Bonum Certa Men Certa

Pushing Back Towards 'Libre' (Freedom), Partly as an Act of Defiance/Resistance Against a World Wide Web Which Gravitates Towards Endless Spying and DRM

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Summary: There are opportunities for principled revolt on the Web, thanks to a bunch of clones and forks seeking to undo the disturbing trends of "mainstream" Web browsers, which have also become the base or a template of lesser-known browsers (so monoculture around Chromium in particular remains a serious problem)

THE WEB is getting worse, not better, over time. Despite a lot of talk (no walk) from surveillance companies such as Facebook, Microsoft, Google and so on, privacy is further eroded. Politicians are failing to keep up and their privacy legislation is barely enforced; meanwhile the Web is being 'extended' -- almost always in a negative direction (except from the point of view of corporate interests and shareholders).

"The media won't help as we know whose pockets it is in."So what we be done? Well, the Web as a whole may be too late to repair; it's a lost cause so Gemini gives us hope (it's probably the most advanced in the 'small Internet' at the moment) and for things that still strictly require the Web (as in Web sites), assuming we reject Google's codebase, there are some Firefox alternatives, the latest of which is LibreWolf (focused on privacy/liberty). It's unrealistic, not just idealistic, to foretell a post-Web era. It might take another decade or more, but we need to push in the right direction. The media won't help as we know whose pockets it is in.

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