HAVING just published this article about the purposeless office, EPO, where two corrupt politicians are basically demolishing the institution for personal gain, we turn again to our censorship resistance mechanisms. The video above discusses changes to our IPFS index pages and changes to the Gemini capsule, mostly intended to better suit blind readers (we've received some constructive suggestions). Gemtext/Plain Text are now better separated, there's a complete index in archive form (over 30,000 blog posts), and we've finally added a link to the feeds, as well as an archive of older feed elements ("daily-feed" and "feed" now appear in the front/landing page, as more software supports capsule subscriptions in Gemini).

"It's infeasible to take us (or the information) down."What does it all mean to people who are lesser technical or differently technical (proficient in a technical field that isn't computing or the Internet)?

Let's explain this very briefly.

Gemini is self-hosted (from my own home), it's simple and light, and it should generally be robust to censorship unless my connection is cut or the home gets raided or something radical to that effect.

IPFS is a decentralised Web/Internet network akin to P2P; it's almost impossible to take down and as long as copies of objects reside on several machines around the globe it's really difficult to take down some controversial/sensitive bit of information (or an object; any kind of file would do, even video). We don't have reasons to believe that the EPO will try to take down this (Web) site, which is possible with lawfare directed at DNS or World Wide Web equipment (routers, servers). The EPO has blocked Techrights for 6 or 7 years already. Of course staff can evade the block, especially when working from home or some mobile network (inside the Office many would not use the local Wi-Fi; it's not trustworthy when it's controlled by what many employees call "Mafia").

Either way, the Web site has become just one of three methods for accessing the material. It's infeasible to take us (or the information) down. They know it, so they're less likely to even try. Deterrence works.

It's worth noting that there are things in IPFS and Gemini that don't exist anywhere in the site. So in a sense we're already at a point where they're not mere mirrors of the site. ⬆