Bonum Certa Men Certa

Modern Web Browsers as Web Censorship Software

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jan 13, 2025

What they tell you to do for your supposed "success":

Speaking online: Yes or No - two things compared; Speak of 'open-source values', communicate via social control media that serves the far right, open an account for proprietary microsoft github. Not: use your own site, Talk about software freedom, Install git-server

MANY years ago we reached the conclusion that the Web had become irredeemable bloatware and years ago we resisted what seemed like browsers increasingly adopting built-in censorship, e.g. using centralised CAs to obstruct access to the 'bad' sites using some phony "security" excuse. Here's a recent example of phone security.

The browser companies (formerly Mozilla and its master Google) want us to think they facilitate free speech and easy access, but in practice they shut off more corners of the Web and leave sites like us having to outsource trust or else be ranked poorly, in turn preventing some visitors from accessing the site (browsers would unnecessarily warn them if not outright prevent entry).

SSL Report: techrights.org

Short of the Web as a censorship machine it can also become a hate and disinformation machine, possibly composed by LLMs judging by what "Meta" (Facebook) is doing. Twitter (now "X") seems to be another TikTok - a political influencing tool controlled by a maniac.

We continue to recommend Geminispace as an escape from much of this giant nonsense. We'll do our best to curate links from there (Gopher and Gemini Protocol). It's probably too late to save the Web.

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