Post 9pJQY2DNm9dpz2EOki by wasamasa@niu.moe
 (DIR) More posts by wasamasa@niu.moe
 (DIR) Post #9pJQY1TIXUmJg6favA by wasamasa@niu.moe
       2019-11-23T14:18:25Z
       
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       I've spent a few hours mapping out Gopherspace using Shodan, my best query so far (in terms of signal-noise ratio) is "port:70 \t", others worth trying are "port:70 gopher" and "port:70 70". I did it for two reasons, to find new #Gopher spaces and figure out what else is listening on that port. Here's my insights so far:- https://commons.host/ offers Gopher over TLS for some reason, with a cute fallback message- Some BBSes offer Gopher- Annoyingly some servers use copious amount of ANSI escapes, including but not limited to BBSes- Other services listening on that port are HTTP, SSH, CimFax (a Chinese fax solution?) and "VMware Authentication Daemon"
       
 (DIR) Post #9pJQY1pzB8vUoTHiHg by wasamasa@niu.moe
       2019-11-23T16:14:10Z
       
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       Meh, it seems the majority of devices available via this port are a certain TP-Link router mostly encountered in eastern-european countries. That will make more exhaustive scans far more annoying.
       
 (DIR) Post #9pJQY2DNm9dpz2EOki by wasamasa@niu.moe
       2019-11-24T22:11:06Z
       
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       I eventually scripted the "port:70 70" query using Shodan's API, wrote lots of jq to select only the results looking like Gopher entries and wrote some more code to extract the URLs and banners from roughly 500 servers. Here's my favorite finds so far:- gopher://b.bewo.pw <- "This site runs on a Beaglebone Black using a server written in assembly."- gopher://taz.de <- bloat-free version of a certain German newspaper- gopher://acm.umn.edu <- "If you came from the Sysadmin Wanted ad, look here"-  gopher://sandokan.tk <- A hacker fraternity hosting a single CVE exploit so far, hopefully more in the future- gopher://gopher.su:70/1/weebshit <- Someone explaining how and why he put up manga, using sixel of all the things...There's more of course, feel free to DM me for the full list. Discovering these makes me feel like in the early 2000's, when I've first encountered web portals and manually curated lists of websites.
       
 (DIR) Post #9pJQY2eK9zBzKapukK by hunter@niu.moe
       2019-11-24T22:24:43Z
       
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       @wasamasa I don't really get the recent Gopher craze. I feel like it's part of the simple web movement but losing the multimedia aspect like embedding images sucks. It just seems like an overreaction to how ridiculous the modern web is. My view is that it's better to present sites with HTML and a sprinkling of CSS. A higher percentage of Gopher sites are going to be neat though, so maybe that improved signal/noise ratio is benefit enough.
       
 (DIR) Post #9pJQY37kOajCnqbPbk by wasamasa@niu.moe
       2019-11-24T22:55:40Z
       
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       @hunter I think we can all agree that the web this days is ridiculous, but I don't see this trend going away any time. Contrast this with a few hundred hobbyists actually doing something about it and showing how much you can do with a minimum of resources.Regarding neat stuff, there's almost 50 services hooked up to a BBS. Most of these mirror each other to varying degrees of completion. It's nice to have a slightly less involved gateway to a BBS than the traditional clients which throw way more than text and links at you.
       
 (DIR) Post #9pJQY3cEZF7AKOrl7w by ayo@niu.moe
       2019-11-25T06:46:33Z
       
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       @wasamasa @hunter You don't really need to reach for Gopher to go back to the good old days of interlinked hypertext. The neat and well-designed indieweb is still very much alive, just obscured behind search engines that don't list them, crap sites doing better SEO than they deserve and Tor Onion services.I'd really love some good old indices for these sites.