#tallship — Public Fediverse posts

Interesting new protocol usage?

I actually don't have enough time to play with THIS but maybe some of you do?

Lemme know what you're impressions are!

Apache and MIT licenses...

#tallship #FOSS #music

Here's a quick look at Captain Drew's World, newly compiled and edited by W. H. Bunting, my favorite living maritime historian:

https://ericbender.co/history-of-the-harbor/

If you're interested in maritime and/or late 19th-century history, find a copy!

#history #Boston #maritime #sailing #tallship #biography

@b0rk @quixoticgeek

The ssh-copy-id command is very handy, and suffered a shortcoming until a few years back where it didn't easily accommodate servers listening on non-standard ports (port numbers other than 22). It's especially handy if you're working with more than a single key, and As far as I'm concerned, editing /etc/ssh/sshd_config so that your SSH server is listening on a non-standard port is actually standard operating procedure.

Today let's say your server is listening on port 51555. to add a (default) key you would invoke it like so:

~$ ssh-copy-id -p 51555 [email protected] - copies your default pubkey over.

It will initially ask you for your (b0rk's) password. If you don't supply the username it will use the logged in user. Following successful login, the magic happens, permissions are set and the public key is copied in to ~/.ssh/authorized_keys. The permissions that should be set are equivalent to:
~/.ssh (700)
~/.ssh/authorized_keys (600)

As soon as your public key is copied over, you're logged out and you are instructed to log in again. If you're using your SSH agent then you just see your shell prompt on the remote box after providing the passphrase for the key.

Since you probably had an id_rsa.pub or an id_ed25519.pub and you wanted to use your id_ecdsa.pub on the remote machine instead, then you probably want to alter your copy command to:

~$ ssh-copy-id -p 51555 -i ~/.ssh/id_ecdsa.pub [email protected]

The correct syntax in this instance is to have a space between `-p' and the actual port number, but in practice, whenever you login in the future you'll just enter:

b0rk@local_box:~$ ssh jvns.ca -p51555 (no space before the port number)

Taking this one step further, I recommend having an active trigger of some sort listening on port 22 that simply "null routes" hosts trying to knock on that door. I like null routes because it drops everything before the firewall, but at least use ipsets so you don't use up memory on maintaining huge lists of those who have scanned your machine for an open SSH port. People will recommend things like fail2ban or SSHGuard, but out of the box those are temporary bans and honestly, I'm just not that charitable with second chances towards people who scan for open ssh ports on my boxes.

I actually like to ban entire countries right off the bat, so you too may enjoy incorporating something like this.

#tallship #ipset #null_route #SSH

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The GIMP Is No Slouch

The GNU Image Manipulation Program emerged from UC Berkeley 30 years ago, continues to dominate the graphic arts industry at the forefront of professional FOSS adoption in the industry and is completely cross-platform supporting most major contemporary operating systems.

Poised for some major advances during the next few releases, including additional capabilities supporting proprietary legacy software and a new file format, there's many new bleeding edge innovations leading the industry that need mention and are included in this latest announcement.

#tallship #FOSS #GIMP #GNU #GPL

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Taken this day, 2019, pirate raiders off the shores of Porty!!
https://www.flickr.com/photos/woolamaloo_gazette/48618591148/in/photostream/lightbox/

Stand by to repel boarders!!

#PortobelloEdinburgh
#Edinburgh #Edimbourg #photography #photographie #Portobello #ship #bateau #TallShip #FirthOfForth #Sea #mer #BlackAndWhitePhotography #Pirates

And now a reminder - WriteFreely instead of...

- The overhead you may not be wanting to inherit with #WordPress
- The #Freemium model constantly pressuring you to subscribe to hosted #Ghost

For super serious #ActivityPub powered publishing those two seem to be the only options that come to mind. Certainly, masto is and always has been little more than a joke in that regard, although many have tweaked it to introduce certain improvements; and Between Ghost and WordPress there's truly very little in the way of serious options beyond the #Fediverse where you push out monolithic or RSS syndicated blogs in the world of FOSS.

As many of you are actually aware, #WriteFreely has, in their own words, been there since the beginning. But for some reason, it often seems to slip the mind of the people it most serves to deliver for.

Since it costs nothing to get started, let's begin by changing that and spin ourselves up an instance, shall we?

You can #self_host or be #freely_hosted, and yes, if you later opt for a subscription based, competently managed, hosted solution you are directly contributing to the development team and future progress of the project.

A Fantastic place to start is HERE

#tallship #FOSS #Publishing #Blog Write.As @updates

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RE: https://write.as/api/posts/ul3ls9vpogr02t68

@dilmandila

Since you're an author who seems to insist on No DRM (that's a good thing, too), Have you considered:

1. ) Smashwords
2. ) Draft2Digital

I believe these may be the two resources that enable you to deliver your works to the reader at the most affordable prices.

On the other hand, if I'm mistaken and you (or anyone else) knows of better resources that handle publishing & distribution at better price points please do let me know.

#tallship #publishing #Smashwords #epub

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Fresh out of the oven folks. Today, 01 August 2026 - NetBSD 11.0

https://blog.netbsd.org/tnf/entry/netbsd_11_0_released

#tallship #FOSS #NetBSD #UNIX

⛵️

Fresh out of the oven folks. Today, 01 August 2026 - NetBSD 11.0

https://blog.netbsd.org/tnf/entry/netbsd_11_0_released

#tallship #FOSS #NetBSD #UNIX

⛵️

Fresh out of the oven folks. Today, 01 August 2026 - NetBSD 11.0

https://blog.netbsd.org/tnf/entry/netbsd_11_0_released

#tallship #FOSS #NetBSD #UNIX

⛵️

Fresh out of the oven folks. Today, 01 August 2026 - NetBSD 11.0

https://blog.netbsd.org/tnf/entry/netbsd_11_0_released

#tallship #FOSS #NetBSD #UNIX

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The world's first social network?

I think the following block will suffice to speak for itself. Most of you reading this will have no idea what's going on, and that's a shame, really.

Anyway, when you 'finger' it out, feel free to finger me at SDF.org or tilde.team ⛵

From [email protected] Mon Feb 19 21:32:35 1990
Received: from cayuga.cs.rochester.edu by sol.cs.rochester.edu (4.0/q) id AA13568; Mon, 19 Feb 90 21:32:33 EST
Received: from Sail.Stanford.EDU by cayuga.cs.rochester.edu (5.59/q) id AA20402; Mon, 19 Feb 90 21:32:26 EST
Message-Id: [email protected]
Date: 19 Feb 90 1831 PST
From: Les Earnest [email protected]
Subject: re: Greetings...
To: [email protected]
Status: R

[In reply to message sent Mon, 19 Feb 90 16:02:17 EST.]

I'm glad that you are enjoying the C3 articles. I need to write another
one soon.

Here is a response to your conjectures, mostly regurgitated from an
article that I posted on Human-nets in 1985. Feel free to forward it to
alt.forklore.computers, or I can post it there if you prefer. I haven't
been reading that newsgroup, but a quick look indicates that maybe I
should.

Finger was named for the act of pointing. I recall that sometime after it
became popular I received a message from a system administrator who
thought that it should be renamed so that users would not have to use a
"dirty" word. I gave his request all the consideration that it deserved.

I created Finger around 1971 to meet a local need at the Stanford
Artifical Intelligence Lab. People generally worked long hours there,
often with unpredictable schedules. When you wanted to meet with some
group, it was important to know who was there and when the others would
likely reappear. It also was important to be able to locate potential
volleyball players when you wanted to play, Chinese food freaks when you
wanted to eat, and antisocial computer users when it appeared that
something strange was happening on the system.

The only tool then available for seeing who was running on our DEC-10
computer was a WHO program that showed IDs and terminal line numbers for
people who were logged in. There was no information available on people
who were not logged in. I frequently saw people running their fingers
down the WHO display saying things like "There's Don and that's Pattie but
I don't know when Tom was last seen." or "Who in hell is VVK and where
does line 63 go?"

I wrote Finger and developed the supporting database to provide this
information in traditional human terms -- real names and places. Because
I preferred to talk face to face rather than through the computer or
telephone, I put in the feature that tells how long the terminal had been
idle, so that I could assess the likelihood that I would find them there
if I walked down the hall.

The program was an instant hit. Some people asked for the Plan file
feature so that they could explain their absence or how they could be
reached at odd times, so I added it. I found it interesting that this
feature evolved into a forum for social commentary and amusing
observations.

Finger was picked up by a number of other groups with DEC-10 computers
that were connected to Arpanet -- software flowed in all directions around
the net in those days. It later migrated to Un*x, probably via U.C.
Berkeley. Somewhere along the line the idea arose to provide a network
Finger service. I don't remember who suggested that but it seemed like a
good idea at the time so I stuck it in. Some other anxious people wanted
to be able to verify that their mail was delivered to specific addressees,
so the Mail feature was also added.

While I was somewhat surprised by the popularity of Finger, it has not
been as successful as an earlier program that I invented -- the spelling
checker. It too was created to fill a personal need that many others
apparently share. We didn't think about commercial development and
software protection in those days, but if we had we probably could have
made something out of it. On the other hand, I enjoyed the comradery
of those gentler times and have no regrets.

-Les Earnest ([email protected])

tl;dr: Yeah, in case you're wondering, and would like to kick the tires and take it for a spin, on Debian it's as simple as:

# apt update
#apt install finger

if you want to play with the daemon, that would be available to you by installing either efingerd or cfingerd. For #Slackware users, finger is already installed HERE, and the daemon is just #fingerd; finger listens on port 79.

Enjoy! 👋🤠

#tallship #FOSS #finger #social_networking

This image for me resonates with both history and tragedy, though I wasn’t thinking about this when I took the photo. This is the prow of the Portuguese ship Sagres, docked at the Brooklyn waterfront. The figurehead represents Prince Henry the Navigator, who in the 1400s pioneered advances in sailing that turbocharged the Age of Exploration and the expansion of colonial empires. A century later, the first European ship reached the island of Mannahatta. 1/3

#SchiffSamstag #shipsaturday #tallship

More photos from the Portuguese ship NRP Sagres.

My previous posts on the tall ships at NYC’s Parade of Sail:

https://ohai.social/@bluejay/116901402575615422

https://ohai.social/@bluejay/116940483672519140

https://ohai.social/@bluejay/116980232344811388

https://ohai.social/@bluejay/116902384606163849

More thoughts in the comments.

#photography #schiffsamstag #shipsaturday #ship #ships #tallship

#SchiffSamstag #ShipSaturday

The Portuguese tall ship NRP Sagres, docked at the Brooklyn waterfront. This is the last of the four ships that I was able to tour when the international tall ships came to town last month for New York’s Parade of Sail. I’ll post more photos of the Sagres in the comments, as well as links to previous posts about the other ships and some general thoughts.

#photography #ship #ships #tallship #brooklyn #nyc

#FotoVorschlag

“'Im Hafen” (In the harbor)

#photography #ship #tallship #reflection

Tall’ship me to the Moon! #illustration in #ATC format. This one is better than yesterday’s because it has purpose. I should’ve been working but… #drawing #ACEO #artisttradingcards #mastoart #mastodonart #handdrawn #TraditionalArt #markers #tallship #moon

Well, I felt rather badly when I got a post in my stream from the official Fediverse account for dillo.

You see, I hadn't included it in my recent HowTo, a cookbook style tutorial on Browsers in Linux, or rather, how to install a boatload of them, and all kinds of them. I even went so far to include one produced and maintained by a company that I literally loathe (and even taught their official MCSE curriculum for them starting back in the mid 90's)...

But I left out dillo. I was tired, and truth be told, it really isn't easy authoring these types of technical publications - you literally need to go through each item on a VM you spin up and take it step by step to make sure that when a neophyte comes around and wants ot simply copypasta your instructions - they can do that, and it will work.

So anyway, the devs over at the dillo project posted on the Fediverse and I immediately was guilt-ridden for not including them. So I went and started to edit my earlier HowTo; I came out about 5k characters over count (and I think my server's already configured for 12K chars).

Anyway, long story short, here's one of my latest contributions to the #FOSS community, specifically, one that's published in the #Fediverse first and foremost. It includes almost every browser you've probably ever used, and certainly, many you probably haven't.

I had to Quote-Post my original so it's kinda kewl with an entry point starting with dillo. I think that's pretty awesome, and it quotes the original (part I if you will) that starts with Vivaldi.

I don't usually ask, but especially with respect to this HowTo/Tutorial, the more people that boost it, the further it will reach, and the more people it can benefit. Give it a gander and if you think others will find portions of it advantageous... well, feel free to boost it.

So without further ado, Here's the link to the Linux Browser HowTo

I hope you find it useful, and Enjoy! 🤗

#tallship #FOSS #Fediverse #Browsers #dillo #Microsoft_Edge #Firefox #Vivaldi #Brave_Browser #DuckDuckGo #Chromium #Opera #Chawan #Lagrange #Tor #Lynx #Elinks #Links #Nyxt #Epiphany #Falkon #Konqueror

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@dillo

Apologies! No sooner had I published, I realized that #Dillo, which was actually on the list, wasn't included in my tut.... Grrrrr!

So, this particular article wasn't published with the intention of being as ephemeral as a regular, standard #FediPost, but rather, as a cookbook style #HowTo to update occasionally and keeping it rather current.

I'm also considering expanding it with sections for other #Unices & Distros, with each one of the #browsers included again, but in the section for the particular #OS - whether it be #OpenBSD, #Slackware, Etc., and I've been doing a little work on that already.

Anyway, it's almost inconceivable that I published w/o Dillo. I was very tired when I did, and I recall thinking about Dillo when I writing up #Lagrange, since I've always believed that it's a sin to remove such tiny amounts of code to accommodate (Yes I'm talking to you Mozilla!) Gopher:// ftp://, Etc.; and for the more forward thinking folks, extending similar support for gemini:// and arguably others spawned from it that I didn't personally work with since the very beginning like I did with #Gemini, back at #SDF).

But I digress, and I'll get to the point.

Here is the update of my Linux Browser HowTo, Which includes dillo*. It was much too long to include by just appending to the original article by about 5000 characters,lolz, so I took the easy way out - I quote-posted it, lolz

That also implies that I'll have to swap hats a couple of times because some forums forced me to completely rewrite it to support #BBCode, and although the original looks nice in HIVE and on Dev, the Markdown is completely obliterated on Nostr (no graceful degradation there folks) - which I left as is because I think people need to see what not supporting Markdown looks like. I think it looks like shit on masto too, but masto isn't the #Fediverse, and it looks great on most other Fediverse platforms :)

I was getting tired again, but rushing to publish, so I know I misspelled various incarnations of privilege at least 3 different ways, and no, I'm not going to clean that up :p What I think I'm going to have to do though, Is publish the next volume on a proper website with some ActivityPub powered capabilities like WordPress, or Ghost, or WriteFreely / write.as, where I don't have to worry about the length of the article and I can continue to break it into pieces or chapters, etc., as it grows. There's other OSes and Linux distros I'd like to cover, but as you can see at the end, Slackware is going to be rather boring, considering how simple it is to install everything under the sun from source - and that is indeed a beautiful thing.

I hope what I've done today facilitates more people having access to dillo, since it's a good product, but seemingly out of reach for many n00bs, when it really doesn't need to be. Sure, setting up a Debian style repo with keys, etc., at Dillo-Browser.org would be ideal, but this is, after all, FOSS, and you've done so much already, maybe I can lend a hand at that at some point in the future, but....

Truth be told, there really isn't anything much simpler than doing a git clone to perform the initial installation, and simply performing a git pull, followed by the same build sequence later to affect any updates.

You have a wonderful day, and I hope I've helped bring some awareness and hopefully adoption by others of dillo, it really is deserving of that, much moreso than Microsoft Edge, which I also included in my HowTo (but mostly as a disparaging joke).

Kindest regards,

Bradley

#tallship #tut #HowTo #Browser_HowTo #dillo #FOSS

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And now for dillo

## dillo browser (the honorable mention):

Now, this tutorial wouldn't be complete without one of the most determined browser projects of all to be included. Unfortunately for the user (and by user I mean the common, everyday n00b, joeuser), very little effort has been put into a one & done download/install procedure.

To be honest, dillo is a bit of a pain in the butt, because even though a lot of effort has been put into rescue of the intellectual property after the main author of the engine passed away and the original domain registration expired (to be picked up by a cybersquatter), rebuilding the forward facing public assets still leaves much to be desired for a simple joeuser - the folks we are all trying to ultimately serve and make things simple.

For example, Where you would almost universally expect to see a "Download dillo" link or button, you will indeed find a link, but it leads to their cgit repo. Even junior devs cringe when they first come across cgit, even though it really is arguably far superior to GitHub style facilities like Gitea, Forgejo (Codeberg), and SourceHut.

Although it's really only a matter of appearance, cgit was written by Jason A. Donenfeld, who also created Wireguard and Pass - the standard UNIX password manager, popular on Androids too (via F-Droid, requires installing OpenKeyChain too on Android).

But back to #dillo! You may be wondering why I placed it so far down the list, and the reason is twofold:

1. ) I brainfarted. Yup, I was really tired and literally forgot when initially publishing this first edition of the Browsers on Linux HowTo, and for that, especially to the dillo dev team, I apologize.
2. ) It may seem a bit complicated - but I assure you it is not, especially when compared to the #Tor_Browser, which immediately precedes the instructions for installing dillo.

I know that a lot of folks went through and endured the process of installing the Tor Browser, because it's such a popular utility in today's world, and since I'm figuring that you got through that okay, we can now turn our attention to dillo, without all of the hunting around on various git repo servers out there and web pages - just the bare bones simple cut and paste for you here...

So let's get to it, shall we?

NOTE: You should know by now that commands prefaced with ~$ are to be administered by you, the regular, unpriviliged user account; while commands prefaced with ~# mean that those commands are issued by "root". You have a choice in your terminal. The first is just to prepend the root commands with sudo, while the other option is to issue su - to root, then go into the directory the user was in and issue those commands. You may find it easier to just open a fresh tab in your terminal app so you have one user ($) shell and then in the other tab or window you have the root user's (#) shell.

The first thing we need to do is make sure that we have resolved all dependencies (prerequisites) for compiling dillo. We do that as root (or via sudo as I just mentioned above) like so:

~# apt install gcc g++ git git-all autoconf automake make zlib1g-dev libfltk1.3-dev libssl-dev libc6-dev libpng-dev libjpeg-dev libwebp-dev libbrotli-dev

Don't worry if some, or even most or all of those packages aren't installed, because some, many, or all of them may already be installed on your system, and invoking the install won't overwrite anything already installed.

Next, let's git (pundit there), er... get the source for dillo, and yes, we're going to use git. A mention now that doing it this way means that in the future your updates will be relatively simple and brainless. More on that later. We'll start by creating a directory (folder) to work from, a place where you can use in the future that doesn't clutter up your home directory with needless entries; then we'll download the source code, build it locally, and install it...

All you have to do is cut and paste each line, one by one, and wait for each step to finish before pasting the next line into your terminal.

~$ cd; mkdir -pv dev; cd dev
~$ git clone https://git.dillo-browser.org/dillo
~$ cd dillo
~$ ./autogen.sh
~$ mkdir build
~$ cd build
~$ ../configure --prefix=/usr/local
~$ make
~$ sudo make install
root@mylaptop:/home/joeuser/dev/dillo/build# make install

That's it! dillo has been installed!

Now, and because we're at the very end. I want to explain the $ and # stuff so it's clear. Notice that the dillo installation steps is the only place in this HowTo that I included a sudo command. The reason is that I believe that in most cases, sudo is a bad way to administer a machine. In classic, traditional UNIX administration, you su to root (the Superuser), do what you need to with thos elevated privs and then exit out of the root shell and back to your unprivileged user account.

So ~# is merely a shorthand in most Bash shells. typically, you're going to see something like username@hostname:/path/to/directory$ for a non-priviliged user, or for root, it will generally read as root@hostname:/path/to/directory#

Generally speaking when you issue a command from a particular directory as a non-privileged user, followed by a command by the superuser (root), you probably want to be in that same directory. So the final command above which was make install, would have been performed by the non-privileged user ($) using the sudo utility (or, doas on some OSes) or as root - but as root, you would have wanted to be in that same directory to run the make command to install the compiled binary in /usr/local on your machine. This is what it would look like had you decided (I recommend this practice in most cases) to 'su -' to root instead of using sudo:

joeuser@mylaptop:~/dev/dillo/build$ su - 
root@mylaptop:~# cd /home/joeuser/dev/dillo/build
root@mylaptop:/home/joeuser/dev/dillo/build# make install
root@mylaptop:/home/joeuser/dev/dillo/build# exit
joeuser@mylaptop:~/dev/dillo/build$ cd
joeuser@mylaptop:~$ which dillo
/usr/local/bin/dillo
joeuser@mylaptop:~$ dillo &

If you followed along with that last block of code, you'll see that we asked where our program (dillo) is, by using the which command. It told us that it's located /user/local/bin/dillo, in our default "path", so all we need to do (from anywhere) is just type in dillo & - the ampersand will release our shell so the process can run in the background. Just hit your "return" or "enter" key and you'll get your prompt back.

Have fun running dillo!

Well, I went into a lot of explantions that normally aren't covered, because basic navigation and what your prompts are going to look like are just assumed in most HowTo's and Tutorials, including mine. But it should be covered somewhere and this was a logical place.

There is just one more (optional) task to complete. Adding dillo to your menu panel - I'm going to leave that task up to you, it's worth learning, and honestly, I don't want to have to cover how to do this in KDE Plasma, Xfce, GNOME, Cinnamon, Mate, etc.... you get the idea; I have no idea what desktop environment you're running but it's an excercise that is worthwhile so you can configure your menus and desktop anyway, so do give it a go :)

There's really just one last thing folks....

Here's just a taste of what to expect with future updates to this HowTO:

~# sqg -p dillo && sbopkg -i dillo.sqf

"What?" You say? Yup! That's Slackware. Installing pretty much every single Browser in this article is as simple as doing a copypasta of that one liner with sbopkg...

But you'll have to wait for all of that funstuff :p

And remember: You can haz #Cheezburgerz! 🍔🍟

I hope that helps!

#tallship #FOSS #browsers #dillo #Microsoft_Edge #Firefox #Vivaldi #Brave_Browser #DuckDuckGo #Chromium #Opera #Chawan #Lagrange #Tor #Lynx #Elinks #Links #Nyxt #Epiphany #Falcon #Konqueror

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RE: https://public.mitra.social/objects/019f49aa-b5c6-7372-b92d-68821dcad285

#SchiffSamstag #ShipSaturday

The tall ship INS Sudarshini from India, recently docked at the Brooklyn waterfront after participating in New York’s Parade of Sail.

#photography #monochrome #blackandwhite #ship #tallship #tallships #brooklyn #nyc

Let's get Politcal - Join the Party!

- All is file
- You've got one job
- Make it simple
- Be clear - NOT Clever
- No news is good news
- Plain text is universal
- Write once - Run everywhere
- Connect with others

You can do it right, or you can do it twice

Go here and join the party!

#tallship #FOSS #UNIX #42 #OpenSource

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The BitchX is Back!

No, not the Elton John song from the seventies - The #IRC client (considered the most popular before #Irssi and #weechat) back in the late 90's on #DALnet and into the 2000's.

But there's a twist, this is an entirely revamped beast, kinda like finding an old Model A Ford that's so rusted out even the axles are seized up and the doors are paper thin with shattered windows, and plenty of bullet holes in the body...

... and then restoring it back to factory showroom floor condition. Except for the engine - a rusted hunk of metal that was replaced with a brand new Chevy 454 Big Block V8; something really contemporary that you might not expect. I'll leave you to discover what that is by visiting the link where the maintainer explains everything :)

And remember, you too can once again be Too Lame to run BitchX!

#tallship #BitchX #ncurses #TUI #FOSS #ANSI_Art

@evacide

Eva, I'm not sure whether I believe that's a dedicaed privacy mining funnel.

After attempting to jump through all of the hoops with the crazy KYC-like requirements, including the reliance of IIRC, https://gov.com logon and not until the very end of the verification that I was who I said I was it went and required me to provide a DID (that's a phone number, for those of you who do not already know) that it liked.

I'm sorry (NOT) but there was way more than enough divulged, including my existing Gov.com creds, to believe that California was privacy mining for the sake of tracking their subjugated chattel.

Thanks, great idea and thank you also for your public service, but I don't even know if I"m going to bother to go look again - I FELT REALLY VIOLATED

#tallship #privacy #privacy_mining #fingerprinting #industrial_surveillance

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.

@karlauerbach @tychotithonus

Cavebear wrote:

I have trouble accepting anything rooted in a country code top level domain (ccTLD), such as .me or .it, as being secure for use identifying people in the US.

Notwithstanding contemporary community constructs such as KeyOxide, there is an air of (perhaps misplaced) stability with some popular ccTLDs, like, .CA or .CO and even with some that aren't (arguably) quite so deserving, like .TV which has itself had a few turbulent hiccups for registrants in the past. The .CA ccTLD has seen it's fair share of Californian's attempting to capitalize on the mnemonics of that ccTLD, when clearly, this isn't something Canada is happy about, and indeed, one might argue that it dilutes the national branding that is beneficial to Canadian companies.

.CO is right up there near the top of the warning bells, since many believe that governments have both total authority over their ISO-3166 assets and the wisdom to manage them - they do not.

In an even earlier article penned by Kieren McCarthy, he states:

>The first thing .CO Internet did was to ignore accepted wisdom. Even now, many of those comfortable with the status quo claim that new extensions are “not needed”. They include well-known Internet figures such as Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web. According to this logic, the Internet’s naming infrastructure is no more interesting than the phone system or the road network.

For my part, even back when offered tidy little sums to provide "professional valuations" for various domain names, I typically accepted the contract and disappointed the client by providing my expert assessments of $35.00 - NSI was charging $70.00 for two year registrations at the time.

Easy Peasy. The value of a domain registration is, within reason, that which the registry operator sets as the registration fee.

So with respect to Mr. McCarthy's observation, I concur with the belief that these machinations we rolled out in the 1980's as vehicles to assist humans in mapping out and arriving at particular IP addresses are certainly, nothing more than what could be arbitrary strings in a database, assigned (i.e., registered) by request to someone who will leverage it for utilitarian purposes. I know that's really dry. It's how any engineer would look at such a construct functionally.

Where things got weird was when people with marketing minds started to claim a piece of the pie, when it wasn't even sliced into pieces:

- You cannot own a domain name. It's a registration, congruent with the nature of a phone number - pay the renewal fee or that string of characters will return to the pool of available names.
- You can't assign value beyond that of the registration fees established by the registry
- If you built a brand of value tied to your (phone number or) domain registration's string, and that registration expires, the value of that brand reverts to $0.00 - once again, you cannot own a domain name, or a phone number!
- If you build a brand and register that service or trademark with the USPTO, know that it by definition exists separately from a domain registration that you do not, and cannot yourself, own.
- If you trust your brand on the two letter ccTLDs of nations, know that your brand's name recognition is subject to the whims of that nation and maybe even that nation's ever shifting political sand beneath it.

That last one is interesting when you consider that even the United States' management of the .US Top-Level Domain came under public scrutiny for the resulting calamity when the rug was pulled out from long time regional registry providers and their registrants when the geographic nature of 3LD registrations and below under the .US ccTLD were sunsetted under the management of the NTIA.

To be fair, this wasn't nearly as catastrophic as the zillions of registrants whose domain registrations were amputated following Brexit.

The .TV ccTLD has been in the news as well, scrutinized as a Top-Level domain that will potentially cease to exist, eventually. and historically, management of .TV's registry operations (and marketing) has been a never ending marathon of musical chairs. GoDaddy is actually the operator, while the Tuvalu Telecommunications Corporation handles all the sales and marketing for the brand.

Montenegro has had a tumultuous life cycle, and the reservations expressed by Karl aren't just valid, but IMO, should be taken as a literal precautionary note. Nevertheless, pigeonholed schemata persist when the marketing types slick back their hair with Brylcreem and their mouths start moving, with promises of great fortune billowing from their lips. the .ME TLD was born, if you will, from the ashes of a succession of ISO-3166 ccTLDs going back originally to Yugoslavia's .YU ccTLD.

Although I've been focusing on the ccTLDs that have attempted to brand with varying degrees of success and reliability, the smell of money attracts the same carpetbaggers to gTLDs like .mobi and .tel have had varying degrees of success as registries - with some, like the .GOO TLD outright imploding. Let's cover a few...

- .TEL - A lot of money was poured into this new age virtual business card that was supposedly only available as captive portal with pre-populated fields to fill out for your contact information. I guess that didn't work out too well, following the initial interest by curios folks, since they've officially done away with that hard requirement. Truth be told, it was always possible to simply register your own DNS servers as AUTH and completely bypass their captive portal system, and many gearheads did just to make light of what many considered redundant, ridiculous, and unnecessarily retro.
- .WORK - As if it could be the rubber banding of a wagon wheel, instead of the original steel girding that .jobs (and yes, there was a .job application too) never really delivered on, this might go down as a better 'marketed' mousetrap, but I don't get the impression that this TLD is really making many waves, and the utility is rather questionable too for anything other than very specialized cases that might be better served under one of the classic gTLDs.
- .JOBS - I was personally brought in as an expert consultant in to help get this (and .JOB, which didn't make it) accepted in a round 2 application in 2004, for acceptance into the DNS Root with ICANN, which was successful. But that's only half the battle, when job seekers actively flock to Dice, Indeed, XING, Linkedin, and one considers that the average human will at first likely guess that a site called jobs.com might be a first stop on their career search (retail.jobs forwards to usa.jobs), I don't know if the past 21 years have really bore out any fruit for this particular TLD. I was never enthusiastic about the potential, I mean, consider dog_groomer.jobs, yet I was highly optimistic that I could get them across the finish line of the acceptance process - which I did.
- .WOLTERSKLUWER - Yes that's called an Easter Egg. I've never heard of a single .wolterskluwer domain, or the TLD itself, but all I can come up with "Egads! What were you thinking?" Oh, yeah, the Easter Egg... .BOO is indeed for real. As you can see below, I checked the availability for Yogi_and_Boo.Boo, at the time of writing at least. No I did not follow through on registering but I'm sure that someone will. I still check however, occasionally, to see if Chicken.Coop is available.

The DNS Name Space is full of failed TLDS.

Getting back to having enough confidence in a TLD to base your business product (and as it follows, your "brand"), I'm going to finish this article up with a bit of a horrible potential outcome when you register a domain name in the ccTLD namespace when the government is either politically unstable, inept, or both.

This is the case of the .BZ ccTLD. the original delegation by Jon (Let's just call him IANA, because that was his pseudonym for many years until his passing) was placed in what one would surmise to be a relatively stable environment - a university.

This delegation of Authority to the TLD Manager was effected on 03 September 1991 to the University of Belize, in according with the rollout of ISO-3166-1 alpha 2 codes for each country. Nothing to see here folks, so we move along to...

The phenomenon known as the .com bubble and its contemporary, affectionately or infamously referred to as the Domain Wars, close on the heels of the Browser Wars.

Whereas the registry for the ccTLD for Belize was from 1991 primarily manually, yet competently administered (i.e., by hand), the Government of Belize saw dollar signs after Jon passed away in October of 1998 and subsequently decided to contract out marketing and registry operations to a firm by the name of Economic Solutions Inc. (ESI) in 1999. That's where I come in.

History has recorded, out of convenience sake, I suppose, that the contract between the Government of Belize and ESI was for marketing only, but that's not what the contract that ESI provided me said. They were to take over registry operations and do the marketing to compete with the new .BIZ gTLD that the nascent ICANN was going to place in the DNS root.

Since I was already operating several types of registry operations ESI wanted to contract my firm to merely expand registry operations to include the .BZ ccTLD. This was not a problem, and within a few hours had a standalone registry system operational as a prototype. Since this wasn't going to be a part of any existing registry operations I had at the time, I required money to complete a build out for production commercial operations in my data center.

This is where things began to get a little sticky, as those jokers at didn't seem to understand that I don't really care about their lofty goals, and neither myself nor my CEO at the time were going to do anything without up front compensation. we provided them with the IP addresses, etc., of the new name servers, but made it clear that this zone was not going live until we were fully funded.

It devolved into a back and forth between the Government of Belize along with ESI on one side, demanding that ICANN.... um.... IANA, rather, change the delegation in the root, and the University of Belize folks on the other, who were quite nice, amicable people.

I guess this battle between the government of Belize and "IANA" went on for a couple more years, long after I severed the relationship with ESI for not performing, and eventually, that same claim of non-performance was the basis for Belize to cancel their contract too.

Anyway, in 2001 the university spawned a new entity, University Management Limited (UML), to manage everything - including the marketing, and it's remained that way ever since. All's well that ends well. But the point is, this isn't what the government wanted, and IANA made it eventually clear that they weren't going to change the delegation for the zone to any other entity. - and this is a good thing, because governments are stupid. The university staff were more than willing to work through a coordinated smooth transition, but ultimately it was ICANN - not the government of Belize, who put their foot down when it came to operational integrity.

In closing, I'd like to point out the likely damage caused to the approximately 80,000 SLD registrants under the .EU who had their registrations revoked (of the total of more than 300,000 that were threatened), as a result of Brexit, is a good example of what could have happened, had the Government of Belize had their way, on a smaller scale, yes, but with even less regard for their existing registrants.

And that's how incompetent governments do things when you don't have technical guardrails in place to prevent them from shooting themselves in the foot.

#tallship #DNS #Registry #Registrar #Domain_Names #IANA #ccTLD

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RE: https://sfba.social/users/karlauerbach/statuses/116953628070701544

The majestic Peruvian tall ship BAP Unión in Boston this morning, before the sky turned yellow from wildfires in Canada and Michigan.

#Boston #tallship #maritime #climatechange #climatecrisis