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- <header>
- <h1>The Unknown Man surfaces, then disappears again</h1>
- <p>Day 00357: Saturday, 2016 February 27</p>
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- <p>
- We spent the beginning of the day finishing up our cleaning of the house so that my mother's friend could come over.
- She came and stayed the night, the event that she came to participate in will be tomorrow.
- </p>
- <p>
- <a href="https://ronsor.net/">Ronsor</a> added a feedback form on his website, asking for users to rate the site.
- Strangely enough, any input added to the form will then be sent to your mail client upon submission, then you send the email for it to reach Ronsor.
- I've never heard of a setup like that.
- He asked <a href="https://opalrwf4mzmlfmag.onion/">wowaname</a> and I to try it out, so I disabled JavaScript in <a href="apt:iceweasel">Iceweasel</a> to try out the site, as I thought that the site made heavy use of JaveScript for some reason and wanted to be sure to test for accesibility.
- If I was going to give a rating, I was going to actually put in the effort to provide feedback that would actually lead to fixes.
- However, the site seemd to work pervectly.
- I didn't test out the chat page, and that probably does require avaScript, but the main pages of the site should and did function.
- Next, worrying about the heavy use of frames, I tried the website in the <a href="apt:links">Links</a> text-based Web browser.
- Surprisingly, I found that Links actually handles frames in a reasonable way! I suspect that frames still don't work in some other text-based browsers, but if Links can handle it, maybe that's something that other text-based Web browsers need to fix.
- With my two major accessibility concerns alleviated, I commented about the fact that the page doesn't pass <abbr title="World Wide Web Consortium">W3C</abbr> validation and that <abbr title="Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure">HTTPS</abbr> support would be much appreciated, even if using only a self-signed certificate.
- I never did go back and check to see if the page validates, as I only care on my own pages when not actively submitting reviews, but Ronsor did set up <abbr title="Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure">HTTPS</abbr> access to his website!
- </p>
- <p>
- Ronsor did mention that <abbr title="Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure">HTTPS</abbr> support was only set up on his main site though, not the mirrors.
- The mention of mirrors intrigued me, so I asked about them.
- For them to be relevant, they needed to be at the same domain as the main site, using some sort of round robin system or the like.
- If that was the case, I couldn't link to the <abbr title="Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure">HTTPS</abbr> site, as it wouldn't always work depending on which server was queried, but I wouldn't call having several servers on using the same <abbr title="Domain Name System">DNS</abbr> address "mirrors".
- The alternative would be that there actually were mirrors, but in that case, why even mention them? He obviously cannot control whether mirrors use <abbr title="Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure">HTTPS</abbr> or not, plus there is not mention of mirror addresses on his site.
- As it turns out, he did indeed actually mean mirrors, and has asked people to mirror his website.
- He says he'll add instructions for mirroring to the site, so I'll check back later and maybe set up a mirror here in onion space.
- </p>
- <p>
- On <a href="ircs://kitsune6uv4dtdve.onion:6697/%23Volatile">#Volatile</a>, The_Black_V1PER was trying to figure out how to retrieve weather forecasts from <a href="https://wttr.in/">wttr.in</a>, which seems to be a pretty cool weather service.
- In-browser, it sends text colored via <code><span/></code> tags, but when used via the command line (for example, using Wget), it colors text using terminal-compatible color byte sequences.
- I'm not sure exactly how it tells the difference between clients.
- I suspect that it uses the User-Agent string sent by the client, but if that's the case, it defaults to the <abbr title="Hypertext Markup Language">HTML</abbr> version; it sends the <abbr title="Hypertext Markup Language">HTML</abbr> version to my Web browser, but my Web browser is set not to send that header.
- <a href="https://github.com/chubin/wttr.in">Source code</a> is available for anyone that wants to run their own instance of the service or study how it works.
- </p>
- <p>
- I managed to get in touch with <a href="http://zdasgqu3geo7i7yj.onion/">The Unknown Man</a> today.
- With my <abbr title="Internet Relay Chat">IRC</abbr> server up and operational, he decided not to invest in an <abbr title="Internal Revenue Service">IRS</abbr> server hosting service, which I think is for the best.
- We don't have enough users to require multiple servers yet, so it would be wasted money.
- Hopefully by the time we need more servers, some users will want to add their own machines to the network instead of renting hardware.
- He also gave me a new email address to reach him at, but <a href="apt:evolution">my email client</a> is being a pain.
- It doesn't have an option to manually choose which key to use for encryption and his <abbr title="Pretty Good Privacy">PGP</abbr> key specifies his old email address.
- The email address attached to the key is of course no longer valid too.
- I need to figure out what to do about this once I have caught up on everything again.
- </p>
- <p>
- My check from the <abbr title="Internal Revenue Service">IRS</abbr> came today, but I got distracted and didn't get a chance to open the envelope.
- More importantly, my insurance card came.
- Oddly enough, twelve insurgence cards came, but two were blank and nine were voided out.
- It seems like a waste of paper, but whatever.
- I still find it idiotic that health insurance has become mandatory, but at least i have that out of the way for this year.
- </p>
- <p>
- I added client certificate recognition to NickServ.
- It only involved uncommenting a single line.
- I'm not sure why this is disabled by default, to be honest.
- In any case, if you configure your NickServ account with your client certificate fingerprint, you will now be identified by NickServ automatically.
- </p>
- <p>
- I was discussing <abbr title="Secure Digital">SD</abbr> cards with someone on Tox today, and came across some interesting information.
- I had thought it stupid that mobile devices can only handle <abbr title="Secure Digital">SD</abbr> cards up to a certain size.
- After all, an <abbr title="Secure Digital">SD</abbr> card is an <abbr title="Secure Digital">SD</abbr> card, right? However, I didn't really question it.
- However, if the person I was speaking to is correct, the information about maximum <abbr title="Secure Digital">SD</abbr> card size is actually a lie.
- A regular <abbr title="Secure Digital">SD</abbr> card can only be built to carry so much, but a different standard, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_Digital#SDXC"><abbr title="Secure Digital Extended Capacity">SDXC</abbr></a>, can be used to create cards that hold even more.
- He said that a device that can handle one size of <abbr title="Secure Digital Extended Capacity">SDXC</abbr> card can handle an <abbr title="Secure Digital Extended Capacity">SDXC</abbr> card of any size.
- The <abbr title="Secure Digital Extended Capacity">SDXC</abbr> standard covers <abbr title="Secure Digital">SD</abbr> cards with sizes ranging from 64 gigabytes to 2 terabytes, so because my device can supposedly handle cards up to 64 gigabytes in size, it should also be able to handle larger cards up to 2 terabytes in size.
- This is awesome! I don't need a card quite that big yet, but when I get there, I won't need to trim my music collection, I'll just need to get a bigger card.
- By that time, <abbr title="Secure Digital">SD</abbr> card prices will probably have fallen even lower too.
- </p>
- <p>
- I read an interesting article on <a href="http://www.hxa.name/articles/content/The-Illusion-Of-Decentralisation_HXA7241_2015.html">the illusion of decentralization</a>.
- Basically, the point the article makes is that you cannot decentralize everything; it simple isn't possible without making communication impossible.
- When communication is centralized, these central authorities are able to create whatever "standard" that is used for their platforms.
- You end up with many different services, each with their own protocol.
- The development of such communication protocols is decentralized.
- However, in order to create a platform in which communication is decentralized, all participants must agree on a standard.
- There could be thousands of servers deployed by varying individuals and companies, but development of the protocols must be centralized.
- Without centrally-developed protocols, the many nodes are not speaking the same language and are unable to properly interact.
- The article argued that this later strategy, what we normally think of as "decentralized", is actually even more centralized than "centralized" services.
- What these "decentralized" services actually offer isn't decentralization, but a consistent and stable set of rules.
- We need to stop focusing on "decentralization", and instead ask ourselves and each other what set of rules actually work best for us as users.
- Personally, being able to keep our own data in our own hands seems to be a pretty good reason for sticking with standardized protocols, but we need to make sure that these protocols are well-designed enough to actually provide us with what we need.
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