Minus Protocol and EasyGPG 4.55

Work on adding Minus support to EasyGPG is finished. I will wait 24 to 48 hours before I publish EasyGPG 4.55 to be certain that it is ready.

EasyGPG's Read text from the Internet will be the only way to read the EasyGPG Minus server until I (and possibly others) can produce some Minus clients.

Minus is based on Gopher. It is Gopher without the odd type codes and Gopher menus. Gopher menus are not human-readable. A Gopher client is necessary to present these menus in a human-friendly way.

Because Minus is based on Gopher, it is possible to translate Minus URLs into Gopher URLs. While you are waiting on EasyGPG 4.55, you can use EasyGPG 4.54.7 to browse the EasyGPG Minus server.

gopher://7hinc6ucgvwbcjjoe44lhzzxyjptb3da6tzl33oe7ezl2qgwlrkfe6yd.onion:1990/9/

This just replaces minus:// with gopher:// and adds :1990/9 after the TLD of the domain. This is actually the simple way that EasyGPG 4.55 supports Minus.

Of course, you must have Tor to use .onion domains. However, using EasyGPG, it is only necessary to have the Tor Browser running, and curl installed.

In the next few days I want to start development of a very simple Minus client and server that others can use. These will be implemented as BASH scripts. The CLI client will probably not make Minus URLs links, as required by the specification, so it will not yet be a complete client implementation. It will, however, handle Tor in the same user-friendly way that EasyGPG does.

I hope to make the server and client so easy to read and understand that others will produce their own better alternatives. This applies especially to Minus clients.

#internet #protocol #tcp #file-server #hypertext #http #gemini #gopher #minus #minus-protocol #easygpg #gpg #encryption #privacy #surveillance #security #cryptography