95 lines
4.8 KiB
Plaintext
95 lines
4.8 KiB
Plaintext
= Net Citizen
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The web was still young when I first went online in 1996. It felt like a
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utopian dream of free culture and free knowledge. Anyone could contribute and
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communicate. I spent countless hours on IRC, learnt html, php and mysql and
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created my first site on a shared shell server with some webspace.
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I’ve watched as the dream has become a nightmare of
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_advertising#Privacy_concerns[surveillance]
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and monetisation
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(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Website_monetization[1],
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_monetization[2],
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_monetization[3]). Companies such as
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google#Racially-targeted_surveillance[Google]
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and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privacy_concerns_with_Facebook[Facebook]
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offer their
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privacy_concerns_with_social_networking_services[services]
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for free to the public because their real products are their advertising
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networks powered by the personal data of their visitors.
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I've watched hundreds of carefully handcrafted, personal websites become slow
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and boring wordpress, medium and bootstrap blogs that all look the same. Many
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of them just disappeared and people moved to big social media plattforms.
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I've watched networks becoming regulated, favoring services for money and
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slowing down or blocking services that were not liked by the network provider,
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endagering https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_neutrality[Net neutrality].
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I watched a network that was made for everyone become a marketing instrument
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to influence politics and make everyone pay with their personal data. Mostly
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involuntarily and by offering a useful service people want. This service is
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mostly not the business the company is in, but rather a side product needed
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so people join in.
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The same scheme can be seen in games, which use psychological techniques to get
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people addicted, so they buy in app goods, which have absolutely zero value in
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real life.
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And here I am, ranting about the past like one of the old people.
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I have little influence over the wider web, but I can control my small part of
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it, and hold it to the ideal I learned to love. This page is simple, doesn't use
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javascript, tracking or cookies. It's just there, like a good old homepage.
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== Copyright
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Copyright limits creativity and holds back progress by restricting our rights to
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build upon the works of others. Therefore I'm releasing this website, it's code
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and content under the terms of the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Legal Code.
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You can use and adapt it without attribution.
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Exempt from this release are all pictures that show people or are in the Photos
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section of this website.
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== Privacy
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My site is hosted on a server provided by Hetzner Online GmbH in Germany. I'm
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operating the server myself and Hetzner only provides the hardware and remote
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access to it. There is no content delivery network involved when accessing this
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site. This means it might be slow in far away regions, but it also means that no
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data is shared with a CDN provider. The server is fully encrypted and webserver
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logs are deleted after two weeks.
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Almost every site today includes code that tracks visitors for statistical and
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advertising purposes. Often the site owner includes code with the deliberate aim
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of tracking their visitors, but sometimes they just want to include a feature
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provided by a third party, and that provider includes their own tracking code.
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My site doesn’t include any tracking code, and doesn’t load any code from third
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parties. It doesn’t have a cookie banner because it doesn’t use cookies.
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== Transparency
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You probably don’t know me, and shouldn’t have to trust me. Instead, you should
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be able to check security and privacy claims for yourself. Unfortunately most
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sites today use a process called code minification, which makes them faster but
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also makes it harder for other people to understand their code.
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My site doesn’t need to use code minification in order to load quickly due to
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its simple design, efficient implementation, and absence of resources loaded
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from third parties. As a result, other software developers can easily understand
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how the layout, styling, and interactive features are created.
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== Attribution
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I'm not every good with design and therefore many design related elements
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of this page are taken from https://iamkate.com[Kate Rose Morley] who thankfully
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released her work under a permissive license.
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However, the way how the page and content is generated is different and
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based on a modified version of https://github.com/nuex/zodiac[zodiac],
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which is a static website generator written in the programming language
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AWK[AWK]. Some content pages are generated by
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https://asciidoctor.org[asciidoctor] and others by shell scripts or a
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markdown parser. Here is the https://github.com/c0dev0id/website[Source Code].
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