Bonum Certa Men Certa

Our Move Further Away From the World Wide Web, the Browser Monopolies, HTTP, and HTML

Passage of time does not necessarily beget progress

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Summary: The World Wide Web (WWW) is going down a bad path and a clearly regressive direction; the solution isn't going 'retro' but exploring more sophisticated systems which are robust to censorship (localised or globalised) and downtime (related to censorship) while reducing surveillance by leveraging encryption at the endpoints

THE year 2020 was horrific to many of us. To me, personally, it wasn't too difficult as I had already worked from home since 2007 and for Techrights it was an inadvertent boon because having to stay at home a lot more time meant that we could do projects. In late summer we started implementing censorship circumvention for the site. The first step was turning Web pages into one-page or single-object elements. We worked on the daily bulletins. Later came text versions of IRC logs. Last week we started converting images into unicode art, in effect embedding a sort of abstraction of images inside the bulletins. All those things are being fed into IPFS and then distributed (decentralised) overnight, every night at around 3AM. Videos, we've recently been told, are already circulating in IPFS. Some people share them in a peer-to-peer fashion. The physical, centralised server is said to have served 11.2 TB of traffic over the past 2.5 weeks. That's about 7.5 megabytes per second, on average. So the decentralised nature of the site helps reduce load and improve capacity, not just talking about censorship aspects here...



"The physical, centralised server is said to have served 11.2 TB of traffic over the past 2.5 weeks."An increase in capacity (disk space, bandwidth, processors) has facilitated expansion and growth. Not many sites can afford to self-host videos, not quite so frequently anyway. Many just come to rely on Google as a faceless censor (fear of removal of videos, deplatforming, demonetisation, delisting from searches/contextual recommendations and so on) and some opt for PeerTube, LBRY and other platforms/options that themselves have downsides (including threats of muzzling).

WWWIf all goes according to plan, Techrights will be one of the very few sites that are available through multiple channels (maybe Onion/Tor as well one day), including decentralised ones. We will of course remain on the World Wide Web (most people still choose that option), but seeing the direction the Internet has taken, especially the browser monoculture, we must explore alternatives before it's too late to do so. Censorship agenda is being promoted even by supposedly 'liberal' companies like Mozilla. They already discriminate against sites that don't do 'pseudo-security' (centralised, CA-based and often Microsoft-hosted) the way they want everyone to. Not a good sign...

When those who claim to champion Internet freedom and software freedom (not really) are acting in this way you have to wonder who the "bad actors" really are and whether you wish to associate with them.

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The Comment TheLayoff.com Has Just Censored for Criticising a Ridiculous Puff Piece of IBM Management
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The Power of Writing Down Facts
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