#tallship — Public Fediverse posts

@mythologyandhistory @mjj

Yes I believe him, dressed up like a member of The Specials (maybe sax 🎷 player?), and those punk rock skateboarder Vans that he's sporting with the suit.

Even the Sex Pistols were bankrolled merely to showcase their manager Malcolm McLaren's clothing boutique at 430 King's Road in London.

One of my exes was a pre Goth death metal chick with relatively short pink hair and that pasty white corpse like makeup in a different, classy lingerie ensemble everyday of the week ( It helped that she worked at Frederick's on Hollywood Blvd).

If what John Waters is quoted as saying has any weight (and I believe he's spot on) it's that the antisocial movement of the previous decade will be largely found to be insignificant and forgotten because they had no particular and unique fashion sense of their own to remember them by.👋💀

#tallship #heavy_metal #punk_rock #new_wave #forgotten_Gen #music #fashion #lifestyle

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RE: https://mas.to/users/mythologyandhistory/statuses/117176052087304300

@mythologyandhistory @mjj

Yes I believe him, dressed up like a member of The Specials (maybe sax 🎷 player?), and those punk rock skateboarder Vans that he's sporting with the suit.

Even the Sex Pistols were bankrolled merely to showcase their manager Malcolm McLaren's clothing boutique at 430 King's Road in London.

One of my exes was a pre Goth death metal chick with relatively short pink hair and that pasty white corpse like makeup in a different, classy lingerie ensemble everyday of the week ( It helped that she worked at Frederick's on Hollywood Blvd).

If what John Waters is quoted as saying has any weight (and I believe he's spot on) it's that the antisocial movement of the previous decade will be largely found to be insignificant and forgotten because they had no particular and unique fashion sense of their own to remember them by.👋💀

#tallship #heavy_metal #punk_rock #new_wave #forgotten_Gen #music #fashion #lifestyle

⛵

RE: https://mas.to/users/mythologyandhistory/statuses/117176052087304300

@mythologyandhistory @mjj

Yes I believe him, dressed up like a member of The Specials (maybe sax 🎷 player?), and those punk rock skateboarder Vans that he's sporting with the suit.

Even the Sex Pistols were bankrolled merely to showcase their manager Malcolm McLaren's clothing boutique at 430 King's Road in London.

One of my exes was a pre Goth death metal chick with relatively short pink hair and that pasty white corpse like makeup in a different, classy lingerie ensemble everyday of the week ( It helped that she worked at Frederick's on Hollywood Blvd).

If what John Waters is quoted as saying has any weight (and I believe he's spot on) it's that the antisocial movement of the previous decade will be largely found to be insignificant and forgotten because they had no particular and unique fashion sense of their own to remember them by.👋💀

#tallship #heavy_metal #punk_rock #new_wave #forgotten_Gen #music #fashion #lifestyle

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RE: https://mas.to/users/mythologyandhistory/statuses/117176052087304300

@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

⛵

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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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

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

@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

@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

⛵

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

@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

⛵

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

HowTo: INSTALLING Browsers in Linux

Here we're going to cover the installation steps of Browsers in Linux - specifically, Debian GNU/Linux.

We're covering the procedural steps for this in Debian Testing (Forkey), which is already beginning the gleanings of what will become Debian 14. At the time of writing,the current kernel version is 7.0.13+deb14-amd64.

Daily drivers will likely be along the lines of Vivaldi, Firefox, Lagrange, and Brave Browser, and in no particular order. Any others will be mostly for particular reasons like, testing, curiosity, Etc., but some specialized products like the Tor browser, which focus on privacy are also covered. This list is by no means complete, but there's a bunch of them we cover, so let's jump right in!

I can haz #Cheezburgerz? 🍔 🍟

Well, let's see... First up is the first rate and fully featured Vivaldi, built on top of the open source Chromium, as are so many others in this list.

- Vivaldi

Manual setup of the Vivaldi Linux repos - According to their website, "you no longer need to do this. After downloading a Linux package and installing it our Linux update repositories will be configured automatically for you to receive updates."

That's awfully nice, so visit the download page above and get the .deb package:

~# mkdir -pv /usr/local/packages/vivaldi; cd /usr/local/packages/vivaldi
~# wget https://downloads.vivaldi.com/stable/vivaldi-stable_8.1.4087.48-1_amd64.deb
~# apt install ./vivaldi*.deb

- That's it! You're ready to go now.

Next up...

- Firefox
~# apt update && apt install firefox
- Brave Browser

~# apt install curl
~# curl -fsSLo /usr/share/keyrings/brave-browser-archive-keyring.gpg https://brave-browser-apt-release.s3.brave.com/brave-browser-archive-keyring.gpg
~# curl -fsSLo /etc/apt/sources.list.d/brave-browser-release.sources https://brave-browser-apt-release.s3.brave.com/brave-browser.sources
~# apt update && apt install brave-browser

- DuckDuckGo (on Android - There's no Linux port)
- Edge (For the sake of completeness in testing? For the love of God, WHY???)

~# mkdir -pv /usr/local/packages/edge; cd /usr/local/packages/edge # download Edge from the link above into this directory
~# apt install -y ./microsoft-edge-stable_147.0.3912.98-1_amd64.deb # or whatever version you downloaded.

- Lagrange

~$ apt update && apt install flatpak
~$ flatpak install flathub fi.skyjake.Lagrange

- Chromium

~# apt update && apt install chromium

- Opera

~# mkdir -pv /usr/local/packages/opera; cd /usr/local/packages/opera # Download from the link above, for example:
~# wget https://download3.operacdn.com/ftp/pub/opera/desktop/131.0.5877.5/linux/opera-stable_131.0.5877.5_amd64.deb
~# apt install -y ./opera-stable_131.0.5877.5_amd64.deb

Good Ole Lynx, Elinks, and Links. One should not be without at least a couple of these. you can surf HTTP, Gopher, and remain in a character based environment with Lynx, so the utility of testing is available quickly at your fingertips. Also included w3m.

~# apt install -y elinks elinks-data elinks-doc links links2 lynx lynx-common w3m w3m-img

Nyxt: For a more elegant take on the mostly character/CLI based options above you might wish to have this browser in your toolchest. Installing is simple as a FlatPak.

~$ flatpak install flathub engineer.atlas.Nyxt

GNOME Web - aka: Epiphany. Yes, this is the decendent of Galeon, the legacy of which began in 2000. Much of Galeons features were ported to Epiphany, which for whatever reason, is having an existential moment with respect to its name - Officially? It's now GNOME Web, but everywhere it says that, they also include the Epiphany name just so there's no confusion. Huh?

~# apt install epiphany-browser epiphany-browser-data

If you must call it "Web", that's fine, but even if you want to install it as a FlatPak you're going to be invoking Ephiphany, and that's what everyone still calls it anyway:

~$ flatpak install flathub org.gnome.Epiphany

Falkon. Formerly QupZilla, this browser received its new name in 2017 when it was picked up by KDE. With a simple, but modern, themable interface affording the user options resembling that of Firefox, Chrome, Windows, and Mac, it also comes bundled with AdBlock installed and enabled. There are several other features and extensions available including a PDF reader, GreaseMonkey,Tab extensions, Etc., which are available via the KDE store rather than Chrome or Firefox add-on marketplace.

~# apt install falkon

You can also install via Flathub:

~$ flatpak install flathub org.kde.falkon

Konqueror - The longtime File and Web Browser by KDE. It's probably already installed by default if you're running KDE, but if not here you go:

~# apt install konqueror konqueror-data konqueror-doc libkf6konq7 libkf6konqsettings7

And now for something truly special...

Chawan

~# mkdir -pv /usr/local/packages/chawan; cd /usr/local/packages/chawan
~# wget https://git.sr.ht/~bptato/chawan/refs/download/v0.3.3/chawan-0-3-3-amd64.deb
~# apt update && apt install ./chawan-0-3-3-amd64.deb

Alternatively:

~# mkdir -pv /usr/local/src/chawan; cd /usr/local/src/chawan
/usr/local/src/chawan# wget https://git.sr.ht/~bptato/chawan/refs/download/v0.3.3/chawan-0-3-3-linux-amd64.tar.xz
/usr/local/src/chawan# tar xvf chawan-0-3-3-linux-amd64.tar.xz
/usr/local/src/chawan# cd chawan-0-3-3-linux-amd64/
/usr/local/src/chawan/chawan-0-3-3-linux-amd64# make install

you can start with ~$ mancha cha

DESCRIPTION

Chawan is a text-mode browser. It can be used as a pager, or as a
web/(S)FTP/gopher/gemini/file browser. It understands HTML and CSS, and
when enabled by the user, can also execute JavaScript and display images
(on terminals supporting Sixel or the Kitty image protocol.)

   Chawan can also be used as a general text-based document viewer  as  de‐
   scribed  in  cha-mailcap(5),  or  as a hyperlinked man page viewer using
   mancha(1).

## TorBrowser

This one's a bit more of a chunk to bite into, only because if you're going to endeavor for such security, then you want to make sure to cross all the t's and dot all of the i's.

Import the Tor Browser Developers signing key

(0xEF6E286DDA85EA2A4BA7DE684E2C6E8793298290)

gpg --auto-key-locate nodefault,wkd --locate-keys [email protected]

Your output should look something like:

gpg: key 4E2C6E8793298290: public key "Tor Browser Developers (signing key) <[email protected]>" imported
gpg: Total number processed: 1
gpg:               imported: 1
      EF6E286DDA85EA2A4BA7DE684E2C6E8793298290
uid           [ unknown] Tor Browser Developers (signing key) <[email protected]>

Now that you've imported the key, you can save it to a file, identifying it by the fingerprint above:

~$ mkdir -pv ~/packages/tor; cd ~/packages/tor
~/packages/tor$ gpg --output ./tor.keyring --export 0xEF6E286DDA85EA2A4BA7DE684E2C6E8793298290

From the Tor Project's download page HERE, download the .asc OpenPGP signature file and the TorBrowser package tarball:

~/packages/tor$ wget https://www.torproject.org/dist/torbrowser/15.0.11/tor-browser-linux-x86_64-15.0.11.tar.xz.asc

~/packages/tor$ wget https://www.torproject.org/dist/torbrowser/15.0.11/tor-browser-linux-x86_64-15.0.11.tar.xz

NOTE: At the time of writing, these were the current files downloaded, the filenames will almost certainly have changed by the time you download them, so the tarball and signature file will have different names - adjust accordingly. We'll continue using those filenames below.

Now we verify the veracity of the package's tarball using the .asc signature file like so:

~/packages/tor$ gpgv --keyring ./tor.keyring ~/packages/tor/tor-browser-linux-x86_64-15.0.11.tar.xz.asc ~/packages/tor/tor-browser-linux-x86_64-15.0.11.tar.xz

Your output should confirm a "Good signature":

gpgv: Signature made Tue 28 Apr 2026 02:01:23 AM PDT
gpgv:                using RSA key CAAE408AEBE2288E96FC5D5E157432CF78A65729
gpgv: Good signature from "Tor Browser Developers (signing key) <[email protected]>"

Now we explode the archive:

~/packages/tor$ tar xvf tor-browser-linux-x86_64-15.0.11.tar.xz

Let's give it a go, shall we?

~/packages/tor$ cd tor-browser
~/packages/tor/tor-browser$ ./start-tor-browser.desktop --register-app
Tor Browser has been registered as a desktop app for this user in ~/.local/share/applications/

You'll notice that the permissions of ./start-tor-browser.desktop are set to 700 - It has only been installed for you and you alone. I would recommend that everyone install their own but if that seemed like too much hassle for you to begin with, we can just install it system-wide for everyone, with the following two commands:

~# apt update
~# apt install -y torbrowser-launcher

## Summary, and why

I know I know, I always seem to put the tl;dr's at the very end, but that's only because it humors me :p In this case, however, it really is best if the Tor Browser is installed individually for each and every user account that is going to use it.

Why do I usually put the tl;dr's at the very end of my articles? Because I've observed that the impatient among us are inclined to break something anyway for lack of patience and understanding, and if you really think about it, we've learned a lot today, going over each step and most of the time, why we did it that way.

Even so, when you get to the end there's this nice fluffy and quick way to accomplish your task quickly, and you can do it a hundred times now because you understand the whole thing. On the other hand, the people who just want the tl;dr are typically one of two types of folks - they've got a great handle on things and only need just bare syntax, or.... they're the kind of folks who, when assigned a book to read, start by reading the last couple of pages, then think they're ready for the book report.

For that last group of people, isn't putting the tl;dr at the very end where they really expect to find it anyway?

## Parting Thoughts

Not all of the products that we've covered the installation for today are FOSS. Many aren't even Open Source. We're trying to be complete with all of the various applications in the browser spectrum that people may wish to use - for even the most obscure above, tens of thousands of people use it as their daily driver, or as a particular tool for a job that they perform every day.

I'm going to explain why I decided to include one browser in particular. Years ago...

Microsoft's current version for Windows Internet Exploder was either 3.01b or 3.02b at the time, and this was the only time that I've ever seen this - so I actually have a copy of this browser. In my wanderings across this planet I've seen people complain over the years about there not being any Internet Explorer for Linux, and indeed, this is the case. In fact, in my experience, I've never seen a port of Internet Explorer for any of the Unices (Apple products excepted), until one day when I was installing a Sun Enterprise server running Solaris. I just happened to notice when looking through the files that I saw the rarest of all creatures...

A lone Internet Exploder, version 3.02b (or maybe 3.01b) for Solaris! For Solaris? Why? No, not really why? but given the proof that they could have a port for Linux at anytime and haven't, yet they cozy up to Sun Microsystems and offer a port of Explorer that is supported on Solaris. WoW!

I quickly fell into a state of perplexity. Why Solaris and no one else? Why not Linux? Why not AIX or HP-UX? Why bother at all if they're not going to make it available for Linux and the BSDs too, and I thought long and hard about this.

I still do, and I have a lot of answers. None of which are truly acceptable. Yes, Ballmer called Linux a cancer, now they hug it like a redwood tree. But think of what could have been.

So... Why did I include Microsoft Edge here in this article?

I was being charitable, as I continue looking down my nose at Redmond, dismissively, disparagingly, with just a tinge of a smile containing just a hint of my condescension.

I'll probably continue to add a browser package here and there to this article when I feel it's warranted. There are a lot, and this only covers the most popular and it was good to get these out of the way so perhaps I can tend to the more obscure or peculiar at some other point in time.

I hope that helps!

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

⛵

#FotoVorschlag “USA”

My usual caveat: I hate what my country is doing to its own people as well as to people around the world. This should be a day of reflection and resistance, not celebration. That said, I think tall ships and France’s gift statue are very cool, so I went down to Valentino Pier in Brooklyn this morning to capture some shots of both. (More photos in the comments.)

#photography #SchiffSamstag #ShipSaturday #ships #sail #tallship #statueofliberty #brooklyn #nyc #july4th

Assholes Will Always Exist

Over the years they've been called a lot of things. Some of the terms, these miscreants actually donned like a cape or wore the disparaging noun as a badge of honor:

- #cracker
- #list_bully
- #foreign_agent
- #incel
- #phishermen
- #spammer
- #blackhat

The list is truly, much too long to collate in a single fly by topical mention; and that's really not the point of what I'm writing about here either. What is absolutely pernicious, is the #MiTM style attack on software distribution rising to a level where even the source cannot be held in high confidence.

When these atrocious acts become the commonplace verbs to the infamous nouns above it is time that each and every one of us stand vigil and at the ready to come to the aid of our community members. Here's one such place where we can begin - the #AUR: https://archlinux.org/news/active-aur-malicious-packages-incident/

#tallship #FOSS #malware

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@deutschewelle #TallShip #whatthehelljusthappened

Ghost is an excellent platform for publishing. I used it a lot a few years back for publishing articles when it was headless - that was optimum. Compose at your leisure within your own local environment, then push it up to your own self-hosted instance.

Unfortunately, they let it fall into disrepair, left it unmaintained, and last I checked the Ghost desktop was nowhere to be found in the repo. One of the maintainers explained to me that they just didn't have anyone willing to maintain the app and so I migrated away from the platform myself.

Integrating #ActivityPub is a fantastic idea, and will give #WriteAs a run for the money, but the reasons for leaving #Drupal and #WordPress to publish on #Ghost aren't so compelling with editors like #Gutenberg exist now, along with the #WordPress_ActivityPub plugin.

I'm going to give it another looksee to review what happened to the elegant, #headless nature that Ghost used to espouse as one of it's key ingredients for using it in the first place. I just hope that they don't try to go the way of #OOo, #Bacula, and other #FOSS projects that were forked, and somewhat marginalized, as a result of decisions to force community versions into #Freemium products that lacked most functionality without fee based subscriptions. Lord knows, the last time I checked their managed hosting solutions for Ghost it certainly wasn't even competitively priced.

With this newfound revelation in the form of some kind of epiphany, let's hope their commitment to #Fediverse and FOSS exceeds that of their grasp for excessive monetization.

#tallship

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RE: https://todon.eu/users/MediaActivist/statuses/112302834109929024

@MediaActivist

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

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Reprinted from the Fediverse-City Matrix room, with permission from the author (myself):

I was just participating in another discussion elsewhere on the connotations and perceptions relating to a global feed of the entire known Fediverse, as it pertains to what various platforms call it (in their selector tabs).

Lots of suggestions, and every platform uses a different nomenclature. Some use 'global', some use 'live', and there's a few others as well that try to convey that type of extremely busy feed.

But then I touched on the subject of Local feeds - not all Fediverse platforms utilize this type of concatenated feed. I related that the Hometown fork of mastopub was [at least one of] the first to incorporate this as both a feed, and a type of post that is localized to only that particular instance.

I also, because I've read his contention, included the Dev's reasoning on having such a utility as a feature - because he intended Hometown to be a Fediverse platform that could encourage a Highly localized "community".

So you can select the other various, common types of scope for a post when making a post, as well as posting something that is only viewable to other users on your local instance - thereby supporting the 'local community only' aspect that has eluded and mostly deluded users on other platforms.

Why "deluded", because having a Fediverse account in the minds of most folks coming from the deprecated, monolithic silo space is something that has been heavily promoted by Fedizens as one of the reasons why it's better to use the Fediverse instead of those impersonal deprecated silo systems.

And that's simply not true.

Take me, for example. I have several accounts and interact using them with different circles of people (I won't get into the power of recursive circles as they were implemented in gplus). So I'mma just use mastodon.social, one of the biggest monolithic-like silo instances in the Fediverse, as an example here.

People there, most often n00bs from the November Rain or later) talk about the sense of "community" they have there, when they're really only speaking of the connections they have by following and being followed by not just people on that instance, but across the entire Fediverse.

The sense of community that almost everyone in the Fediverse perceives is mostly a compilation of the follows and followers that they each have, and is unique to themselves alone.

For example, I prolly know 4 or 5 people on each instance I have an account on. My community is comprised almost entirely of the direct connections I have made with others across the Fediverse at large, and yes, people on platforms with 'local-only' feeds to see my posts, know them to be local, but so do folks on other instances watching their 'global feeds' (or home feeds where someone they follow includes a follow of my account).

So to me, in my experience, my community is comprised of those who I've made connections with and the people they are connected to, with very little traffic from the local instance I am on at any given time.

To think that you're going to have a community on mastodon.social consisting of people primarily from that instance is a bit naive, IMO, coz your default feed grows exponentially with foreign user's posts the more you connect with anyone - not just the people you follow that are local to your instance. You see something, you interact because it's interesting, pertinent, or relevant to you - you don't do that because you've discerned that you will only interact with local accounts... that just ain't natural, human tendency.

So the creator of the Hometown fork realized that one type of vehicle in the feature set to mark this kind of delineation was that of the ability to post and see in your feed, local only posts, with the overt assertion that Hometown is a fork that in part, is a platform that can facilitate the social diaspora consisting of a 'mostly local' community.

Even entire instances, named or stated as localized geographically or topically, as having publicly open registrations miss this mark in a big way - people for whatever reason, want a Fediverse account, pick a host/instance, by whatever criteria, and then inadvertently end up creating their own diaspora of social connections across the entire Fediverse anyway.

nostr, Bluesky (when it eventually fully supports other instances), Threads (yeah, I know, it's a bastard, lolz), Minds, and other, bigger instances or monoliths, don't try to capitalize on this notion of "Your instance is your community" because overwhelmingly, it just isn't the case in reality.

I'm not saying that there aren't Fediverse instances are successful in cultivating small communities consisting of connections with others on those particular instances, but the most successful of those are the instances that have actually disabled Federation on those instances, lolz.... There's lots of examples of that, which is kewl - to each their own.

But the tendency of everyone to follow the Ew! Shiny! paradigm of simply liking and following what you like irrespective of whether it's on your local instance or not is the lions share of how people interact with each other.

Your thoughts, observations?

Attached graphic attrib: A Jack Russell, happy as can be, sitting in the pilot's seat flying a Cessna, not knowing WTF he's doing.... but he's really happy! The caption reads: "I have no idea what I'm doing".

#tallship #FOSS #Fediverse #social_networks #community #local_communities #global_communities #connections #follows #followers

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Don't trust those "little buddy heaters" and their cousins of having CO2 sensors and low #Oxygen cutoffs that their marketing indicates you can bank your life on.

You can fucking die.

I used a few of these for several years, when I lived completely off-grid, in the mountain wilderness far from the nearest humans.

They're really convenient and quick to heat a small area, or anything close to them, in just a few minutes, and you can pick them up at any Target, Walmart, Big 5, Tractor Supply, Etc., for $40 - $50.

Basically, you warm your environment, sitting on your cot and warming up your feet and toes before turning it off and burrowing into your subarctic bedding. You can leave the pilot going all night so all you need to do is twist and click it on on the morning, but seriously, why bother?

Sharp (and more importantly, observant) girl in the video - although there's no way to be sure, she just may have saved the lives of everyone in that fricken' tent.

https://invidious.fdn.fr/shorts/kaSwF2jru3A?si=u8a0HRKlqPxb_A8T&local=true

#tallship #asphyxiation #camping_safety #CO #Carbon_dioxide

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@gordoooo_z @PhenomX6 @futurebird @ink8 Whatever Eugen decides at this point it’s irrelevant. He’s pretty much lost his grip over holding the Fediverse brand as secondary to the notion of a fantasy “mastodon network” when he gave that Time Magazine interview two months ago in which the word “Fediverse” appeared not one single time - that caused enormous, untold damages including confusion that remains in the news media and disenfranchisement of large swaths of developers and users alike on not just other platforms, but mastodon instances themselves.

There’s really no such thing as toots anymore, Eugen himself refers to “Posts” and “Quote Posts”, and the submit button in mastodon now says “publish”. The reason #Misskey calls them “notes” is because that’s what they are actually called in #ActivityPub - there are also other types, that other platforms use as well, including “article”, although, instances like #qoto have set the character count for notes at 65535 🙂

It’s been covered in this thread already that Quote Posts are simply beyond the control of mastodon devs, Eugen’s edicts, or local mastodon users or admins, because most other platforms support it and there isn’t anything #mastopub can do about it. In Misskey, users can disallow it, but that only affects other local users, so it’s s moot point (except for silo instances).

There are very few Fediverse platforms that aren’t taking advantage of most things that are possible, for example, #Soapbox now has federated events, and introduced custom emoji reactions like Misskey has, and live chat - Misskey’s traditionally led the way with these federating features with #Calckey going even further.

Some platforms however, intentionally incorporate a leaner set of features; #Smithereen is one example, it doesn’t even sccomodate boosts, which harkens back to #Myspace, #VKontakte (aka, “VK” - not sure I spelled that right), and very early #Faceplant days. #Epicyon has anti-silo capabilities baked in.

#Mitra has #Substack style subscriptions at it’s core. Anyone can subscribe remotely from any Fediverse server instance where the user can receive DMs - and in congruence with privacy concerns that are typically expected for Fediverse implementations, it’s based on #Monero (XMR).

Most platforms also support #Markdown, with Cakckey being perhaps supporting the greatest superset IIRC, including #LaTEX, and #Friendica, being much older than msstodon, has continued to evolve over the past decade and still has support for #BBCode too, and direct links for uploading images for those who prefer to.

I didn’t see any mention of Markdown support when I bothered to look at the mastopub roadmap, yet even on that platform, Quote Posts are all throughout the stream and people boost and reply to them as the time - and, as mentioned earlier, anyone can create a post, simply pasting the link from someone else’s post, and then boost that… Voila! Local #Quote_Post.

mastodon was successful in its arrogance of leveraging some pretty graphics and welcoming verbiage into a brand that Eugen weaponized against virtually all other Fediverse platforms, and now, with all of the fine forks like #Hometown and several newcomers, we’ll soon be seeing hardforking as a result of that hostility.

But not just forks, funding and ambitious development as evidenced by existing and emerging platforms like #Cloudflare’s #Wildebeest, Tumbler, and the very unique, #Django based Takahē Fediverse server that I wrote about here:

https://tallship.writeas.com/takahe-a-new-fediverse-paradigm

Average people are already migrating in larger numbers everyday away from the archaic mastodonian resource hog to other, more capable and promising (and friendlier) platforms elsewhere in the Fediverse that have integrated and fully support #masto_migration, and even ones that don’t (yet) haver that feature.

Unlike other dinosaurs and the eponymous mammal for which Eugen chose the namesake of his #TootSuite product, we shouldn’t expect extinction for his platform, but the apathy and indifference levels are rising, as is the enmity in many sectors of the community for what others perceive as a betrayal (or sellout), and that kind of self-inflicted damage is often difficult to mitigate, with waves of disenchantment reverberating get into the future… Just look at what happened to #SourceForge - it still technically exists, but never recovered after the community betrayal it committed years ago.

And finally, there’s a irony so obvious that’s it’s not even plausible to deny… Eugen subverted the very rudimentary principal that the Fediverse network is ideologically predicated upon - #DeSoc… There’s no question that his goals shifted to that if building a silo for himself, at least to some great degree. Very sad.

An interesting thing about condescending others, you find yourself alone and isolated in an otherwise vibrant, busy world.

#tallship #Takahe #ActivityPub #privacy #community_values #FOSS

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