IF you don't know about any nodes (because you are a brand new user), AND you can't access these three hardcoded one, THEN you are fucked.

No I'm not saying that anybody could ever do better than that. Even in theory I don't think you can do better than that.

What I *AM* saying is that nostr is on the same order of uncensorability as this is. That is, IF you don't know about any relays (because you are a brand new user) THEN you are fucked.

My point was that if you don't have a node list, you can't get one without going to these "convenience nodes". Take down these nodes and new people who have no other way of finding a node can't get anywhere.

This is IMHO the same problem nostr has, except nostr has the problem right now because it has no "convenience nodes".

I'm willing to admit that I am wrong and learn something. But just saying I'm wrong isn't going to do it. Like any kind of science, you have to show me that I am wrong.

I don't know who runs them.

router.bittorrent.com:6881

dht.transmissionbt.com:6881

dht.libtorrent.org:25401

Wow I just found nostr:npub13ndpm2hm9hud4azsq5euhf5mv3d05r90wymwxsd7rdn29609hhvqp60svh. He is so *smart* and not at all "retarded." 😏

I'm not sure if I should bother correcting his misunderstandings of nostr, or his misjudgements of what is and isn't censorable and why, or just ignore him. Does he listen or just talk? We will see.

I like pkarr. I like using Mainline DHT directly even more. I'm using it in Mosaic. But it is also censorable. The bittorrent DHT may not be subject to sybil attacks, but it only has 3 (AFAICT) public well-known on-ramps. Take those three down and people who don't already have a node list can't get on. Nostr is not better for bootstrapping (finding a person's relays) but it isn't much worse. There is a weak centralizing pressure to put relay lists on a the same well known popular relays, but those change over time and the pressure changes over time, and good clients republish to the current popular set which can move. The main issue is that client devs are all over the map in terms of how they choose to deal with the situation, and some aren't even using outbox model. IMHO (emphasis on H) the main benefit of the DHT is someone new with a single key they want to follow can get started without knowing anybody nor any relays/servers.

There is no censorability difference between homeservers in pkarr and relays in nostr. You can run your own, or you can outsource it, in both cases. One isn't more censorship resistant than the other.

When I look at https://github.com/pubky I see among top rpos "pubky-app" which says it is a deprecated repository, and will be replaced with pubky/franky. But pubky/franky does not exist. So IMHO there is no opensource pubky, which means I won't be using it and I recommend against.

My german shepherd didn't give balls back. She could keep two in her mouth. I used to play fetch with her with three balls. She kept 2 in her mouth, and would run to the 3rd ball but couldn't pick it up. I had to run fetch the 3rd ball every time after she got to it. Basically the same as playing fetch with myself while my dog tagged along. Sure I could have trained her right, but I needed the exercise.

He cut taxes and raised spending in an unbalanced "big beautiful bill". But he also raised taxes via tarriff.

The net result might be taxing foreign spending instead of taxing income. Not bad if it balances.

I'm reminded of that fatboy slim song

give the poor man a break

give the poor man a break

give the poor man a

give the poor man a

give poor

give porn

gay porn

gay porn

gay porn

gay porn

gay porn

Maybe people got tired of winning.

GM nostr:npub1zafcms4xya5ap9zr7xxr0jlrtrattwlesytn2s42030lzu0dwlzqpd26k5

nostr:nevent1qqsxx0dxggzyrjyn80zcarujc3y3rppyvpwagvawyww55qajlnhjrscpypmhxue69uhkx6r0wf6hxtndd94k2erfd3nk2u3wvdhk6w35xs6z7qgwwaehxw309ahx7uewd3hkctcpypmhxue69uhkummnw3ezuetfde6kuer6wasku7nfvuh8xurpvdjj7z4vfa6

Despite what I wrote yesterday or 2 days ago about Epstein, I do think there are a lot of shenannagans going on, and a lot we are not being told.

nostr:nevent1qqsdmdwwnv3yclckmu0dd7frumgg8xd0jp7zl2p98yfgy6933nydy7gpz4mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfduhsf0s8e9

Alan Dershowitz also came out saying he knows many other names and files that are being hidden.

Trump was clearly nervous when the Epstein quesiton was asked a few days ago, so nervous he said crazy things: "Are you still talking about Jeffrey Epstein? This guy's been talked about for years. Are people still talking about this guy? This creep? That is unbelievable. I can't believe you're asking a question on Epstein at a time like this, when we're having some of the greatest success, and also tragedy with what happened in Texas. It just seems like a desecration."

Back when Lex Friedman interviewed Trump before the election, he was nervous about it then too.

I can't account for everybody and I'm doing that much research. But the indictment I read said there were "dozens" of "minor girls", had one charge of paying for sex, and has the statement "The victims described herein were as young as 14 years old at the time..." although I believe all but one were at least 15. And that he "recruited, enticed, harbored, transported, provided, and obtained numerous individuals who were less than 18 years old... and who where then caused to engage in at least one commercial sex act in ... New York".

Yeah I saw this news and heard him say it on video. Maybe it is true. It doesn't contridict what I posted as what I think is the most likely situation. He's not even saying the people this information is about had sex with underage girls, he is saying there are more documents that they haven't released and according to Dershowitz that evidence exonerates them.

I used to use Trillian. I had a lot of accounts on it: AIM, ICQ, MSN, Yahoo, etc. Those times were better. I don't know why it went away.

I tried to use it recently and found the popular software far too complex, both the server and client, and also far too limited. Not a good combination.

425 Too Early

Not the Onion: Israel Wants to Build the Most Moral Concentration Camp in the World

(I didn't read it, I just laughed at the headline, but the link is proof this is a real article)

https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/editorial/2025-07-10/ty-article-opinion/israel-wants-to-build-the-most-moral-concentration-camp-in-the-world/00000197-f0b3-d963-addf-f4b7029a0000

Why am I tagged here? You want my opinion on that statement?

I'd say gsovereignty can't prove it 😂

Nah, I barely know anything. I just type a lot. :-)

In his opinion, what he did shouldn't be illegal. The girls were not that young (14-18) and he didn't force them.

As a society we have agreed on laws against it because we know girls of that age still just do whatever they are told, do not really exert their own will yet, and a commanding presence suggesting things to them is hard to push back against when you are that young.

But why would evolution make it such that girls go through puberty and yet no men are attracted to them for another 4 years even as they are biologically ready? It's not logical. Clearly some men will be attracted as soon as puberty has completed - the early bird gets the worm.

1/2

He helped rich people hide money. For example, if they were in a divorce, so they wouldn't have to split it 50/50. By cavorting with the rich he was able to find the richest of clients.

He could have been funded by an intel agency, but I don't like to believe things just because it might be true if there isn't really better evidence.

Yes I was paying attention when that happened. She was in a car accident a week or two earlier and reportedly had organ damage or something? Then they say she committed suicide.

There are tons of interesting links, coincidences, allegations, and such. Whitney Webb did huge amount of research. Ghislane's father was interesting.

But also it is easy to see connections that don't mean what you think. Science is plagued with this, mistakenly believing a cause when it isn't a cause.

A lot of people seem to believe that Jeffrey Epstein recruited underage girls in order to videotape them having sex with rich and powerful people as compromat for an intelligence agency, perhaps Mossad, and that he was murdered in prison to cover up the loose end.

While I cannot prove that this is not true, there is almost no evidence for this story. The evidence points to a simpler story: Jeffrey Epstein was a socialite and financier who had connections with lots of famous and powerful people, and he also liked having sex with minors and so he recruited minors so that he could have sex with them. Several famous people also took the opportunity to have sex with minors facilitated by Epstein, but not as videotaped compromat. The second time he was imprisoned for it he committed suicide by strangulation.

The hyoid bone can be fractured by hanging, but more often by strangulation, and the description of Epstein's body as found is more like strangulation. You can commit suicide by strangulation (please don't).

The strange occurance of the camera being off, the cell not being monitored, could have been guards who were turning their backs to let him commit suicide ("fucking pedo should die, let's let him do it."). Papers related to Epstein said he was a suicide risk prior to his death. US Attorneys office offered a plea deal to the correctional officers if they claim they fell asleep, who rejected it claiming they did nothing wrong, but clearly the Justice Department suspected the guards.

Earlier on July 23 Epstein attempted suicide, which put him on suicide watch. But Epstein's attorney argued against it and he was taken off suicide watch but stull was supposed to be checked on every 30 minutes. So the bedsheets were not toilet paper in this cell as some claim.

The claim that Alexander Acosta said "I was told Epstein 'belonged to intelligence' and to leave it alone" has only one source, an editorial in The Daily Beast by Vicky Ward who says it came from an interview she did with a former senior White House official and this is what she claims Accosta told the Trump team. It is not in court documents or congressional testimony from Accosta as far as I can tell, and regarding it Accosta said "I would hesitate to take this reporting as fact."

Maxwell is in prison for assisting Epstein in recruiting underaged girls for sex with Epstein.

The famous people that various girls claimed were involved in sex acts in this situation may or may not have been. The evidence doesn't strongly favor either side.

I have found no evidence of video tapes recovered from the Island with the names of famous people on their labels. I vaguely remember seeing it in a video way back when, but either I am mistaken or the Internet has been scrubbed of such a thing. If anybody has it, please share. I'm currently assuming this was a myth at the time and never happened.

The conspiracy theory was fun, but it is too flimsy.

That is interesting and detailed information.

Web apps running in Chrome or Firefox or Safari wont work with any of those solutions though AFAICT. Clients would have to run on the Tor browser to access .onion relays. Which is sensible anyways (using a tor proxy w/o the tor browser is risky).

Q: Can browser apps access tor onion sites? Such sites could not have a valid certificate, right? So I'm guessing they cannot.

So then tor usage is limited to having the client tunnel everything through tor and out through some exit node to a regular website with a valid cert.

It's a Cambrian explosion of complexity. Very innovative space and cool ideas are being tested.

I don't know how to check fully either. I just react to what I do know and hope it is good enough for now.

We need some sort of better feature detection, or maybe we need to better utilize what we already have. NIP-11 has "payment_required" which is defined as payment for ANY action, so such relays are completely unsuitable for inbox/outbox/dm. "restricted_writes" means it won't be a good inbox. But then there are more. How can you deal with the posting policy? You have to just post and hope.

Your PR #1924 and nostr:npub1l3cgtsurhfchg4cyhhqudm70074sr96srhje330xc5m6czej5n9s9q6vs2 PR #1969 should be combined. Neither of them help explain however if the relay would be a good inbox or outbox.

Hmm, that's better than I remember.

Maybe I'm confusing my memory with WebGPU, which even chromium wasn't yet supporting without passing a command line flag.

Unfortunately for users, there are a lot of complex policies that different relays adopt which make them unsuitable for inbox/outbox usage.

If a relay requires payment to write, and you use it as your outbox without paying, then your messages will not be accepted by that relay.

If a relay requires payment to read, and you use it as your outbox (paying or not), then most users can't read your posts because they didn't sign up for that same relay.

If a relay requires AUTH to defeat spam, and you use it as your INBOX, then people who care about privacy will not reply to your messages.

I could go on, the list of gotchas is far longer than just this.

Gossip client, admittedly written for technical people not normies, has a "test relay" button to check if a relay is suitable as an outbox or inbox.

When I last looked about a year ago, WebTransport wasn't well supported yet.

That is a good point. But I'm not as concerned with specification centralization. If that is attacked, well, people fork it. And we have to rely on people converging on something anyways, which means it will be forked but somehow there will be the most popular fork which people will follow. Hmm, reminds me of blockchain.

But as to the details, I'm inspired by a number of different mechanisms none of which I'm committed to. TLS uses a list of available algorithms, and social media could use a list of feature extensions... at least for additive. Or it can be FEATUREA_V1 and also FEATUREA_V2 where a server might support both for a long time, until V1 died out.

I just want to say here (because I've been critical of some of his ideas) that I have mad respect for nostr:npub180cvv07tjdrrgpa0j7j7tmnyl2yr6yr7l8j4s3evf6u64th6gkwsyjh6w6 and I'm hugely impressed by nostr which was quite a breakthrough, and that he has proven wiser than me more than once. But where I disagree I'm going to say so. And so then we can all argue about it.

I focus on what is wrong (or what I believe is wrong, rightly or wrongly) because that is what you need to do to fix things, but it also ends up coming off as negativity or bad-mouthing, which isn't intended. 💜

Someone tried to blackpill me today. But I coughed it up and spit it out.

The blackpill was that decentralized systems can't innovate because it is too hard or impossible to make breaking changes. Centralized systems like facebook can just innovate without permission or compatibility and so they will always innovate much faster, and so decentralized system can never keep up and will never compete with them.

I partially agree. Yes, centralized systems can innovate faster. Yes, it might always be that most people will be on the centralized systems.

But where I disagree is this: Centralized systems keep letting us down. And some of us are happy enough to use a decentralized system for a subset of our social media, to have at least some level of reliability and trust that we can depend on.

Moxie Marlinspike (fittingly named after a knot) poo-poo's decentralization here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DdM-XTRyC9c

but much of what he claims is wrong, adjacent to the truth but not quite correct or meaningful.

Let's look at breaking changes. Consider how breaking changes can occur:

1) You go around and get everybody to update their software (PITA and eventually impossible)

2) You just give up on the feature and decide we can live without it (a cop out)

3) You version the protocol.

nostr:npub180cvv07tjdrrgpa0j7j7tmnyl2yr6yr7l8j4s3evf6u64th6gkwsyjh6w6 valuing simplicity rejected (3) in his writings early on for nostr. Because versioning multiplies complexity. You have to keep all the old code and have case dependent code for the newer code.

But I still believe that (3) is the only way out, and growing complexity is inevitable. Yes of course any change that can be made non-breaking is definately the preferred approach, but not everything can do that.

There are real world examples of this that are working just fine. The Vulkan API is in a sense decentralized. It works on many different hardware devices and with many different OS vendors. It is versioned. How did it not ossify? It's a fucking mystery ain't it?!

Also, Moxie talks about IPv4 not being able to get to IPv6 and IPv4 ossifying. But fails to mention the obvious: IPv4 is the greatest success story ever. Damn near everybody uses it all the time. So who cares if some parts of it have ossifed? Not me. And to be honest, parts of it (like congestion control) were able to change very late in the game. So this is a piss-poor argument against decentralization.

Also, Moxie talks about how many people are programming stuff and you can't keep up with all of them. But he fails to mention that less than 10% of those people are useful. Or that the management interference almost necessarily breaks any useful thing they end up doing. Against the view of all the pundits (Bill Gates most notably) open source software supercedes commercial software in almost every domain. Because in open source, and with decentralized solutions, the entire world participtes, rather than just one or two buildings in Redmond. And generally only the most intellgent high-IQ people can pick it up and run with it, meaning you have a worldwide team of highly intelligent people versus a limited commercial team that is mostly deadweight and plagued by managers who want to make their mark.

I may not be a bright-eyed (red eyed?) bushy-tailed spring chicken bitcoiner who is upbeat about everything and believes everything is possible. I'd say I"m a bit more cautious than most about what I hope for or aim at. But I am still a "can do" person and I will never stop trying.

*spits out the black pill*

Gossip client lets you override somebody's name with a petname, and puts a special symbol next to their name if you did that. Pet names were supposed to be a distributed naming web where you would refer to somebody through somebody else's petname: JudgeHardcase.hodlbod would be the person that hodlbod calls "JudgeHardcase". But I never coded anything like that.

I like the fat binary idea. Newer clients sign the JSON event and also the new format. Mosaic has been going with a "clean break" and a new cryptosystem, in which this idea isn't sufficient for dealing with replies... but I'm getting closer to the point of just accepting that we simply have to stick with secp256k1 and simply have to keep working with existing nostr.... still a fight goes on in my head.

Line structured data (like HTTP) is reasonable. But even HTTP after they went with line-based added compression. The compressed data is clearly binary, the thing everybody shutters about, but nobody seems to mind when HTTP uses compression. I also want what is digitally signed to be all lined up ready to sign and not need to be copied and shuffled first, but that is a minor point.

As for kind, I'm of the opinion that we have a 64-bit kind number, where 5 bytes are the application ID, 2 bytes are used within the application, and 1 byte is flags telling the relay how to handle it (ephemeral? duplicates? serve only to author? etc). Then applications (like zaps, kanban boards, git, etc) are out of scope and specified by anybody who wants to write an app that is now strictly on top. App IDs are just handed out to anybody who wants one with no debate.

HTTP/WebSockets doesn't add anything on top of streams except for framing (which is easy). So I'm for direct on top of QUIC, and for Tor support which can't handle UDP direct on top of TCP with TLS.

I'm keen on using client-side certificates in TLS for auth. The only downside is that your connection is either AUTHed or not, so you can't conditionally upgrade it, meaning you have to reconnect if something let you know it is time to auth. But reconnecting on QUIC is trivial and highly performant. Putting AUTH inside of nostr caused some state and order related problems... maybe we solved them all I'm not sure. But TLS auth I'm quite sure is well researched and secure.

We used to talk on Telegram. One day I burned my account because I suspected Ukraine was using it to crash my computer (only because of the repeated coincidence of when it crashed and what pro-Russian telegram channels I was reading). I'm not sure if other devs are still over there. XMPP is so old now - I've used it in the last year but it seemed rough. I have signal but only on my phone where I can't type efficiently.

Nice client. First I've seen it. I hope it surpasses gossip so I can retire.

I know, I know! .. oh wait. No I don't know. I've heard good arguments on both sides. Let's just say "it's complicated."

I lean towards Netanyahu using Israel.

I was at the supermarket buying groceries and the machine said "Enter PIN" and then right below it showed my PIN! I was like "What?! Don't show that" and I leaned in to cover it up. Then I realized it was showing the price of what I was buying.

I will make a very important post about how to tell the truth from misinformation. You should read it after I post it.