Johan Bové

Why do I believe Gemini is great for personal Internet presences? First of all, it's a real grass-roots initiative which I am very excited about.

If you're reading this, chances are high you are already using Gemini. But for history reasons and to share my opinions of Gemini I would like to offer you here some views of mine.

Collecting some of the strong-points of Gemini from my perspective of having some experience with Gopher and running personal websites.

Fast and lightweight

• It's very easy on the system resources. So the protocol works really well on slower hardware without any problems. Hosting on a Raspberry Pi3 is easy-peasy.
• Since there are no fancy design in Gemini capsules, it is really optimized for low bandwidth.
• It should work really fine on a feature-phone, like for KaiOS. I don't believe there is a client yet for KaiOs at this time.
• It's fairly easy to build clients and servers for the protocol.

Simple yet complete

• The specifications provide enough functionality to do basically what you would expect to be able to do online.
• Much lower learning curve compared to Gopher and HTML. You can start publishing Gemini pages within minutes.
• Even-though the syntax is limited, it still gives enough playroom for creative expression.
• Use of TLS certificates promises security and privacy.
• It is more international than US-centric Gopher.
• The procol supports the UTF-8 character set so any language can be used to publish sites in.
• This should help make the protocol more popular in non-ascii wielding regions in the World.

Easy to publish

• Content will be probably first of all stored in static text files which are future-proof and easy to maintain.
• Many servers already available that require minimal technical skills.
• Yes, you still need a server, but there are many collectives which you can join to facilitate this.

Focus

• No popups, animations, videos, sound effects.
• Focus on actual content instead of fluff and effects.
• No advertisemens and commercial tracking.
• No Facebook, Google or Twitter.

Accessible

• Power of formatting goes into the clients or readers. Like in the good old days of the early Web, people are expected to style the content to their own liking.
• It's pure text, has simple navigation rules, so should be great for people with disabilities.
• No JavaScript so you really see what you get.

And on top of this, the young Gemini community is driven to make this a success!

I'm sold.

ps. I published this first in plain text on my Gemini capsule and now that I copy paste this into a HTML document I can really tell just how easy it is to publish on Gemini.

Got a SwatchPay watch developed by Swatch and G+D Mobile Security, the other Saturday as a father’s day gift. I activated the payment function today using the Boon Virtual Debet Card I had registered for some months ago. Since WireCard in Germany is filing for bankrupcy there was some confusion and uncertainty.

The nice people at the Düsseldorf @Swatch store had to verify that it would work. It did. Some time later I paid contact-less for lunch with my new watch. Pretty sleek and COVID - safe.

Being able to pay contact-less is pretty great. But people on the street who depend on small change donations are really left out. I simply don’t carry cash and coins anymore with me. My credit-card size wallet also attest for that.

So how could we give small-change using a contact-less cash system? Similar to how in China vagrants use Alibaba Pay QR codes to beg for a small contribution on the street.

How would that work with a system that relies on NFC like SwatchPay? Give everyone who needs it access to NFC readers? What is the cheapest, most battery-efficient, weather-proof, solar-powered NFC reader payment terminal you know of?

It would have to be a system that works offline, but where the collections can be transfered into a system that exchanges for actual cash or exchange for food and clothes or shelter. People who have no identification should also still be able to use this system. The reader would have to taken care of as if it was actual cash.

How can we digitalize small-change donations in Germany where a large part of the population, luckily, still trusts cash in the hand more than electronic payment systems?

So the best solution is that we would reverse the devices. The people on the street all get “SwatchPay - like” watches or a similar thing like a card. They work without a battery, need only to be registered once. Then it would be up to everyone else to use their phones, or a portable NCF payments-capable device, to initialize the donation transaction. There would be an app for that. Just like the existing Boon or SwatchPay apps.

Instead of paying, we would be giving.

How much technology is inside the SwatchPay watches? It’s an NFC tag chip, similar to the ones we all have on our bank and credit cards.

How SwatchPay! Works (source)
Payments are made possible by the NFC chip, which is located on the back of the case. In a ring around the bezel, the watch has an antenna that catches the radiation, connecting the chip with the payment terminal. This is exactly the same technology as your bank card uses. You can activate your watch with your internet banking system. Setting this up costs about ten minutes. SwatchPAY! uses a method they call tokenization, which creates a unique “token” for the device. Simply store your credit or prepaid card on your smartwatch via the app (activation of SwatchPAY! watch in Swatch store) – the app is available for iOS and Android.

More insights in the tokenization can be found in the PDF: SwatchPay case-study by G+D Mobile Security.

Giesecke+Devrient Mobile Security is a company based in Munich, Germany

I’m not an engineer or have really investigated fully into the technical side of this, but the logic seems sound. What if we could tokenize everything this way?

And how we would avoid abuse is a whole different level of challenges to look into.

I've been dugg into Secure Scuttlebutt and Dat since a couple of weeks. This peer-to-peer Internet of Humans (and bots) is intriguing. The community is very friendly and the open-source software projects and implementations inspiring. My wish would be that it would be even easier to get friends and family on to Scuttlebutt (or SSB). There are still some technical hurdles to overcome. But I believe the future looks bright!

I’m happy the space drop is over for me. Lumens should have never been linked to a monetary value like it was done, to avoid hoarding hackers. The whole thing almost ruined Keybase for a lot of people. However the concept of the Stellar network still has huge potential. Keybase was on its way to become a crucial key factor in a more secure, verified Internet, but became out of greedy gold rush motivations, almost malicious. I hope Keybase will still become the connected, secure communication and verification platform it was meant to be.

My mom's brother Werner only became 41. He died on December 26, 1995 after a short intense battle with lung cancer. He was a heavy smoker. I remember him mostly as a DJ and a computer wizard. I remember he had boxes full of diskettes filled with early PC games. I wonder now if he posted anything on a BBS at the time or had his own Gopher site or even an early HTML website. I wish he was alive now and could observe how the Internet grew to what it is today and how computing power encreased exponentially. I wish he could be here today so I could share with him what I do a for a living as a Web developer and to be able to share good music. In 1995 I was only 15 years old and was not into PC much yet. Cancer sucks.