Are you suggesting that the editors or Slashdot get a kickback from payments to Linux Pro Magazine? Because something like that would have to be happening to justify language like "sleazy". Of course we would all prefer to read everything immediately without having to pay for it or subscribe. But you can still wait a few week for the article to become free.

The Gemini protocol is designed to be un-extendable in several respects, specifically so that it can not evolve into the WWW. Nevertheless, as you point out, people will always find a way to abuse the users.

Itâ(TM)s not shady and itâ(TM)s not advertising. I donâ(TM)t get paid for visits. Many people here probably already have a subscription, and the article becomes free after a while, as well.

Asking for a direct payment is the opposite of the kind of abuses I was referring to in the article. These take the form of pretending that a service or information is free, but extracting a cost in tracking, invasion of privacy, and annoyances such as door slams.

https://lee-phillips.org/perma...

https://www.linuxpromagazine.c...

Author here. While mathematicians usually begin the series with zero, in papers about computing the initial zero is often left off. I should have been consistent, though.

Thanks for sharing the story of PORTRAN: that's really interesting history that I'd never heard before (I'm the author of the OA).

That's an unrelated "arc".