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Notes by Mike Dilger | export

 I don't think humans are smart enough to survive.

Maybe the cockroaches, when they evolve intelligence, will find a way. 
 This is a sign of things to come. 
 I literally have no relays setup anywhere but in nos2x with simple read / write for months 
 If you never published any relays, gossip tries to figure out which relays are the most likely to have your stuff. That is based on a lot of things like where notes were seen in the past, relay hints, etc.  Easily overridden once you publish relays.

My gossip says your relays are:  nos.lol   relay.damus.io   relay.snort.social   eden.nostr.land
 
 #steak

If you are going to eat steak, you'd best learn how to cook it wrong?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tjQWzOFFxKU 
 #politics #middleeast
 
Hear the leaders / representatives of 57 Arab and Muslim countries respond to the recent Israeli attacks and Netanyahu's claims..... in English.

All 57 of these states just want peace and are willing to guarantee the security of the State of Israel.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TobPROj8Lvk 
 Has anyone here built a nuclear bunker for themselves? 
 Whatever you do, be aware of the nuclear sponge. Some people relocate to the middle of nowhere only to discover they are near a nuclear missile silo. 
 The UN has allowed bloody dictatorships like Cuba and Venezuela to enter the human rights council... 
 Committes and UN groups are pointless things.  All that matters is the General Assembly and (unfortunately) the Security Council.  The rest of the UN is woke socialists trying to make one world government. 
 Spend less time adding snazzy features and more time making sure core features work. 
 Question for the Men:

When you think of Sundresses, what does the dress actually look like in yo... 
 Lightweight cotton.  Pleated or ruffled.  Just past knee length.  Some light shines through the fabric.  Short sleeved.  Often yellow or white or spring colors.

How did I do?  I didn't cheat, this is what I think a sun dress is.  Now I'll go read the other answers. 
 If this were X I would post something snarky like "The IDF are hiding in tunnels under the West Bank settlements. The are using civilians as human shields!".  But this is nostr so I won't post it. 
 #politics

How to collapse NATO:

Step 1: Turkey incites Israel, with rhetoric, supplying Israel's enemies, maybe even launches against them.
Step 2: Israel attacks Turkey (the 2nd most powerful NATO country)
Step 3: NATO countries now have to defend Turkey due to article 5
Step 4: USA breaks with NATO and defends Israel (of course they would)

There is no mechanism to expel a NATO member.
Turkey is very pro-Palestine and has threatened to invade Israel and forcibly keep the peace.
Putin would love to weaken or collapse NATO, and this lever has to be on his mind. 
 #politics #opinion

I'm probably too one-sided against Israel.  So let me make a case for Israel.

Hezbollah has been firing rockets at it for almost a year. Those rockets are not guided and their targets are not certain, making them war crimes and "terrorism".  They come from various places, mostly from valleys in the mountains, but also from residential areas.  If Israel is held to the standard of "you cannot use war crimes or terrorism in response" that puts Israel at a distinct disadvantage and they just lose. Of course they aren't going to just sit there and take it.  When they did air strikes on Southern Lebanon they hit many civilian residential targets which then experienced many subsequent explosions (indicating they hit a cache of weapons) or several rockets came flying out in spirals like a fireworks stand (again indicating that they hit a cache of weapons).  You can find the videos. I can attest to seeing some of these on live-stream so they aren't AI generated.

Now I believe that Hezbollah's aims are noble, to pressure Israel to stop the genocide. But their methods include terrorism, war crimes, and intentionally placing military assets among cilivilan neighborhoods.

Just because one side is committing crimes doesn't mean the other side isn't.

Many innocent Lebanese are dying, as well as many innocent Israelis, and war is hell.

I predict it will get much worse, because Israel has just repeatedly escalated over and over without even IMHO a good reason to have done so, leaving their enemies little choice than to escalate and possibly even do a ground invasion of Israel or S Lebanon or both.

I hear there are 40,000 Hezbollah ground troops in the Syrian Golan Heights ready to invade.
I hear there are 40,000 US troops throughout the middle east, as well as new troops amassing at Cyprus and the 101st Airborne.
Russia has a naval base at Tartus (North of Beirut in Syria) a city that Israel attacked four days ago (I don't know what the target was). They have an S-500 here, the placement of which put an end to Israeli fighter jet activity in Syria (Russia said they would shoot them down). Russia should be able to shoot down Israeli fighter jets attacking Beirut, but they haven't done so and I don't believe they ever told Israel they would shoot down their planes in Lebanon, only in Syria.

There are lots of ways this could pay out. 
 Yes, the war cabinet wanted the excuse to do what they have always planned to do, and there is some evidence that they set up the excuse.

HAMAS is an acronym for Ḥarakat al-Muqāwamah al-ʾIslāmiyyah, and their militant unit is the Ezzedeen Al-Qassam Brigades. Mostly people mean Al-Qassam when they say Hamas, but they say Hamas since Westerners don't usually make the distinction from political Hamas and military Hamas.

I always remember something after I post that adds more subtelty and context. Many rockets from S. Lebanon were targetted well enough to take out iron dome sensors and such. And many were not towards anything in particular, just designed to trigger an iron dome response in order to deplete the iron dome.  So I shouldn't say they were all war crimes.  Some were. 
 Nobody ever said Israel can't fight back, that is a straw man argument.

But If a school shooter holds a bunch of kids hostage, the FBI doesn't bomb the school killing all the kids in order to kill the shooter and then say "it is his fault, he was using human shields."  Stop and  think about how psychotic and murderous that viewpoint is.  How have they have twisted your mind into accepting that psychotic view?  No, the FBI waits for a clean shot and tries to protect innocent people.

The reason is that psychologically healthy human beings care about innocent human life.

Clearly Israel does not. 
 I appreciate your opinion.

If you don't care to read the rest of this post, the summary is just this: "make peace not war."

I don't accept the human shield argument. The IDF headquarters is next to a shopping mall in downtown Tel-Aviv. Are they using that as a human shield? Israel's enemies have known for a long time that human shielding doesn't work.  It just happens to be that some military assets and civilian infrastructure is proximate. Beirut is a densely built up city. There is no place that the leaders can meet that doesn't endanger civilians in an assassination strike.  Military leaders simply don't meet up in pastures on hilltops.

I also don't accept the common belief that Arab muslims have always hated Jews and that they are all dead-set on killing all the Jews and therefore there is no other solution but to kill them all.

	CAVEAT:  Right now lots of Arab muslims want to kill all the Jews out of revenge (and for their safety), and lots of Israelis want to kill all the Arabs out of revenge (and for their safety).  But these are not permanent stances, they are reactionary emotions. If you sympathize with Israelis feeling unsafe, how much more unsafe do you think the muslim Arabs feel?

I believe this "permanent irreconcilable enmity" fiction was sowed by religious extremists who needed an excuse to capture the land they believe God promised them.  I know from history that this enmity with the Arabs started only 80 years ago.  Yes there are ancient hadith prophesys about Arabs winning a battle against Jews, but that isn't a central tenet of any of their scriptures -- every culture hated Jews back then: Russians, Greeks, Germans, Arabs, pretty much everybody agreed to be racist against Jews back in those days.  And a prophecy of a particualr battle against Jews sometime in the future is scant evidence for "permanent irreconcilable enmity."  Before 1948 Jews considered Arabs their brothers under Ishmael.  Jews were fleeing persecution in Europe and from Russia, not from Arabs.  They coined the term anti-Semite which includes all the Arabs alongside all the Jews because their enemy wasn't the Arabs, it was the Nazis and pre-Nazi Europeans and Russians.  Jews included the Arabs as their brothers in the term "Semite".  The term worked and became very powerful so they can't change it now, but it exposes the truth... that Arabs didn't used to be their enemy.

Groups like the Houthis have nothing to gain by doing what they are doing.  They have no economic interest in their actions.  They are 100% selflessly defending the Palestinians at their own expense and lives.  I've never seen that before in geopolitics but it gives me renewed faith in humanity, that a people would do what they believe is the right thing even against their own interest.  They have made it very clear why and under what conditions they would stop.  Those conditions require movements towards friendship.  All Israel needs to do is start sowing friendship, it doesn't need to kill all it's enemies.

But Israel only sows enmity. The only tool they wield is murder. All negotiations are head fakes and deceptions. If they never sow friendship, they will never reap it. The more murder they sow, the more enemies they have. They now have enemies in every nation on earth, and nations are far more explicitly distancing themselves from Israel. Great Job, Bibi.

But It is never too late. I am a person of hope and change, not of hate and vengence. I believe Israel can still recover from this and grow their economy far beyond what it was, and have peace with all of its neighbors.  Yes there will be reprocussions for a long time to come, and terrorists who want revenge for their families for at least another 40 years. But eventually Israel can recover if it wants to. If it keeps going down the path it is going down it will probably end in a number of nuclear explosions. Really really low social intelligence religious nut jobs are running the ship right now, but I believe that ship can still be rescued even at this late hour. 
 Yeah. Also the Brits promised the Arabs recognition of their state if they would push back the Turks, which they did, and then got worse than nothing in return. 
 > They were living peacefully together until Israel was attacked on October 7th

75 years of military occupation, 16 years of military blockade, continuous taking of houses and land, one person at a time to be replaced by militant settlers, different systems of law for Palestinians versus Israelis...  I see why they call you "LibertyGal". 

Your post is so disingenuous and/or poorly informed that I am disengaging now. Your conversation points are just a bunch of hasbara tripe that I've debunked so many times as to be boring and a waste of my time.
 
 I will happily consign my political opinions to some closed chat community instead of making them kind-1 posts in everybody's faces.

But how can I do that?  What is the leading nostr chat client (e.g. NIP-29)? 
 Right now I'm trying to strike a balance between saying what I feel I need to say about politics, and not pissing people off.  But to strike that balance I am typing in a lot of things and then thinking "I'd better not post that."   I would be a lot more free and post a lot more posts if I knew the audience signed up for such posts.  And people who don't want to hear my political views could only hear my mostly nostr posts.  Everybody would benefit from such siloing. 
 I appreciate that.  But I really want chat spaces.  I want a dev chat space between the gossip devs so we can get off of telegram too. 
 Nobody has been complaining (recently) but I have been very aware of my audience and I really don't want to wind people up.

I also want a chat space for gossip devs so we can get off of telegram. 
 Thanks. Yes I suppose it is.

But I also don't want to infuriate anybody, and some of the things I have almost posted surely would have. Everybody here is so nice, I don't want to turn it into an X-like cesspool of hate slinging.  And I think the best way to avoid that is if people have fine-grained control over what they follow.

I have started using hashtags to help but I suspect most people/clients aren't able to filter with such fine grain controls.  Gossip users can with something like this:

...
  if pubkey=="ee11a5dff40c19a555f41fe42b48f00e618c91225622ae37b6c2bb67b76c4e49" && is_political() {
    DENY
  }
...

fn is_political() {
   for tag in tags {
     if tag[0] == "t" && tag[1] == "politics" {
       return true;
     }
   }
   false
} 
 I don't know. Maybe over time people will settle on a certain set of common hashtags and then people can have following lists that include and exclude hashtags on a per-person basis.  So instead of following a person, or following a hashtag, you can follow something like "mike & !politics".

I think @hodlbod has done the most on custom feeds. I haven't looked deeply into what he did yet. 
 ejabberd, the "best" xmpp server, is too complicated and too fragile for me to setup. I gave up after an hour.

We need a nostr solution because xmpp is so old that the good people left and the remaining people are ossified, whereas nostr is fresh and vibrant and we make things simple. 
 I installed with 'apt install ejabberd'
I followed the docs pointed to at the top of /etc/ejabberd/ejabberd.yml, which pointed off to old blog posts for some things (unaccepable).
I configured /etc/ejabberd/ejabberd.yml to edit hosts, acl. acme, and certificates as best I could from those old blog posts.
I copied certificates from letsencrypt into /etc/ejabberd and made them owned by ejabberd, pointed to by the yml file.
I added my host to /etc/hosts (stack overflow solution)
And yet running "systemctl start ejabberd.service" or "systemctl stop ejabberd.service" simply hangs without giving me my shell back.
That is unacceptable. Broken piece of shit. 
 Matrix is Israeli spy software. It's also bloatware. 
 I got prosody to work, and Gajim.  Thanks. 
 Https://lukesmith.xyz/articles/matrix-vs-xmpp/ 
 I don't know.  I'm not personally interested in voice and video.  I just want to get group chat off of Telegram. 
 #politics #opinion

Netanyahu gave a speech at the UN general assembly. Most people walked out. The place was only about 1/4 full when he took the podium. A large crowd entered the gallery up above. Apparently he brought his own audience to clap for him.  Remember, the General Assembly are the diplomatic representatives from all the countries of the world. This expresses the general view of Israel worldwide.

He claimed Hezbollah "put a missile in every kitchen, a rocket in every garage." This is apparently a pretext to strike at all civilian targets in Lebanon (many recent airstrikes by the IDF have hit weapons caches as evidenced by many secondary explosions and/or missiles flying wildly out from the site bombed, I don't dispute that, but in every kitchen? in every garage?)

They levelled 6 apartment buildings in Beirut claiming there were military underneath, and that the apartment buildings were "human shields". Despite whether or not there were military underneath (this is still to be determined), it is a war crime to strike that location given the massive civilian deaths it caused.

Remember, military officers can go home to their wives and children at night. That does not mean they are using their families as human shields. N12 News in Israel claims the strike killed Zeinab Nasrallah (Hassan Nasrallah's daughter), indicating that this was likely Hassan Nasrallah's residence and not a military installation.

Netanyahu does not care about war crimes anymore because he is already a war criminal. What incentive does he have now to avoid further war crimes? None. He continues to trash Israel's international standing, turning Israel into a recidivist terrorist state. 
 No, he is not doing everything right. He is dooming Israel. He has made enemies with most of the world, which sees Israel as an extremist terrorist state the threatens the world and needs to be put down, just like Islamic State needs to be put down, for indeed the same reasons... the fact that they are terrorists without restraint on the use of power and without regard to non-Jewish human life, without respect for national sovereignty or international rules (like consulates) assassinating anything anywhere. This is more dangerous than the extreme Islamists, and more dangerous than Hitler who did not have nukes.

I feel sick about the innocent Jews in Israel that will suffer the backlash of these horrific acts of terror, and I recommend that they leave Israel for the time being at least. 
 The tide may turn, but it won't happen soon.

The world is becoming multi-polar, but these new poles don't have enough power to do anything about it yet without such a move being extremely risky.

As time goes on the US sinks and China floats and at some point China will start to exert power beyond the second island chain.

But by the time we are in that world, Netanyahu will probably have already died of old age drinking Mai tais on the Gaza beach outside of his palace. 
 If you want to understand Middle East geopolitics without any moral judgements and without taking sides, just facts and strategy, then Dr David Oualaalou is very good.

https://www.youtube.com/@geopoliticaltrends/streams
https://rumble.com/user/GeopoliticalTrends

If you want to track current events as they unfold without moral judgements and without taking sides, then Steve Lookner is your guy.

https://www.youtube.com/@AgendaFreeTV
https://x.com/lookner

If you want to hear what the nations are saying to each other publicly, than the United Nations General Assembly speeches are your direct source.

Screw the news media. Screw the social media hypesters. The sources above will not deceive you, won't hype you up on hopium, and will also uncover lots of things that the news doesn't dare to report on. 
 I'll check him out. 
 Best free, easy to use (ie for a non-techy person) password manager? #asknostr #privacy
Is it bit... 
 I vote bitwarden 
 Huh.  'b' is not a valid bech32 alphabet character.

Verify you are doing something like: 

$ ./target/release/relay-tester ws://localhost:8080/ nsec19eg50yp0qt3ulwqm9l5p5jh2y5ezw742erc2r82kxa3r0ys33meqj9fmdx  nsec18f2kapsh77ju22vx3hl647ufwuv0jh4twm6jng4fmzxge35cfklqv8zujq

The code changed recently to need two nsecs. 
 We need clients to do something about this. It's getting hard to manually browse so many relays o... 
 On unstable gossip, you can now click the wss://questions.swarmstr.com/ link and then click "View Feed" to view that relay feed.  It will be blank for a few seconds at first, just be patient. 
 I'm intending to do a release in the next few days. 
 $ sudo systemctl stop cups.service
$ sudo systemctl disable cups.service
 
 Block port 631 on your firewall (you probably already are) 
 Queria agradecer aqui expressamente ao nostr:npub1acg6thl5psv62405rljzkj8spesceyfz2c32udakc2ak0dm... 
 Gm Nostriches 🪶

Elon Musk is bending to Brazil’s censorship demands.

Pavel Durov is bendin... 
 I find crowbars work nicely.  Slap it against the palm of your hand a few times.  They will get the point.

More seriously now, I recently rewrote my webpage on this:  https://mikedilger.com/gossip-model/ 
 It is a window size thing.  I get that if I shrink the desktop browser. 
 that was shorthand for 'Fuck X' 
 I am going to be attending a Town Hall meeting on free speech next week, put on by the NZ Free Speech Union (of which I'm a founding member).

I would like to have a stack of flyers about nostr to hand out in order to purple-pill people.

Can one of the many graphic designers here come up with something, or point me to something that is already designed and ready to go? 
 It is good. But too long for a flyer. And the dynamic title wont work.

It would also be nice for people to know that nostr already has hundreds of applications and thousands of relays and is growing fast... that it is the next big thing... that it is totally open and free and not tied to any company.   Because I think people will assume it is a product or a centralized thing or maybe some small idea that hasn't proven itself yet.... those wrong assumptions people make generally cause people to dismiss it before the recognize it for what it is. 
 I'm looking at a number of these, they are all good, but I think I'll make my own. The audience is very much concerned about free speech, but probably not very techical.  I'm thinking something like this:

NOSTR is bringing everybody FREE SPEECH ONLINE.

Nostr is not a company, it is an open protocol that supports censorship-resistant
social media and other interactions over the Internet.

You control your own account (you hold the keys) so you cannot be cancelled and
lose your followers.

Redundant and Dynamic:  It resists censorship because you can post content to many places
and then change where you post at any time without your followers even noticing.

Decentralized: there is no central point for a would-be censor to put pressure upon.

There are already hundreds of apps: chat, blogging, videos, recipes, art, music, and more.
It even supports micropayments!

Here are a few webpages to help you get started:
  https://nostr.how
  https://nostrapps.com
  https://njump.me
  https://nostr.net
  https://usenostr.org
 
 Maybe A5 printed both sides, color and glossy 
 There is a print company in town that I can have print them. I suppose they would deal with the "glossy" bit. 
 That's awesome!  Take liberties with the content if you think of something better. 
 I think the styling is fine. I like that all 5 websites I listed are shown and don't take much space.

Although many people on nostr think zaps are the best thing since sliced bread, I'm not sure that will draw in more people than it will repulse even with the red explanation. For this crowd I think we should leave off that selling point.  Many normal people get nervous once you talk about sending money, either due to fear of the government and being a criminal, or fear of a scam.
Let them get orange pilled after they get purple pilled.

I think mentioning something more like "a protocol not a company" might be more effective than "A company doesn't own your nostr, you do" because the latter isn't clear that there is no company behind this at all... just that the possibly imainged company claims to not own you.  So even though "protocol" is a technical word, I think it communicates a lot here in one word that non-technical people can just gloss over without being too confused.

"Your followers can find your content, regardless of where on nostr you post your notes" is informative, but doesn't quite explain how it is that nostr is censorship resistant, whereas something like "you can post to any servers you choose, there are already thousands, and you can dynamically move away from servers that censor you without affecting your followers" or something like that.... at least people that have tried Mastodon will understand that.

I don't think "highly customizable settings" will matter to these people, nor "built around a web of trust of who you follow."

Instead of very short bullet points like these, I think fewer but longer explanatory phrases would be more effective. These will be highly educated politically active older people, less interested in bullet points that are too short for them to get the picture, and possibly even the kind of people who would read proposed legislation which is ridiculously detailed and precise.  So we should move to longer sentences with more precise statements I think. 
 That is very good. Lots of information in just a few words. 
 I think that is good.  I can use that.  Thank you!  🫶 
 I got them. I'll take them to the printers tomorrow. 
 One of the hardest things about creating things, whether design or development, is that onlookers... 
 I scanned your post to find a spelling or grammar mistake that I could harp on.  But alas, it was a perfect post. 
 Now that we have Tor enabled by default for untrusted relays that are not in your list, I feel mu... 
 Yes.

If you want to follow my world-wide-web content, you have to get it from https://mikedilger.com/.  You cannot get it from your own local website.  The outbox model is the same thing, and so is RSS.  If you want my microblog, you get it from where I post it.

Under the outbox model, clients figure out where stuff is and then they go and get it... on relays you may have never even heard of.  This is no different than going to a website, and that website telling your browser to grab a font from fonts.google.com or to fetch a javascript library from a CDN, or to grab advertisements from doubleclick.

If you have a problem connecting to "strange relays" that you have not vetted, then you should use a VPN or Tor.  They were designed expressly to address that concern.  Trying to re-invent them inside of nostr is a fools errand.

And by the way,  it is safest to use Tor via a system designed to use Tor, e.g. on qubes or whonix.  Torsocks should also be safe since it replaces DNS lookups at the DLL layer.  I'm not sure if using Orbot on Android avoid all the sidechannel DNS leaks, but I hope Amethyst did it right.  I just don't know enough about Android to say one way or the other.  But for desktop apps like gossip, Tor should NOT be builtin, users must use torsocks or one of the systems I mentioned which will always be more secure than anything I could code. 
 Ok. I rewrote that old webpage.  https://mikedilger.com/gossip-model/ 
 Thanks for that feedback. I agree the web risks go beyond privacy and maybe I shouldn't divert attention to that that on this page.  I didn't do the diagram so I can't really edit it, and it is the best I have at the moment. 
 I would vote for Joe Biden if he stopped supplying Israel with weapons.  I would make a concerted effort to find a ballot and vote for him.  Oh, wait,.... it's Kamala now right?  Um....   lemme think.... 
 If anyone out there is currently dissatisfied with their nostr client, may I humbly suggest Corac... 
 It won't let me paste, I can't scan a QR code, I can't see what I'm typing, and with my fat fingers there is no way I'll be able to enter my nsec without several mistakes that I will not be able to see to correct.

Otherwise I would use coracle on my phone. 
 I pointed obtainium at the git repo. 
 I got it typed in now. But it would be a nice feature. 
 Erdogan's speech at the UN general assembly:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jJ4299xvBAg

"The values that the West claims to defend are dying. The truth is dying. The hopes of humanity to live in a more just world are dying one by one." 
 Hey #Gossip - I have a tough time getting gossip to play nice with dual monitor situation .. Is t... 
 I have dual monitors and it works fine for me, so it is hard for me to debug your situation.

Gossip rests on top of egui/eframe which uses winit which handles windowing.  We don't mess with windowing code, we just utilize the libraries provided.  It sounds like the problem you are experiencing might be at the winit level, so if I were you I would start reading through the issues on the https://github.com/rust-windowing/winit repository and maybe you'll find something.  If you find something that requires a change to gossip code, let me know so I can fix it for everybody.

Also, you might have a window manager issue, or a display driver issue.  I've personally had a similar experience when using linux with an nvidia card in a laptop against two monitors, and I solved it by installing the nvidia drivers. 
 I use xfce, but I don't seem to have these key mappings.  They don't do anything for me. 
 We are men of renown

 nostr:nevent1qqsfl0kkdha0nwqfudet25hw7wa54levwl47qul5dd30yv66ngu7dggpr4mhxue69uhkummnw3ezucnfw33k76twv4ezuum0vd5kzmp0qyv8wumn8ghj7mn0wd68ytnxd46zuamf0ghxy6t69uq32amnwvaz7tmwdaehgu3wdau8gu3wv3jhvtcmy6nvl 
 This is the argument against pharmaceuticals, and I think it is a strong one:  If defeating your body's natural systems via interfering with a single biochemical pathway makes you healthier, then your ancestors would have easily evolved such a thing.  Every biochemical pathway has regulators, and natural selection can adjust them.  Exogenous substances adjusting these pathways is directly in contradiction to what your body is trying to do (for example, anti-inflammatories defeat your body's natural inflammation;  anti-pyretics defeat your body's natural fever; pain relievers defeating our body's natural way of avoiding further tissue damage).  And clearly your body is trying to be healthy.

There are exceptions, however; pharmaceutical interventions that don't fall into that category. But businesses want to sell more things to make more money, and so they will expand into drug targets that wise people would best avoid. 
 I chose Athens because in many ways their lives resemble ours:  low labor requirements (they had slaves, we have machines) good living conditions, etc... but yes pharmaceuticals are not the only difference.

I only wanted to put forth the argument, labelled as such, not to claim it is my bible. 
 I am a mathematician by education and this is my first social media post. Glad to learn about the... 
 I'm a computer scientist... so yes, a mathematician (computer science is math not science, I don't know how it got so misnamed). I did research on computer vulnerability classifications, so... science actually I guess. 
 It is a mix.  It is mostly math:  shannon entropy, complexity theory (P vs NP), etc.  But undoubtedly there is a lot of engineering (programming, algorithms). 
 Question:  Should I be calling "friends of friends" your "web of trust" or is that the wrong term?  Vitor thinks the web of trust is a google pagerank graph algorithm.  We should coalesce around useful terms so as not to confuse each other.  What term should I use instead? 
 I just decided to rename it 'friends of friends' and be done with it. I provide that to the spam script which can use it if useful.

//   fof           - Friends of friends: Among you, the people you
//                   follow, and the people they follow, how many
//                   follow the pubkey of the event? 
 Please, I beg of you, put more effort into vetting your follows, as the #WoT relays are going to ... 
 I don't call it Web of Trust anymore.  I call it "friends of friends".  And I don't trust friends of friends, but I do expect that they probably aren't spammers.  If anybody is caught following a spammer, that can be found out and they can be unfollowed. 
 You can send a NIP-56 defined 1984 report to the pubkey in the relay's NIP-11. 
 I am sorry to see so many relays now require AUTH for reading.  I don't AUTH to read.  I want to read anonymously, just like I can read RSS or websites anonymously.  Why require AUTH for reading (other than for DMs)?

NOTE: I totally understand requiring AUTH for writing.  And if I reply to somebody and their inbox wants me to AUTH to send that reply, I get it. That is a good policy to prevent reply spam.

It feels to me that nostr is splitting, and a bunch of relays that have taken this AUTH-to-read policy are now unavailable. 
 I'm sorry, I'm only concerned with public content such as kind-1 notes.  You are right, other applications no nostr have different requirements.