Synchronet BBS as an #onion node makes #telnet over #Tor a secure protocol because your exit node is the #BBS itself...

Brilliant!

- Synchronet over Tor on an rPi - Marvelous!

But what about those #MS_Windows users out there? How about a gzipped tarball, all nicely packaged up so you can distribute around, of a custom built #PuTTY client that will securely connect people to your #Synchronet_BBS over telnet?

Brilliant!

- Create a custom PuTTY package to distribute for your BBS over Tor - Magnificent!

What was that again? Oh yeah, ... Brilliant!

Enjoy!

#tallship #FOSS #Synchronet #rPi h/t to @dheadshot

⛵

.

I'm often inspired to share my thoughts, expound upon something I've read that sparks that inspiration, or pose a bit of socratric reasoning in discourse. Sometimes we actually edjumacate ourselves by asking the tough questions rhetorically. Sometimes it's even more effective if we share those quests with others. It can be a phrase, a paragraph, or a sentence that ignites that quest for understanding within me, and whether I'm simply working it through it myself for my own sake or a genuine desire to share some kind of enlightenment or wisdom with others, I usually feel better doing it in the public eye at the end of the day when all is said and done.

There's a bit of a stir in the Fediverse. Darnell offers us some valuable considerations and specifics in the link to his blog post below.

For me, I think the most interesting part when you read between the lines is, ...

> This latest move could be a way for Meta to use Threads to thwart any potential ActivityPub powered rivals in the Fediverse (like Pixelfed, Friendica & WordPress).

Note that nowhere is masto even listed there - it's insignificant. The #ActivityPub powered rivals in the #Fediverse cited are what have been considered for many years the direct corollaries to #InstaSPAM and #Faceplant, respectively, which of course are the exceedingly capable platforms #Pixelfed and #Friendica.

In all of that, considering that #WordPress is the big game changer here of most recent repute, enjoying a 42% market share of all websites worldwide certainly blows away anything Meta has to offer, but even though it is past the 4th of May, Faceplant and InstaSPAM still do comprise the #phantom_menace flavor of this week.

- Pixelfed has a very nice interface for browsing images. Unlike InstaSPAM however, there isn't this overwhelming nausea attending user accounts with duck-ass selfie-kisses blown into bacteria laden bathroom mirrors, or the overwhelming shitposting of memes scraped from other non-verbal teenage neanderthals. So yes, there's less traffic, typically, but actual photos of things that are actually important and relevant to the people posting them, and more so, liked and boosted by people who appreciate such sentimentalism or professional art. On the downside, is Pixelfed's relatively lackluster editor that fails to provide the poster with paragraph breaks in the WebUI with any reliability, it's mastocrap-like paltry 500 character limit per post, and a complete lack of formatting capabilities (i.e., Markdown or BBCode, Etc.). Having said that, the 500 character limit is easily remedied in a single entry of a config file, which is a blessing to many who have resorted to using the #A11Y alt-text fields to provide the descriptions and narratives for images uploaded, but the other sophomoric qualities of the editor leave massively huge run on paragraphs for the reader to endure - like this one, for example :p

Other awesome projects either spawned directly from, or inspired by the success of Pixelfed are the FediDB research database, which although pretty, leaves much to be desired with respect to completeness; Sup, a client/server federated chat app model; Loops, a closed beta service that aims to position itself as a replacement for, and similar to YouTube shorts; and PubKit, a tool service in closed beta at this time that attempts to service the same or similar tests that the production https://funfedi.dev/ resource does.

- Friendica was once a platform that closely mimicked the look and feel of Faceplant. And then it wasn't, as the Faceplant monoverse continued to evolve in look and feel, and Friendica lagged in what I typically refer to as "Prettiness". Those days are long past, Friendica looks better and better with each and every successive release, and there's an obvious effort on improving the UX for users, making it much more intuitive, and the UI, tending to the "Prettiness" that I do indeed place so much emphasis on.

Once the original darling of the Fediverse, Friendica is once again at the top of the heap with a few others. This does not include the increasingly marginalized masto brand, as more and more adoptees continue to turn their backs to that has-been flagship.

After increasingly pervasive betrayals of both the #FOSS and #DeSoc philosophies and advocates for the past couple of years, eventually revealing it's own EEE aspirations by actively conflating it's masto brand and registered trademarks with that of Fediverse. Even worse, overtly engaging in an onboarding scheme that actively funnels new #Fedizens to one masto machine in particular, in grand, deprecated silo fashion, the masto corporation has populated one of the largest monolithic vertical gardens in the Fediverse itself. The sad part is that, being just another twitter clone, it still has no sense of community and offers nearly a million users a single point of failure. Ouch!

This masto mega-silo problem becomes even less relevant when you visit the Friendica page above, and gloss over the phenomenal feature set and attention given to interoperability with a shopping list of other platforms, protocols, and clients, including:

RSS/Atom, StatusNet, GNU social, Diaspora, SMTP/IMAP, Bluesky, Tumblr, GNU Social, pump.io, Libertree, Blogger, WordPress, Twidere, AndStatus, Bitlbee, Choqok, Frentcl, Gwibber, Hotot, IdentiCurse, Pidgin/Purple, Mustard, Pino, TTYtter.

Now, you might note that Twitter/X has walled off its deprecated monolithic garden, but that doesn't mean that the client and other toolsets that work with those APIs don't still work just fine with Friendica. And we're not even stating the obvious here - ActivityPub clients like Husky, Fedilab, and Sengi work just fine with Friendica, including Friendiqa and Relatica - two fine examples among the numerous choices you have for native Friendica apps for Android and desktop.

For more of an in-depth read on Relatica, here's an article I published a while back

The second most interesting thing that Darnell mentions, I think, has to do with the verbiage in which he characterizes Existing and traditional Fediverse powered platforms. Rivals. He calls them, "...ActivityPub powered rivals". Hmmmm....

I do believe that's the first time I've actually heard it put quite like that. But it's true. to be certain, it wasn't, not by a longshot, just a little while ago, but now? Well, it's nothing that we've done here in the Fediverse, except for continue to just ignore what's going on with the #subjugated_chattel that have all but succumbed to the #Sunnyvale_Syndrome, and get on with the good work of building and #dogfooding FOSS. But, ...

It's got a lot to do with what you might call interlopers, carpetbaggers, snakeoil salesmen, infestation, or maybe just plain old encroachment of aged and abusive #dreadnoughts into the Fediverse that stubbornly adhere to their deprecated, monolithic silo model of privacy farming technologies.

Hitherto all of these ActivityPub refits and forays into a Privacy mindful and respecting network of social communications systems, people kept using terms like Alternatives, for ActivityPub powered platforms such as the three main platforms mentioned in Darnell's blog article.

Now, they're being elevated to the rank of Rivals? But we, we, didn't do anything!

Neither did the GPL'd Linux Kernel - it just continued to do what FOSS does. It doesn't care what thinks it may be in competition with, or what considers it a threat, or rival or yes, REPLACEMENT for things like Faceplant and InstaSPAM.

Yes, FOSS just lumbers and chugs right along, relatively oblivious to whatever the proprietary, closed source contemporaries think of it - with respect to Linux, It actually entered the jurisdiction of a market dominated by Microsoft, IBM, and a couple of others, was lampooned and ridiculed, until it was considered a Cancer, by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, but this wasn't Microsoft or others encroaching into a space where only Linux and the BSDs resided...

This time it is different, because it's the other way around, but the end result will be the same. In the meantime, the perceived hostile invader, at the moment, is Zuckerberg's Meta. This isn't an EEE in the works, it's a desperate attempt to reach and hold onto the the coping that lines the deep end of a swimming pool which InstaSPAM and Faceplant must learn to swim in, and yet cannot - in the meantime, until it is able to tread those waters, it is feebly dog-paddling toward the edge where a handhold can be made while it is fitted with water-wings.

Even though both Tom (everyone's friend) and Eugen are happily traveling around the world snapping photographs and flirting with photography as a hobby, #Mark_Zuckerberg really doesn't wanna be #Myspaced.

If you don't move, you atrophy.

But Friendica, WordPress, and Pixelfed? Well, they're just FOSS, and they're just doing what FOSS does - exist, improve, and evolve. independently and irrespective of commercial threats by would be competitors.

Existing Fediverse platforms continue to onboard new Fedizens hourly, that's not slowing down, and it isn't going to either. Some of these n00bs are straddling the fence until they get their sea legs, existing in both worlds, while others are just cutting ties with the deprecated monolithic silos and jumping into the pool head first.

This phenomena of adoption and the logarithmic increase in onboarding and the deployment of new Fediverse instances is only going to pick up pace as the masses of users on platforms like #Threads and #Bluesky continue to become aware of the Fediverse, and the freedoms they can enjoy in social communication through leveraging WordPress, Pixelfed, and Friendica (and it goes without saying, all the rest of the wonderful platforms too).

With a community facade that pretended to hold the reigns of masto having been dropped, leaving a new 501(c)(3) masto corporation in the US steered by the likes of Twitter founders themselves, the steam is running out on that brand, and although Meta, via Threads, is certainly welcome to participate in the #FEP process (they actually are), there's really no foothold with which they can insert a toe and dictate very much at all that the community itself isn't inclined to adopt already, independently and without concern of capture by well funded special interest groups - like the new US masto corp.

But in closing, let's get back to why all of this doesn't even really matter where existing traditional Fediverse platforms are concerned - or the millions of users actively engaged on those thousands of hubs and instances:

Because it's FOSS, it evolves organically, and just doesn't care about that kind of stuff, lolz.

#tallship

⛵

.

RE: https://one.darnell.one/users/darnell/statuses/112405069391666443

@darnell

#e2ee is a goal, not a promise. As far back as I can remember, forums like those supporting #Enigmail and #gpg were staffed with volunteers from the privacy community who repeatedly insisted on answering questions, like, "Is <this> (whatever this might be) totally secure?" with stock questions like, "What is it that you consider 'totally secure?" or answers such as, "Secure is a relative term, nothing is completely secure, how secure do you need your mission's communications to be?"

Phrases such as, reasonably secure should be indicators of how ridiculous it is to assume that any secure platform is EVER completely, and totally secure.

That begs the question, "Exactly how secure do you require your communications to be?" The answer is always, ... relative.

Which means that you should always believe Ellen Ripley when she says, "Be afraid. Be very afraid!"

https://www.city-journal.org/article/signals-katherine-maher-problem

#tallship #encryption #PGP #secure_communication #Privacy #FOSS

⛵

.

Okay it's one of those, "What's peculiar here?" kinda things.

Consider the source itself. And I certainly don't mean code of any sort. 'Why' would 'They' cite Wikipedia, as good a resource as anyone might think it to be?

Why not cite yourself? Instead of citing someone else - who will merely turn right around and cite you as the ultimate source reference?

#FOSS #DOS, get it? I was rather amused. Anyway, Here it is.

#tallship #Microsoft h/t to: @csolisr@azkware.net You can haz #Cheezburgerz! 🍔

⛵

.

This is an example of a marketplace listing in Flohmarkt.

What "I" did here...

- Went to the "All" tab over at Flen's Market - Much like PeerTube, there's a Home, Local, and All tab, the latter of which includes items from other instances that you've manually federated with within the radius you've specified from your location.
- Next, there's a choice to make if you're interested in an item. You can register for a local account (I don't see any reason to do that unless you want to post a listing on that particular server), or you can remotely add yourself (like I did). Since the remote features don't quite seamlessly work with Mitra, I tried this from a masto server - no joy. I tried it from another masto server (a masto fork) - no problem this time, even on an older version of masto. That was humorous to me, as I've a bit of disdain for mastopub servers and found it amusing that even some of the instances running the very latest version of masto won't work, while older one's based on forks do; but I've got a twisted sense of humor.
- So next, you can engage with the seller directly from your local instance on most Fediverse platforms (support is added for various additional Fediverse platforms all the time). In this case, (visible because I chose the "All" tab), the particular item was from yet another #Fohmarkt server elsewhere - this is a very nice feature, like #DeSoc #eBay!!!
- From there, once you boost the item in the listing, others can see it in their streams, boost it further, make arrangements directly with the seller, etc. Kinda Kewl.

This is different from how most other attempts to deliver a marketplace into the #Fediverse. Usually, what I've seen is someone trying to integrate the functionality local to a platform, which networks (via ActivityPub federation) only with other like platforms. That's not a Fediverse solution - that's a platform solution and leaves everyone else on the fediverse not running that particular platform disenfranchised.

For example, using the Epicyon server platform as an example, it is first to be understood that this particular server platform is designed for very small numbers of user accounts per each instance. You also have to manually contact the admin of remote Epicyon servers yourself (or be contacted by them), then mutually agree to federate each other's marketplaces separately and distinct from any wider federation configurations your server has. Considering the inconveniences with locating other Epicyon instances that may or may not have enabled and made use of their marketplaces and establishing a mutual publishing agreement, coupled with the likelihood that each of your instances between 1 and 10 users, posting an item in the marketplace has a pretty high probability of being more effort than its worth - especially since it dosn't federate with any other Fediverse platforms.

Others follow a similar design, but also generally operate like normal #ActivityPub federation using a blacklist method, as well as being able to accommodate potentially hundreds, or even thousands of users per each instance (yeah, I know, semi-monolithic); so even if those marketplaces didn't already automatically federate across the Fediverse with all instances of other like server platforms, it's still a huge improvement over the previously discussed smolweb platform's model.

But they're still not Fediverse wide...

This is where Flohmarkt really starts to shine - it's fully Federating (Still a WIP wrt some platforms - see the wiki for particulars) across the entire #ActivityPub portion of the Fediverse.

You can check for the latest particulars on Flohmarkt's current Federation status if you're interested in your particular Fediverse platform and level of interoperation with Flohmarkt instances.

I do have some criticisms of the particular functionality in federating that the developers have chosen to incorporate, however. Basically, The server admin still needs to manually federate item listings between the local instance and other remote Flohmarkt servers. It doesn't need to be this way however, but one must concede that after going over the documentation and seeing that the concern's of the dev team are over unchecked spam, phishing, poor quality ads, etc., I find it to be a very reasonable concern, although I'm still not comfortable with how the Dev team has hard-coded this conditional into the server's capability, when a slightly different approach might afford self-hosters much greater flexibility and incintive for adoption; namely:

- Make the current model the default
- Enable other configurations for federating between other Flohmarkt servers (and eventually, other platform marketplaces) via either simple configuration files, runtime arguments, or via a GUI in an admin control panel, including that of an uninhibited fully blacklist model of sharing listings between Flohmarkt servers.

I generally tend to think that hard-wired, opinionated configuration choices are a less than ideal (usually bad idea) than acknowledging issues surrounding such decisions and then choosing a default while affording server admins (or users themselves) of being able to manage the options for themselves. This is one of those cases where I feel it could make a huge difference in the viabilty and adoption potential for this, "Strictly Federating Marketplace" Fediverse platform.

The other (very minor) criticism I have for Flohmarkt is the pin & string radius solution as it is currently implemented:

- It's determined by the server admin, instance wide
- It's determined by the server location, or some other arbitrarily decided locale

The radius is a great idea, but I think the following would go a long way towards improving the utility of this feature set:

- The server admin decides whether to enable user-level radius configs or server level, as is the case at this time.
- Local users determine, and have control over whether an established is applied to either their entire user profile's repertoire of items listed, or on a per item basis.
- If he user chooses a per item radius, each listing could have a different radius established.
- The local users have location radius specifications that can be based on different criteria, such as pinning a location on a map of their choice, by country (the free IP2Location databases can accommodate this behavior).
- The user's particular radius settings for each listing must be preserved and observed by all federating remote Flohmarkt server instances (but not by individual remote user shares/boosts, which should remain unrestricted).

This Radius feature is extremely powerful and I think that every effort of the development team to exploit the potential of this feature set should be a major consideration. Eventually, Flohmarkt servers will federate with other server platform types, exchanging listings between say, Flohmarkt servers and Friendica servers, etc.. but the awesome power unleashed through following and boosting capabilities that are already fully available to remote users to share with others holds the potential at this very time to make Flohmarkt item listings ubiquitous across the entire Fediverse, ... And that is really kewl :)

Well, I'd rather tease your interest and see you go checkout more for yourself rather than feed you everything you wanna know about a really kewl #social_commerce communications tool - you really should experience how kewl it is for yourself.

I couldn't locate a #Matrix support room for Flohmarkt like most contemporary software products maintain in the FOSS world, but the more traditional irc chan #flohmarkt at #LiberaChat is readily available, and of course, there's the issue tracker at the Codeberg repo I previously linked to above.

What are your thoughts and impressions on this novel approach to embedding the marketplace commerce structure into potentially everyone's social streams in the form of both a dedicated platform and as passive feeds via the intervention of other #Fedizens who share and boost individual items and listings in Flohmarkt?

I hope that helps! Enjoy!

#tallship #FOSS #Marketplace #eBay #I_can_haz_Cheezburgerz? 🍔
@grindhold @me @flohmarkt_support #flohmarkt_support

⛵

.

RE: https://fedi.markets/users/Yonggan/items/f7f7f8d1-6279-4249-890a-bdd97340d218

@Yonggan

Going back to Konversation for GUI stuffs. DCC file send/receive is kinda important to me. For everything else, including a lot of Matrix usage, WeeChat is still the Kewlist :p

https://bugs.quassel-irc.org/projects/quassel-irc/wiki/Migrating_from_Monolithic_to_Client+Core - just ain't gonna cut it right now.

I still love HexChat.

Honorable mention goes to Halloy, which I think looks really good, supports tiling, and says it supports DCC Send - I don't mind manipulating config files by hand, and I might check it out with a FlatPak, but if I'm sufficiently impressed it looks like I'll have to build the .deb and SlackBuild myself, ... Well? Somebody's got to! Right?

#tallship #FOSS #IRC #DCC #GUI #Quassel #Konversation #Halloy #HexChat #WeeChat

⛵

.

Thanks Evan, there's a bit to digest there, some of which I agree with, and some of which I don't, between what both you and the Other Evan had to offer.

It's good to get this stuff right out in the open, especially as the Fediverse is currently undergoing yet another paradigmatic shifts, perhaps an evolutionary step, but certainly, a complete game changer from much of the perspective offered in the Evan <==> Evan Essays ;)

https://fediversity.site/item/eed57428-ca9c-4ea1-a398-ef2d7319eff7

I hope that helps! Enjoy!

#tallship #FOSS #Fediverse #masto_Tron_is_Gone #ActivityPub #Streams #Identity

RE: https://evanp.me/2024/04/14/responses-to-rabble-on-activitypub/

@evanprodromou

Okay I thought I'd share this recent post here on the #Fediverse. To give it some context, it's an answer to a common question, often a misunderstanding (even by many knowledgeable folks) as to just how we got here.

So first, the question, posed HERE.

And my answer follows below:

There's a lot of apples and oranges here. And everyone had a lot of good points made, but your question is simple, and has a very simple answer. I'll endeavor to address that directly, but do need to tend to some of what has already been said.

## Scroll down to the tl;dr for the succinct answer of your question

Ethernet, ARCNET, Token Ring, Thick net (RG-59), Thin net (RG-58 A/U), and UTP (Cat 3, Cat 5, and Cat 6 unshielded twisted pair, Etc.) really have zero bearing on your question insofar as IP is concerned. All of these specifications relate to the definition of technologies that, although are indeed addressed in the OSI model which is indeed very much in use to this day,but are outside the scope of Internet Protocol. I'll come back to this in a minute.

It's quite common to say TCP/IP, but really, it's just IP. For example, we have TCP ports and we have UDP ports in firewalling. i.e., TCP is Transmission Control Protocol and handles the delivery of data in the form of packets. IP handles the routing itself so those messages can arrive to and from the end points. Uniform Data Protocol is another delivery system that does not guarantee arrival but operates on a best effort basis, while TCP is much chattier as it guarantees delivery and retransmission of missed packets - UDP is pretty efficient but in the case of say, a phone call, a packet here and there won't be missed by the human ear.

That's a very simplistic high level-view that will only stand up to the most basic of scrutiny, but this isn't a class on internetworking ;) If you just want to be able to understand conceptually, my definition will suffice.

Networking (LAN) topologies like Token Ring, ARCNET, and Ethernet aren't anywhere in the IP stack, but figure prominently in the OSI stack. I'm not going to go into the details of how these work, or the physical connection methods used like Vampire Taps, Thin net, or twisted pair with RJ-45 terminators, but their relationship will become obvious in a moment.

The OSI model unfolds like so, remember this little mnemonic to keep it straight so you always know:

> People Don't Need To See Paula Abdul

Okay, touched on already, but not really treated, is the description of that little memory aid.

> Physical, Data Link, Network, Transport, Session, Presentation, and Application layers (From bottom to top).

The physical and Data Link layers cover things like the cabling methods described above,and you're probably familiar with MAC Addresses (medium access control) on NICs (network interface controller). These correlate to the first two layers of the OSI stack, namely, the Physical (obvious - you can touch it), and the Data Link layer - how each host's NIC and switches on each LAN segment talk to each other and decide which packets are designated for whom (People Don't).

In software engineering, we're concerned mostly with the Session, Presentation, and Application layers (See Paula Abdul). Detailed explanation of these top three layers is outside the scope of this discussion.

The Beauty of the OSI model is that each layer on one host (or program) talks to exclusively with the same layer of the program or hardware on the other host it is communicating with - or so it believes it is, because, as should be obvious, is has to pass its information down the stack to the next layer below itself, and then when it arrives at the other host, it passes that information back up the stack until it reaches the very top (Abdul) of the stack - the application.

Not all communication involves all of the stacks. At the LAN (Local Area Network) level, we're mostly concerned with the Physical and Data Link layers - we're just trying to get some packet that we aren't concerned about the contents of from one box to another. But that packet probably includes information that goes all the way up the stack.

For instance, NIC #1 has the MAC: 00:b0:d0:63:c2:26 and NIC #2 has a MAC of 00:00:5e:c0:53:af. There's communication between these two NICs over the Ethernet on this LAN segment. One says I have a packet for 00:00:5e:c0:53:af and then two answers and says, "Hey that's me!" Nobody else has that address on the LAN, so they don't answer and stop listening for the payload.

Now for Internet Protocol (IP) and TCP/UDP (Transmission Control Protocol and User Datagram Protocol):

IP corresponds to Layer 3 (Need) - the Network Layer of the **OSI Model.

TCP and UDP correspond to Layer 4 (To) - the Transport Layer of the OSI model.

That covers the entire OSI model and how TCP/IP correspond to it - almost. You're not getting off that easy today.

There's actually a bit of conflation and overlapping there. Just like in real life, it's never that cut and dried. For that, we have the following excellent explanation and drill down thanks to Julia Evans:

- Layer 2 (Don't) corresponds to Ethernet.
- Layer 3 (Need) corresponds to IP.
- Layer 4 (To) corresponds to TCP or UDP (or ICMP etc)
- Layer 7 (Abdul) corresponds to whatever is inside the TCP or UDP packet (for example a DNS query)

You may wish to give her page a gander for just a bit more of a deeper dive.

Now let's talk about what might be a bit of a misconception on the part of some, or at least, a bit of a foggy conflation between that of the specification of the OSI model and a Company called Bolt Beranek & Newman (BBN) a government contractor tasked with developing the IP stack networking code.

The TCP/IP you know and depend upon today wasn't written by them, and to suggest that it was the OSI model that was scrapped instead of BBN's product is a bit of a misunderstanding. As you can see from above, the OSI model is very much alive and well, and factors into your everyday life, encompasses software development and communications, device manufacturing and engineering, as well as routing and delivery of information.

This next part is rather opinionated, and the way that many of us choose to remember our history of UNIX, the ARPANET, the NSFnet, and the Internet:

The IP stack you know and use everyday was fathered by Bill Joy, who arrived at UC Berkeley in (IIRC) 1974), created vi because ed just wasn't cutting it when he wanted a full screen editor to write Berkeley UNIX (BSD), including TCP/IP, and co-founded Sun Microsystems (SunOS / Solaris):

> Bill Joy just didn’t feel like this (the BBN code) was as efficient as he could do if he did it himself. And so Joy just rewrote it. Here the stuff was delivered to him, he said, “That’s a bunch of junk,” and he redid it. There was no debate at all. He just unilaterally redid it.

Because UNIX was hitherto an AT&T product, and because government contracting has always been rife with interminable vacillating and pontificating, BBN never actually managed to produce code for the the IP stack that could really be relied upon. In short, it kinda sucked. Bad.

I highly recommend that you take a look at this excellent resource explaining the OSI model.

# tl;dr:

So! You've decided to scroll down and skip all of the other stuff to get the straight dope on the answer to your question. Here it is:

> What were the major things that caused TCP/IP to become the internet standard protocol?

The ARPANET (and where I worked, what was to become specifically the MILNET portion of that) had a mandate to replace NCP (Network Control Protocol) with IP (Internet Protocol). We did a dry run and literally over two thirds of the Internet (ARPANET) at that time disappeared, because people are lazy, software has bugs, you name it. There were lots of reasons. But that only lasted the better part of a day for the most part.

At that time the ARPANET really only consisted of Universities, big Defense contractors and U.S. Military facilities. Now, if you'll do a bit of digging around, you'll discover that there was really no such thing as NCP - that is, for the most part, what the film industry refers to as a retcon, meaning that we, as an industry, retroactively went back and came up with a way to explain away replacing a protocol that didn't really exist - a backstory, if you will. Sure, there was NCP, it was mostly a kludge of heterogeneous management and communications programs that varied from system to system, site to site, with several commonalities and inconsistencies that were hobbled together with bailing twine, coat hangers, and duct tape (for lack of a better metaphor).

So we really, really, needed something as uniform and ubiquitous as the promise that Internet Protocol would deliver. Because Bill Joy and others had done so much work at UC Berkeley, we actually had 4.1BSD (4.1a) to work with on our DEC machinery. As a junior member of my division, in both age and experience, I was given the task of, let's say throwing the switch on some of our machines, so to speak, when we cut over from the NCP spaghetti and henceforth embraced TCP/IP no matter what, on Flag Day - 01 January 1983.

So you see,the adoption of Internet Protocol was not a de facto occurrence - it was de jure, a government mandate to occur at a specific time on a specific day.

It literally had nothing to do with popularity or some kind of organic adoption, the erroneously described, so-called demise of the OSI model, or any physical network topology.

### DARPA said 01 January 1983 and that's it, and that was it - Flag Day.

Sure, it took a few days for several facilities to come up (anyone not running IP was summarily and unceremoniously cut off from the ARPANET).

And one also needs to consider that it wasn't every machine - we only had some machines that were Internet hosts. We still had a lot of mainframes and mini computers, etc., that were interconnected within our facilities in a hodgepodge or some other fashion. Nowadays we have a tendency to be somewhat incredulous if every device doesn't directly connect over IP to the Internet in some way. That wasn't the case back then - you passed traffic internally, sometimes by unmounting tapes from one machine and mounting them on another.

There was a lot of hand wringing, stress, boatloads of frustration, and concern by people over keeping their jobs all over the world. But that's why and when it happened. Six months later in the UNIX portions of networks we had much greater stability with the release of 4.2BSD, but it wouldn't really be until a few years later Net2 was released that things settled down with the virtually flawless networking stability that we enjoy today.

Enjoy!

#tallship #DARPA #IP #Internet_Protocol #Computer_History #internetworking #Internet #ARPANET #MILNET #NSFnet #Bill_Joy #BBN #UNIX #BSD

⛵

.

This is really messed up stuffs...

I call it despotic overreach via subjugation through state sponsored industrial surveillance systems.... It has nothing to do with capitalism but rather, that thing that Thomas Jefferson gave us... you know, the thing.

Been to a grocery store lately? You've been complaining for decades now, that they artificially inflate the prices of items so that they can offer you steep discounts on a rotating list of them - If, and only if, you consent to being a "club member". Personally, I've consented many a times; Rite-Aid, Albertson's, Wallgreens, CVS,Von's, and many others, as Brittney Spears, Charles Manson, Joseph Stalin, and even John Rambo, another obvious #nom_de_guerre to combat what would follow as spam but worse, industrial surveillance and privacy mining (of course, you also need to use a fake phone number and a /dev/null email addy).

Have you tried to buy things at Jack in the Box or 7/11 or Mcdonald's lately? ... They have an app for that. Why do you suppose that is? They could just as easily and more efficiently deliver their content via PWS/webapps through your regular browser experience (they don't want to be counter-measured with uBlock Origin or integrated anti-tracking measures on the more sensible web browsers).

They're working really hard to deliver you to evil. I walked into a Smart & Final the other day and saw an unbelievable price for a 30 pack of Natural Light Beer - you had to use a "digital coupon" (just like you do at 7/11 to pay the regular, competitive price for an item). I asked the cashier where in their weekly rag the "digital coupon" was located, and she informed me that one needs to install an app to be eligible for the discount. Fuck that noise. Homey don't play dat.

China has WeChat ... Resistance is Futile.

When you install an app, it's a whole different ballpark of invasiveness, intrusions, data farming, and privacy mining, it's like it's your first day in #Pelican_Bay and you announce that you're going to drop the soap as you shower.

So the next time someone says, "Thank you for shopping at Walmart!", or synonymously, "Go Fuck Yourself", just smile, and offer, "Yes, there's an app for that".

What follows below in the #boost I've shared, that so inspired me to address this issue, is not a simple inconvenience - it's a new beginning :p In #Communist_Red_China, you do everything on your #WeChat app - you submit your elementary school homework, you buy stuffs at the local market, you inform on yourself and your friends to their state equivalent of the #Stazi, and you tell them exactly where to come and arrest, perhaps even disappear you. #Falun_Gong? Healthy? awesome! Now your a live organ donor too - you can thank #Meg_Whitman for that one.

You have been assimilated 🖖

All Your Base Are Belong To Us

#tallship #Sunnyvale_Syndrome #Industrial_Surveillance #Privacy_Mining #Data_Farming #Tracking #Despotism #AYBABTU h/t to @gabriel for bringing this to us via his #LibreSolutions_Network

⛵

.

RE: https://mk.gabe.rocks/notes/9qreb3vsod

@lsn

Ever seen one of these?

I had a classmate that used to bring his to class every night. Just slung his satchel w/the keyboard over his shoulder and carried this in his arms up the elevator and down the hall to class.

It's a Pronto Series 16, running at a blazing fast 8Mhz, and that's a 5.6 MByte removable hard disk there too. Pronto Computers was located in Torrance (my hometown) just down the street from Epson and Ashton Tate (dBase II, III)

Heck I can't even remember the guy's name, but he worked in some local aerospace company and fancied himself an ubergeek; if this box is any indication he sure was, lolz.

So what's so special about this machine? Well, if you ask any 50 people about an IBM compatible computer that ran on an intel 80186 CPU they'll prolly all tell you there was never any such beast - but there was, and this was it (I recall it was fast as fuck, so they prolly pioneered manufacturing production machines that were ahead of their time, while IBM and the clone manufacturers decided to skip a generation and take their time working on a platform that leveraged the 80286.).

The hard disk was light years ahead of its time too - portable Zip Drives (100MBytes) didn't appear on the scene for another ten years, but this was an actual miniature hot swappable Syquest HDD spinning at I believe, the standard of 3600 RPMs.... I can't be sure though, but it was nice listening to that quiet buzz saw sound just singing along.

We were in a Pascal class together, so he would show up, insert a disk, boot to UCSD P-System and off he would go. The rest of us would too, but we had those noisy 5&1/4" floppy disks that made all those cute noises in our IBM 5150 PCs (4.77MHz 8080 CPUs), lolz.... Well, we did have a few XT's w/HDDs, some VT-52 like terminals for the PDP-11, and some 3270 terminals too connected to a mainframe at the main campus in Sandy Eggo.

His #Pronto was a screamer for sure, and I'd only ever seen an amberchrome monitor for mini computers at work, which were much larger. The graphics (Yah, we actually called them graphics at the time) were superior to what we could do w/o an expensive #Princeton_Graphics #CGA card and matching .51mm dot pitch color monitor too.

I had lots of minis, super-minis, and a few mainframes at work, but in the personal computer world there was literally nothing that could perform like this 8MHz 186... nothing. It was a screamer!

But alas, after him spending close to five grand, the IBM 3270 PC/AT was soon to be released, relegating that guys 186 hot rod to the annals of forgotten songs and unsung heroes. The new #AT_Class machines kinda trickled in though, so if you wanted one of those you got to the computer lab early. They also supported HD Floppies w/1.2MB storage - a vast improvement over that of the earlier, so-called Double Density 360KB floppies, although there were some issues moving data between those two formats that required a few tricks - like loading an earlier command.com (kinda like sourcing another shell once you ssh into a box)... Okay I'm rambling.

I kinda liked that guy, and kinda didn't. Most of the other students didn't care for him too much. He was arrogant and one of those, "Mine's better than yours" sort of person, but he was competent, friendly with me, generally speaking, for a guy who was wound real tight, and I could tell he didn't get any pussy, so I kinda felt sorry for him too.

I should mention that there technically were a couple of other manufacturers out there during that era shipping 80186 computers, but I've never seen any of them and don't know anything about them.

Well, that's about it for that era, I just thought that I'd share that little bit of computer history with everyone. I hope you enjoyed reading about this truly innovative machine and it's brief time on the market.

#tallship #IBM #Pronto_Computer #retrocomputing @SDF :)

⛵

.

And now for something completely different.

> "I don’t post directly because I am in prison for killing my wife Nina in 2006."

https://ftp.mfek.org/Reiser/Letters/%E2%84%962%20Hans%E2%86%92Fred/reiser_response.html

> "It has been an honor to be of even passing value to the users of Linux. I wish all of you well."

What was hitherto, your awareness, or understanding of these events? I'd love to here any comments on the matter and boosts are most welcome to widen the pool of available input. There's an awful lot that can be said on many facets of this.

NOTE: Mikhail Gilula is now the owner of https://keyark.com/ (KeySQL).

#tallship #Linux_history

⛵

.

I'm going to offer an honorable mention here, but the fact that anyone can get a free NextCloud account with the same document feature sets and sharing capabilities as Google demands that I consider this a missed opportunity, if not a misguided community gesture by not taking the opportunity to dogfood on our own FOSS instead of a privacy disrespecting, deprecated, monolithic industrial mining silo.

I think leveraging Google Docs to gather input on how to:

> ...make open source open protocol social media easier.

and...

> We're trying to make it better.

are statements belied by the fact that we're not dogfooding by actually using #FOSS like we should be to make the point that we want to make #FOSS better, by showing just how easy it is to obviate large swaths of ABC/Google properties by simply not using them:

https://nextcloud.com/sign-up/

In this day and age, I find it somewhat antithetical and at cross purposes to our overlying mission along with the whole set of philosophies behind building and advocating for adoption of the Fediverse in the first place, if we're going to ask people to go back to the #dark_side and visit Google docs

#FOSS #Fediverse #Dogfooding #Walk_the_Walk - not just talk the talk.

⛵

.

RE: https://mastodon.social/users/rabble/statuses/112006149076679316

@rabble

First discovered in 2002, paleontologist draw comparisons of #Dinocephalosaurus_orientalis with other aquatic species having no modern day analogs - why did the entire family of #Tanystropheidae or the genera exhibiting these morphological functionalities not continue?

Perhaps just as interesting is the convergent evolution (especially with respect to their necks) between that of Dinocephalosaurus and members of the Tanystropheus genus. A close resemblance on the surface, yet Dinocephalosaurus orientalis was strictly an aquatic species.

I've included an artists reconstructive rendition of Tanystropheus longobardicus for comparison between the two, but note that Dinocephalosaurus had four flipper-like feet of the same size, and unable to exist, or at least thrive in a terrestrial environment, where Tanystropheus exhibited larger feet in the rear - not unlike your hands being smaller than your feet.

And yes, as Yuki (@youronlyone) offers up as a contemplative inference, the whole "Dragon" and "Loch Ness Monster" corollaries are uncanny, raising questions as to why would pre-industrial societies actually have such fables, or in the case of the latter, claims of sightings, if not rooted in some previous observation by humans?

https://edition.cnn.com/2024/02/23/world/dragon-fossil-240-million-years-old-intl-scli-scn/index.html

Dinocephalosaurus was extant from the late #Paleozoic (late Permian period) through the early #Mesozoic (early Triassic period) eras.

#tallship #Dinocephalosaurus #Triassic #Tanystropheus #Tanystropheus_longobardicus h/t to @youronlyone for bringing the latest news on this matter to me - I'm always fascinated with things related to #marine_biology - especially #Opisthobranchia

⛵️

.

RE: https://c.im/users/youronlyone/statuses/111985758251416307

@youronlyone