting.
Sure, dwell on Manufacturing Consent in the 90s when journalism was strong and better resourced. But nowadays it seems quaint, like a picky review of a fancy 5-star restaurant when the restaurant industry is collapsing and people may not be able to afford food.
Journalism is collapsing, to be replaced by something worse, not better.
That is a REALLY wild take considering what the NYT functionally is.
It's also exactly the sort of take you'd see propagated by what the NYT functionally is, so I guess have fun with that? For me, seeing wild talk like that only underscores my complete, utter, earned distrust of the thing. All righty then, the New York Times is the only information, full stop. How nice for it.
Do you believe the NYT is the only source of news? Do you believe everyone should read the NYTs. What is this Soviet Russia? Who said the alternative to reading the NYTs is getting news from social media?
> Do you believe the NYT is the only source of news?
Not yet, but if you've looked at the trends, that's a real possibility. The New York Times doesn't have any problems not shared by other organizations like it, and I think it's important for such journalism organizations to exist.
How so? Growing up most of the time my family didn’t have a television. What are you saying I do read the NYT? I have no idea what point you are trying to make. My comment was in response to the comment about how the NYT had to resort to games for sustainability.
I don't understand the downvotes to your comment (and the few replies are grotesque...), but I definitely support the sentiment. If dropping the NYT over Iraq is not justified, then the concept of red lines loses its meaning.
You didn't lose much by the way, their handling of Gaza was equally despicable.
We live in an age where we can make our own inflation. We can choose between 2 products one with realistic expectations at greater cost and one that just looks like the other product but didn’t go the extra mile to ensure the product will function.
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