Hyperlink Poison: The 'Nofollow' Story
"If there was no existing mechanism through which Silicon Valley could justify unfair and anti-competitive self-preferencing, Google could be relied upon to invent one."
Today, they're everywhere. Nofollow-attributed hyperlinks have become the web publisher's default means of linking out to external sites. But the "nofollow" property was never meant to be used by all and sundry. It was designed by Google as a self-preferencing scheme for the Silicon Valley collective.
We, the plebs, were not supposed to discover the dark secret of the nofollow link, or use its poison against Silicon Valley as Silicon Valley set out to use it against us. But in the end, we wised up. And our eventual retaliation has rendered the nofollow attribute entirely useless, to the point that Google had to quietly replace it with a new attribute called ugc. The damage, nevertheless, was done...
Read article →GooglePlustodon: Mozilla Mastodon Instance Redirects To Google
Many people cite companies like Google as "leftists", but they're as right wing as it gets. Raving capitalists, deeply elitist, tax-dodgers, anti-union... And if they're not exploiting the working class or telling them to work for free, they're putting them out of business altogether... They passionately HATE the modern day hippie culture that prevails in the Fediverse. They don't want to "join in" with that culture. They want to destroy it. But the route to the latter is via the former, so...
If ever you doubted that Mozilla's forthcoming Mastodon instance will be the designated flagship for "GooglePlustodon", you might like to pop along to mozilla.social and see whose login you currently find staring you in the face. Better be quick though. Google's involvement will likely be much less blatant by the time of launch. But as of 5th January 2023, Mozilla Social's home URL redirects to accounts.google.com, revealing the obvious suspect behind Mozilla's Mastodon venture, as predicted.
Read article →Will the Era of "DIY Journalism" Save Our Privacy Rights?
It seems the only measure of a journalist's efficiency in the 2020s is the number of hours or days it takes them to regurgitate something someone said in a Tweet.
Q. Why is privacy dead?
A. Because journalism is dead.
It's true. You can blame the collapse of privacy rights on many other factors, but if journalism still amounted to anything more than a propaganda-pump for hire, those other factors would never have gained a footing.
The public - traditionally the media's bread and butter - have always needed a powerful press to hold corrupt systems to account. But the Internet Age has seen the public's diminishing news-consumption-spend comprehensively outbid by the exact corrupt bodies that the press once sought to expose. Result? A U-turn in allegiance. The media no longer work for us. They work for corporations, politicians, NGOs - anyone who will backhand them lump sums to have a message disseminated via a supposedly neutral voice.
Read article →Silicon Valley to Invade Mastodon
We've gone past "First they ignore you...", and moved onto the next logical step in the game of tech monopoly: "...Then they embrace, extend and extinguish you."
Well that didn't take long, did it?...
I recently pondered how many moons would pass before a Google-funded, Silicon Valley cartel member waded unashamedly into the Mastodon limelight. Well, we need wonder no longer. Roll cameras, focus stage left, and cue Mozilla - a Google-controlled surveillance capitalist which, like every other org in its circle, signals fake virtues on a relentless loop, but has one genuine interest, and one only: money. Its key provider of which is Google.
Read article →Contact
Currently, you can contact Bob Leggitt, administrator of Backlit, via the Contact Form on Tape Tardis.
Read article →The Privacy Nihilism Litmus Test
"In anti-surveillance culture, privacy nihilism is the only true marque of authenticity."
Back in June, Brave Software CEO Brendan Eich took to Twitter to theatrically trash rival search brand DuckDuckGo, who were still reeling from two rounds of embarrassing media stories. DDG's bad publicity was thoroughly deserved, although it seemed more than a little rich for a dude with a search engine sitting on an Amazon server to be lecturing a Microsoft partner on privacy.
Eich, incidentally, knew he was safe from DDG exposing his sordid Amazon secret in retaliation, because it was just as great a secret that DDG runs on Microsoft Azure. The media blogs had only revealed a minor Microsoft tracker-preferencing scheme in the DuckDuckGo browser. The really serious stuff was still in the closet, so to speak.
Read article →Before You Use Tor... The Odds of Surveillance
"When irrepressible stalkers are paying for, and even promoting a system that claims to prevent them from stalking us, we would be absolute idiots to believe it's not a trick. It is a trick."
Have you ever given Tor browser a reality check and thought... "Nah. Doesn't add up". I mean, here is a tool that supposedly protects the anonymity of its users, happily existing in a world where surveillance oligarchs will censor and/or block anything that cuts off their gravy train. Indeed, Tor is actively promoted by the EFF - whose financial support got it off the ground in the first place. And as anyone who's researched Big Tech lobbying shops knows, if it's endorsed and bankrolled by the EFF, it is DEFINITELY endorsed by Google. Tor's list of funders is telling indeed, albeit twisted to look as though the public are the primary donors.
The public are not the primary donors. They barely cast a drop into the ocean. The onion router's proxying relay mechanism is predominantly funded by the US authorities. In 2015, Surveillance Valley author Yasha Levine confirmed through Freedom of Information requests that Tor "was almost 100% funded by three U.S. national security agencies: the Navy, the State Department and the BBG". But currently, Tor also receives support from Google and Fastly. I mean, come on... These are surveillance capitalists. And they're not people who chuck cash or resources at a project unless they have a massive agenda.
Read article →The CDN Trap: Hazards of a Multi-Origin Web
"The attention race is by nature monopolistic. People can't give their attention to two advertisers at once. So the various powers are now starting to block each other's access to users and their data. When websites are heavily multi-origin, the likelihood of broken pages rises. Already, broken sites have ceased to even raise an eyebrow."
Back in 2016, when Europe's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) [PDF] was first communicated to businesses, a warning shot echoed across the realm of online tracking. The forthcoming law came with a proposition of breathtaking fines, and it declared that tracking cookies could no longer be used as a default part of the open Web.
The tech industry came up with a notoriously annoying short-term solution that didn't actually comply, but looked, it was hoped, enough like an attempt to comply to keep the regulators at bay. Namely, the cookie consent popup. This hare-brained scheme was and is non-compliant for a range of reasons - not least because it needs to set a cookie on the devices of users who disconsent to cookie use, in order to recognise that they've disconsented. Pure farce.
Read article →Is Geminispace The Great Escape From Nineteen Eighty-Four?
"At some point, we have to stop expecting technology to make itself unattractive to abusers, and start expecting our legal systems to punish abuse."
Imagine, if you will, an online world in which there is no such thing as Google. No Amazon, no Facebook... No such thing as a cookie. No such thing, indeed, as a tracker... Sounding good? Then rejoice, dear reader. For this is not imaginary. This is a real place...
As we plunge into the autumn of 1983 - metaphorically at least - a protocol called Gemini offers us a new online ecosystem. Known as Geminispace, the subcultural new environment promises greatly improved privacy. And that's a promise on which, at the present time, Geminispace delivers.
Read article →The Truth About Creative Commons
"Expecting creators to unilaterally renounce capitalism whilst everyone else drives it right off the speedo, is not anti-capitalism - it's anti-creator."
If you've never before published content on a Creative Commons licence, have you ever wondered what happens when you do? If so, I have a cautionary tale coming up at the end of this post. But before we get there, I want to pull up the floorboards and explore the reality of Creative Commons. Who's behind it, who does it really help, does it make creators more successful, and is it good for creators in a legal sense?...
WHAT IS CREATIVE COMMONS?
Creative Commons is often considered to be a grassroots drive to transform the world of content into a caring, sharing utopia of free knowledge and media, helping creators win wider success through licencing that shares the love in all directions.
But if you delve into the epicentre of Creative Commons, you actually find its driving organisation is a donation-nagging, Google and Amazon-funded, Mountain View-based NGO, established by Silicon Valley lawyers and cosily ensconced within the same cybertech lobbying circle that's spent the past two decades trying to trample copyright and patent law into oblivion.
Read article →Privacy-Themed Tech Will Remain a Niche Market Until it Speaks to Women
"Maybe, in the end, the belief that VPNs are anything other than rear-entry surveillance capitalism, just runs off the same, male-only delusion circuit that says the stripper is your friend."
Have you noticed? It's all men. Check out the conversation around privacy-themed tech provisions, and you may find yourself asking a thought-provoking question: where are the women?
Okay, so there are obviously some women interested in and working in privacy-themed technology, but the weight of presence is so overwhelmingly male that we have to start asking why. Why is privacy-themed technology a male preserve? More importantly, how will privacy tech provisions serve women if women are not involved in the conversations that define the products' roles? And how can the privacy tech movement ever be taken seriously by the mainstream if it is perceived to serve only men?
Read article →How to Fully Incapacitate Google Tag Manager and Why You Should
"We're long past the days when it was possible to simply say "no" to corporate stalking without consequence. Today, when we say "no", we get punished for it. But that only goes to show WHY, more than ever, we should be saying "no"."
Google Tag Manager. It's a product which, by design, cloaks a range of the Internet's most invasive and unethical scripts in an opaque closet, then springs them out in disguise. Combining immense power with obfuscation and vast scale of use, Google Tag Manager is the WWW's single most destructive tool to public privacy and online ethicism.
And it's getting worse. Google is now driving Tag Manager into the first-party domain, switching from third-party to first-party cookie usage, for example. Whilst this may look like a warm-hearted bid to increase privacy protection for the public, it's really just part of Google's relentless string of attempts to circumvent third-party content-blocking by shifting surveillanceware into a first-party container.
Read article →How To Keep Big Tech Out Of The IndieWeb
"The endgame for centralised tech is always money. The promises of paradise are just a means to fatten up the goose for slaughter."
Problem... Utopia attracts its own destruction. The more utopian a community, the more it will be beseiged by grasping thugs who want to strip it of all its value and place that value in their own bank account. For those who are excited about the future of the "IndieWeb", this presents a sobering question...
If we build an alternative to the excrutiating glob of broken, control-crazed, repetitive, braindead spam that the existing Web has become, and that alternative begins to offer real value, it will just be invaded and taken over by the same exhausting, spamming, stalking, wallet-chasers who ruined the Web as we know it.
Read article →Cyber Freedom: No Gain Without Pain
"If we really want freedom, we have to step outside the realm of mainstream browser cores. Doing that will require the construction of an entirely new digital ecosystem, with standards that true independent browsers can realistically support."
Late last month we sat with our popcorn watching DuckDuckGo CEO Gabriel Weinberg squirming in embarrassment as headline after headline dissected his operation's covert data deal with Microsoft. Only the tip of an iceberg, but proof, if any were needed, that in centralised tech, even the foremost champions of privacy are secretly working for the evil overlords.
So isn't it about time we walked away from this mire of deception and doublespeak? I mean, it's not like the DIY alternative costs a lot of money. There are forty-seven and a half bucketloads of free indie software out there, and creating a personal server on Linux has been heavily simplified by packages such as YunoHost and FreedomBox. We can install a personal search engine directly from a Linux package manager. We can host a website from our lounge. We can run our own online communication services. So why don't we take the DIY route?...
Read article →Is The Downfall of Cloudflare Nigh?
"The nemesis for Cloudflare could prove to be the very thing it claims it's there to protect against. What would happen if bots reached critical mass?..."
Cloudflare. It presents itself as a protection mechanism, defending websites against attackers and other unwanted visitors. But a growing group of digital freedom-fighters consider Cloudflare a dire threat to both privacy and liberty.
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