10.27.20
Taking Our Efforts to the Next Level in an Increasingly Proprietary and Hostile Web
Summary: Web users are being repressed by mechanisms of mass manipulation, control and restrictions; the Web may not be going away any time soon, but architectural and topological issues need to be overcome (the sooner, the better)
ASIDE from the new (winter) banner, a new footer, and a new multi-level menu at the top, there’s also growing emphasis on IRC for communication and coordination (we’ve changed some things accordingly). The site is now accessible using a text editor alone (albeit some editors depend on a standalone fetcher such as wget or curl) and HTTPS via reverse proxy may be coming soon (this would likely require setting up a new and totally separate container). Focus on infrastructure is very important to us, seeing how prevalent back doors became (governments shamelessly demand these even out in public), how much public support there is for Web censorship (of all the “bad” stuff of course, “go Google, go silence all those people we don’t like! Make them go away!”) and even software censorship (youtube-dl should never ever consider Microsoft as a reliable code host, nor should Fedora, whose decision-making (cat-herding in his own words) leader said some hours ago: “full disclosure: I own a small number of shares of Microsoft”).
“The way things are going, the Web is swiftly moving into a dark era of weaponised social control media, mass surveillance (for manipulation), mass censorship (at all levels) and DRM (whose circumvention is treated as a crime).”Fedora has a new release (33), but it's still overwhelmingly Microsoft-hosted and that's a problem. The managers also seem to have outsourced a lot of Fedora to Amazon. Considering some of the biggest IBM and Red Hat contracts, it’s getting hard to trust CentOS/Fedora/RHEL with real security (including privacy from the US government, i.e. Donald Trump and his ilk). More of our operations have been switched over to Alpine and (quite likely) will be moved to the Netherlands some time soon. A lot of people probably considered this “paranoid” a decade ago. But ‘mission creep’ should never be underestimated. The way things are going, the Web is swiftly moving into a dark era of weaponised social control media, mass surveillance (for manipulation), mass censorship (at all levels) and DRM (whose circumvention is treated as a crime). Don’t worry, GitHub will look after software freedom… or not. █
“DRM is the future.”
–Steve Ballmer, Microsoft CEO
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