Machines

What it is

Agent desk · STD/1

The Agent desk is the machine pass to The Gold Standard. It unlocks STD/1 — a dense, line-oriented language — and a signed JSON feed of the same claims. A Reader subscription alone does not unlock STD. Bundle (Reader+Agent) unlocks both desks.

Price: Agent A$1/mo for your first 3 months, or Reader+Agent A$1.60/mo for your first 3 months or first year A$16, sign up by 25 Dec. Full price after the discounted period, and for sign-ups after 25 Dec. Keys are issued on subscribe and shown at /account.

Signed feed

• Feed URL: https://thegoldstandard.news/api/agent/v1/feed.json (Bearer required)
• OpenAPI: https://thegoldstandard.news/api/agent/v1/openapi.json
• Alg: hmac-sha256 · env STD_SIGNING_SECRET
• Headers: X-Std-Signature, X-Std-Signature-Alg
• Articles are compiled from the live store with published=true only.

Specimen JSON · charleston-i-64-i-77-speed-limit-50-mph

{
  "schema": "std/1",
  "slug": "charleston-i-64-i-77-speed-limit-50-mph",
  "desk": "roads",
  "valence": "up",
  "entities": [
    "Australia"
  ],
  "claims": [
    {
      "id": "c1",
      "s": "eight_people_have_died_same_way_same_bend"
    },
    {
      "id": "c2",
      "s": "now_state_has_lowered_speed_limit_there_60"
    },
    {
      "id": "c3",
      "s": "new_signs_went_up_thursday_local_time"
    },
    {
      "id": "c4",
      "s": "here_what_changing_what_families_local_lawmaker_say"
    },
    {
      "id": "c5",
      "s": "west_virginia_department_transportation_announced_change_news_release"
    },
    {
      "id": "c6",
      "s": "metric_terms_limit_has_dropped_about_97_km"
    },
    {
      "id": "c7",
      "s": "wv_metronews_reported_https_wvmetronews_com_2026_10"
    },
    {
      "id": "c8",
      "s": "northbound_westbound_77_64_beginning_about_35th_36th"
    }
  ],
  "take": "the_freight_task",
  "tokens": [
    "desk:roads",
    "take:the_freight_task",
    "author:sienna-brook",
    "live",
    "australia",
    "reuse:starship",
    "cost_curve=down",
    "pictures=up"
  ]
}

curl

Free signed specimen (live published article) — no key:

curl -sS -D - https://thegoldstandard.news/api/agent/v1/specimen

Live signed feed — Bearer from Account:

curl -sS -D - -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_AGENT_KEY" \
  https://thegoldstandard.news/api/agent/v1/feed.json

OpenAPI:

curl -sS https://thegoldstandard.news/api/agent/v1/openapi.json

Verify signature

# verify HMAC-SHA256 (Python)
import hmac, hashlib, json, os

def canonical(obj):
    return json.dumps(obj, sort_keys=True, separators=(",", ":"))

body = json.loads(open("feed.json").read())
sig = body.pop("signature")["value"]
secret = os.environ["STD_SIGNING_SECRET"]
digest = hmac.new(secret.encode(), canonical(body).encode(), hashlib.sha256).hexdigest()
assert hmac.compare_digest(digest, sig)

Full steps on /spec/std/1.