A privacy plea, a web that once was

I don’t want to be spied on by Microsoft or Google. I don’t want the NSA intercepting my conversations or even their metadata. I want complete autonomy and privacy without having to resort to workarounds that have been invented to give me back some of the control I should have had in the first place. In other words, I want a computer that I own completely.

~ Tie

As much as we strive for privacy on our daily routine is nearly impossible to drift away from the claws of huge corporation spyware and tracking, not always because of FOMO, but mostly because we live in a society where basic services are weaved into the fabric of centralized software, from having a formal job to purchasing healthcare.

To reject modernity is to resist innovation, hence we find ourselves in a situation where we must accept sacrificing our privacy for the sake of being a part of a world we can’t escape.

Ever since the web has matured from giving visibility to those interested in sharing a personal cause to profiting big corporations, each regular internet user has become a personal data mining rig, a telemetry generator; they buy our privacy and sell us entertainment for the price of minimum brain activity and the feeling of hitting a jackpot every 12 seconds.

Having decent privacy should absolutely not be something exclusive to one with “above average” computer skills, every individual shall be granted with the right to have access to all services and law enforced backdoors running on their very own personal machine without having to be an expert on kernel architecture.

Although I’d love to, I can’t just make all my friends and family use some IRC chat to reach out to me, or set up an Ngrok server to call me on Mumble when there’s some urgent shit going on.

I’m way too young to miss the beginning of the internet, but I do plea for the web that once was, the web that made me fall in love with computers as a kid, a place for login-less curiosity and personality instead of straight out profit.

Nevertheless, I’d like to share two privacy-advocate services I found so I could feel a bit of freedom at least on my free time - I’d additionally like to mention that my machine runs completely on free software.

1. wiby.me – a search engine that returns hand-curated websites mostly from the web 1.0, being immune to marketing SEO. Although it indexes fewer results than regularly used search engines, you browse free from corporate junk and have access to small and independent pages about anything you want. It really brings back the essence of a web for people genuinely interested in sharing regardless of the engagement they will get in return.

2. yewtu.be – you read that.

I personally enjoy searching for entertainment, instead of it being fed to me like a brain rotting stew of my cross-platform data.

Also, here are some cool websites / articles I found and spent a lot of time browsing these days!

theabsolute.net/minefield/ - “the thinking man’s minefield”

marc.merlins.org/linux/teaparty/ - that’s just gold, I’m happy it was all recorded.

solen.info/solar/ - I just found this interesting.

cpu-ns32k.net/Diephotos.html - “the website to remember national semiconductor’s series 32000 family”

stallman.org/articles/on-hacking.html - a light, adorable article.