Circumlunar updates II

Some quick announcements of vaguely recent goings on in the

circumlunar universe:

Firstly, at long last there is an official circumlunar FAQ[1]. I

started writing this a long time ago, around the time that the

Republic was founded and many other pubnix projects were taking off.

Back then I felt that it would be a good idea to have some kind of

manifesto-esque explanation of how CS is envisaged to work and, just

as importantly, why it works that way. I wrote most of it but got

stuck on something and then, somehow, it sat untouched for half a

year. I've finally finished it off. The overall tone is much more

relaxed and informal than I probably originally imagined, and much

more so than just about everything else I write (I have been rapidly

ingesting old Rivendell Readers[2] lately and I think Grant's writing

style has had some probably non-permanent influence), so hopefully

it's not a chore to read.

Secondly, the Zaibatsu has a new policy in place designed to stop the

limit of 32 users from combining with the inevitable fact that some

users will drift away over time to mean that we eventually end up

with a much smaller number of users. If somebody doesn't update their

gopherhole for more than one calendar year, their account may be

deemed "inactive" and moved off the front page and into a dedicated

menu for inactive accounts[3]. Their gopher content is not deleted,

is not changed, and remains accessible from precisely the same URLs:

it just sort of gets "put in the attic". At the same time, room for

one additional account is considered to be opened up, so fresh blood

can flow in. Maybe, over time, this process will stabilise if we end

up with 32 dedicated and active users in it for the long haul.

Probably not, but maybe. Anyway, so far this has happened exactly

once, but the next slot may open up in about a week (I say "may"

because in the case of people who signed up before this policy was in

place, I will give them advance notice and some people may decide to

start actively maintaining their space again), so if you'd like to

become a Zaibatsu sundog, let me know. First come, first serve. Of

course, there is plenty of room available at the Republic RIGHT NOW.

Finally, in my latest attempt to tilt at windmills, I have written a

"highly opinionated" webserver in Go. It's called shizaru[4], and

it's very selective about what it will serve. If a simple file

extension to MIME type conversion results in a blacklist match, the

file won't be served - with the default configuration, no javascript,

no Flash. Based on the MIME type, file size limits are imposed -

text/plain files can be arbitrarily large, other text/* files can be

1MiB, all other files can be 32KiB. Files with type text/html are

parsed and will not be served if they contain forbidden tags

(, , , and other nasties), if they contain

links to forbidden domains (google.com, facebook.com, twitter.com), or

violate various other reasonable norms of decency. In short, it is a

webserver which attempts to "serve no evil". With the kind

cooperation of visiblink[5], shizaru is now up at running at

www.circumlunar.space, on the same machine which runs our XMPP

service. I have moved my old SDF homepage there[6], and hope to

expand it soon, to experiment with what can be done in this kind of

tightly constrained webspace - webspace which, in some ways, should

feel more like gopherspace, except with encryption and hyperlinks,

neither of which are bad things. Sundogs can contact visiblink for

setting up their own webspace. If the concept takes off and proves

interesting, I may spin up an open-to-the-public webhost powered by

shizaru, distinct from circumlunar space. Maybe. Right now shizaru

serves static files only. I'm contemplating adding CGI support. If I

do, various HTTP headers (including anything to do with cookies,

referer URLs, user agents and IP addresses) will be brutally filtered,

in both requests and responses, so that no user tracking, browser

fingerprinting or similar scourges will be possible. A surgical

extraction of the healthy core of the web.

Starting with the web and hacking away the evil is, of course, a

complimentary approach to starting with gopher and adding

controversial enhancements[7]. I still suspect there is something

glorious in the middle.

[1] gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space:70/0/universe/faq.txt

[2] http://notfine.com/rivreader/

[3] gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space:70/1/inactive/

[4] https://tildegit.org/solderpunk/shizaru/

[5] gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space:70/0/~visiblink/phlog/20190530

[6] https://www.circumlunar.space/~solderpunk/

[7] gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space:70/0/~solderpunk/phlog/pondering-whats-inbetween-gopher-and-the-web.txt