Credits
This site loads nothing from a third-party server. Everything below is embedded, with its licence.
The fonts
Space Grotesk
headings, labels and figures · Florian Karsten · SIL Open Font License 1.1 · 25.5 Ko
An industrial geometric with squarely cut terminals and wide figures: the register of a label screwed onto a workshop cabinet. No other project of ours uses it.
Atkinson Hyperlegible
body text · Braille Institute of America · SIL Open Font License 1.1 · 33.9 Ko
It was designed to be read by people with low vision: every letter is made distinct from the others, especially the pairs that get confused. On a site whose subject is making digital life practicable, it is the coherent choice, and it holds up over long text.
The embedded libraries
@cantoo/pdf-lib 2.8.1
the PDF corner · Licence MIT · 661.4 KB
Writing a PDF by hand is unreasonable: it is a format of indirect objects, cross-reference tables and compressed streams, and a one-byte mistake makes the file unreadable. This is the exception the doctrine allows, and it is the only one. This library is the MAINTAINED continuation of pdf-lib, whose last release dates from November 2021: we chose the living code. The version is frozen in the file name, the MIT licence is served next to it, and the code is here, with us: the PDF corner pages load it from this site, never from anywhere else. We checked one more thing, by machine: this file contains NO network call, not one, and the content lock re-checks it at every build.
The embedded word lists
The tool that builds a passphrase draws its words from two lists, embedded in its code. Here they are, with their licence and their author: the Creative Commons Attribution licence REQUIRES it, and CC0 does not require it but deserves it.
THE ENGLISH LIST, 7,776 words: the “EFF Large Wordlist for Passphrases”, published in 2016 by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, under the Creative Commons Attribution licence the EFF applies to its content. It is the reference list of the field: it was built so that the words are easy to type, hard to confuse by ear, and free of hurtful words.
THE FRENCH LIST, 7,776 words: compiled by “Tango” for Tails OS and The Tor Project, reviewed by the maintainer of the diceware tool, and published under CC0 1.0 Universal. The licence is written in the file that accompanies the list. It was filtered from a word list that is itself CC0, then read through by hand to remove rare and hurtful words, and it contains NO accented characters: every word can be typed on any keyboard.
Why only two: because we embed a list only if its free licence is written down in black and white by its author. Several good French lists were ruled out for that reason alone, including a widely circulated one with no findable licence, and another whose author writes that he himself does not know which one applies. A presumed licence is not a licence.
The QR code trademark
The tool that makes a QR code uses those two words, and a registered trademark has to be acknowledged.
“QR Code” is a registered trademark of DENSO WAVE INCORPORATED, in Japan and in other countries.
Using the code itself is free and royalty free: its inventor writes that everyone may use it freely as long as they follow the Japanese standard or the international one, with no application and no licensing contract. It is the TRADEMARK, and it alone, that calls for this notice. We give it here because it is a trademark obligation, not because anyone asked us for it.
We have not read the text of the international standard, which is paid for: the tables our encoder uses come from two concordant, independent sources, and what we verified ourselves is written on the tool's own page.
The making of it
The site is entirely static, produced by a generator written for it, with no installed dependency at all. The visual identity, the icons, the favicon and the sharing images are drawn by a program in the project, in code, and can be regenerated.
Hosting is provided by Cloudflare, which serves files and receives none of your working files.
The project
The Workbench is a project of the ODERSA association, within its programme The Click, devoted to digital autonomy. The association is entirely run by volunteers.