After a long while (almost 5 years!), the blog is finally back online. And yes, I did at the long last come to terms with the word “blog”. Also, the title got changed to what a major translation service spat out when fed the Icelandic information security law.
I admit it took way too much time for me to finally start working on bringing the blog back, and then again too much time to actually get it done. I probably did overthink stuff massively. As I am prone to do.
But hey, at least we can now have…
Nice things
There are Atom and RSS feeds; I am also considering adding a JSON feed. There is a Contents page with tag- and language-based filtering available, all implemented without a single line of JavaScript and no external includes. All the content from the old site is preserved and old URLs are redirected to new URLs (if the URLs got changed).
Care was taken to make the site usable for screen readers, and to be readable and useful even with CSS completely blocked. Go ahead, check how the site looks with CSS disabled! One page where it is very difficult to make the pure markup nice and easy to use is the Contents page, due to CSS-based interactivity, but even that page is not horrid I hope, and I am eager to improve.
I am also sure there is plenty I could improve for screen readers and other assistive technologies. Feedback welcome.
Plans
Eventually, I am planning to add a Tor Onion Service (with Alt-Svc or Onion-Location headers), Gemini site, and PDF/EPUB versions of each article. You can already get a source Markdown version for each post, see just below a post’s title, on the right.
The whole thing is a static site, so it won’t break due to a PHP version upgrade – which, as embarassing as it is to admit it, was the reason why the site went dark all those years ago. This also means I can add more interesting stuff later: put it behind Fasada, easily deploy Samizdat, or generate a zipfile to download and browse off-line for anyone who is so inclined.
I would like the site to become a bit of a showcase of different ways websites can be made resilient against web censorship. I don’t expect rys.io to be blocked anywhere, but making it such a showcase could perhaps help admins of other websites, more likely to be blocked, figure out ways to stay available for their readers.
You can read a bit more about the site (theme, header graphic, etc.) on the About page.
Blast from the past
After pondering this for quite a while, I decided to bring back all of the content that was available on the blog until it went under. All old content is tagged as ancient.
For some posts bringing them back was an obvious decision:
- Subjectively on Anti-ACTA in Poland
- A subjective historical record of the Anti-ACTA campaign in Poland, referenced by quite a few other sites.
- Why I find -ND unnecessary and harmful
- The No Derivatives versions of Creative Commons licenses are quite problematic. Here’s why.
- How information sharing uproots conservative business models
- Copyright was never really about authors’ rights. If the Internet is incompatible with copyright-based business models, it’s the business models that need to adapt.
- Blurry line between private service and public infrastructure
- The question of when does a private service become de facto public infrastructure (and what should be done about it) is exactly the question that needs answering now in the context of Big Tech.
Others are perhaps interesting in the context of the Fediverse, especially considering they have been published years before Fediverse was even a thing:
- Breaking the garden walls
- This was written with Diaspora and pre-Pump.io Identi.ca in mind, and it’s interesting to see how the Fediverse basically solves the first two steps mentioned in that post.
- Diaspora-Based Comment System
- A decade ago I advocated for a decentralized social media based comment system for blogs; way before it
was coolgot implemented as ActivityPub plugins for WordPress and for Drupal. - Social blogosphere
- Another take on the idea of decentralized social media enabled blogs.
Some are braindumps, summaries of experience I gained from particular workshops or through my activism. They might still be useful, although at least partially they might have not aged all that well:
- Border conditions for preserving subjectivity in the digital era
- Summary of a workshop about subjectivity (that is: being a subject, not an object, of actions; having agency) online.
- HOWTO: effectively argue against Internet censorship ideas
- Eight years ago Internet censorship landscape was similar yet different in many interesting ways. Still, useful snapshot of an activist’s perspective on it at a particular point in time.
- Public consultations and anonymity
- How does pseudonymity and anonymity work withing a public consultations process? Can they bring value to them, even though they make accountability more difficult?
But then… then there are the other posts. The silly ones, or those published before I figured out this whole blogging thing (today they would be toots on the fedi instead). I struggled with those, but in the end decided to keep them for histerical (sic!) record.
Lot of effort went into this site. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed creating it!