To Infinity and Beyond: Exploring the Secret Worlds of the Internet
summary
An exploration of obscure and lightweight Internet protocols found in modern infrastructure, highlighting a TFTP instance discovered on a Kubernetes node that was dismissed because TFTP uses UDP and isn’t suited for 50 GB transfers. Presents Gopher statistics (over 5 million selectors across ~330 unique servers), lists Gopher clients/servers used (Gophernicus, Lynx, VF1, Lagrange) and large proxy logs (8M and 5M requests). Covers Gemini (created 2019, default port 1965), compares search/index counts (1.6M pages on ~2,400 domains vs 357k on ~2,677) and notes how easy it is to run DIY Gemini servers and create lightweight text-first pages.
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chapters (7)
- 0:00Introduction
- 1:44Gopher presentation
- 7:23Geminispace discovery
- 11:06Creating a Geminispace site
- 12:32Why lightweight protocols
- 14:18Terminal and web demo
- 15:43Conclusion
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