A new start

blog/2022/august/beres.html

@@ -24,7 +24,7 @@
 				<p>It's a lovely little script. No database, barely any config, no requirement for a VPS. I'm quite proud of it, really. After reading an article, if I don't care about it anymore, I can just delete it instead of merely marking it read and hoping the RSS feed reader will eventually run garbage collection to prevent the database from growing obese and unusable from latency. However, since reading articles means manually opening every one with <code>less</code> and Beres doesn't fetch external resources like images, I've found that using it is incredibly frustrating for use with feeds that publish more than, say, two articles a day. Like social media feeds, for example. It soft-limits me to only subscribing to news and maybe a handful of personal sites I care about and can trust to put out high-quality articles... or, at least, ones I would want to expend the effort of typing in KOReader's terminal emulator to read.</p>
 				<p>Said social media feeds were the reason I originally went with Tiny Tiny RSS because of the "scroll to mark as read" feature to consume as many articles as quickly as possible. It probably also helped that I could just <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20220817173016/https://git.tt-rss.org/fox/ttrss-docker-compose.git/tree/README.md?h=static-dockerhub">throw it inside Docker</a> instead of having to deal with the monstrosity that is manually creating a database in Redis or PostgreSQL or installing seven kajillion PHP dependencies and hoping they'll run nicely with Caddy. (I hate you specifically, Miniflux. "MUH MINIMALISM!!1!" Okay then, where's SQLite support? What's more simple to handle than a single file? You're already a single file, being written in Golang. Can't you go one step further?) And technically I only deleted Newsboat and Tiny Tiny RSS; I kept <a href="https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.decsync.flym/">Flym</a> on my phone(s) to track a handful (an admittedly large handful, but still one) of artists on Twitter whose artwork I would rather not go without. I would have gone one step further and imported these onto desktop to fully cut off the ability to constantly swipe for updates on my phone like a dopamine slot machine, but none of the options for Linux that I know of really mesh well with my sneakernet setup and I often move among two or three devices for writing as I go about the day.</p>
 				<p>But nobody cares about these minor implementation details. What's more important is, <em>why am I doing this to myself?</em></p>
-				<p>And the answer, paradoxically, is that <a href="../../2021/december/exhausted.html">I'm exhausted.</a> I'm tired of dealing with Docker, so I wrote a program that would completely negate the need for it. I'm tired of eye strain from reading on my phone, so I wrote a program that would work on my e-reader. I'm tired of being exposed to the opinions of thousands of strangers on a daily basis, so I wrote a program that would keep me up-to-date on the current state of the apocalypse while being so unwieldy that it de facto excludes all those other strangers with ultimately nothing worthwhile to say.</p>
+				<p>And the answer, paradoxically, is that I'm exhausted. I'm tired of dealing with Docker, so I wrote a program that would completely negate the need for it. I'm tired of eye strain from reading on my phone, so I wrote a program that would work on my e-reader. I'm tired of being exposed to the opinions of thousands of strangers on a daily basis, so I wrote a program that would keep me up-to-date on the current state of the apocalypse while being so unwieldy that it de facto excludes all those other strangers with ultimately nothing worthwhile to say.</p>
 				<p>I'm tired of being online, so I gave myself one less reason to boot up my computer.</p>
 				<p>I wanted to retire from public life, I thought the night before I almost accidentally killed my Kobo. Leave only my books publically accessible and remove access to all the rest and delete all my other social accounts elsewhere. A woman I had never seen before had come up to me in a dream a few nights prior and demanded I stop being so neurotic about my website, to decide once and for all whether I was staying on the Internet or leaving.</p>
 				<p>I don't think I've made my choice yet. Some part of me thinks I may never. That's my response to everything that ever goes wrong in my life, isn't it, Jett? Do nothing and wait for the problem to get worse?</p>

blog/2022/march/digital-immortality.html

@@ -18,7 +18,7 @@
 				<p>A week ago, throughout the course of a single day, I received a chain of bizarre emails from a "Yamato Kuribayashi". A cursory search through our least favorite search engine shows that this name <em>does</em> belong to a real person living in Japan, but I have no idea if he was the actual person emailing me, and I suppose I will never know. Although, if he was, he was exceptionally bad at OPSEC. Arriving in groups of two or three every few hours and with the message only in the subject line, message body solely composed of the Japanese equivalent of "sent from my iPhone", the first few said "die", "I'll kill you", and "death". Once I asked him why he was sending me these, both in English and in a poorly-translated copy-paste from Google Translate, the bundles of messages continued, but now instead of death threats they held "we are sorry for the inconvenience". He kept apologizing until evening, where he strangely offered to share his location over Find My iPhone and then said he would "change [his] behavior and become a true human being".</p>
 				<p>Was it an omen? A prank gone awry by a technologically inept person? A person so incensed after reading something on my website that he had felt compelled to try to push my paranoid buttons?</p>
 				<p>I suppose I will never know.</p>
-				<p>My <code>prometida</code>'s birthday is, at the time of writing this, a little over a week away. I've been putting the finishing touches on <em>The Eschaton Eminence</em> and working on some kind of knit-flower floral display and tidying my room. The last two are not going particularly well... although I can't tell if this is because my body is slowing down or if I was wrong and I do have winter-induced seasonal affective disorder after all and the lethargy is sapping my will to do anything. Theoretically, all is in place for my impending demise. May or November, I'm not entirely sure: I asked for an extension so my future-wife would have time to complete her own studies, but apparently her campus has erupted in fiery riots and she's temporarily fled for her own safety, and the <a href="../../2021/december/exhausted.html">"reconciling with my parents"</a> thing is not going well, no matter how hard I try.</p>
+				<p>My <i>prometida</i>'s birthday is, at the time of writing this, a little over a week away. I've been putting the finishing touches on <em>The Eschaton Eminence</em> and working on some kind of knit-flower floral display and tidying my room. The last two are not going particularly well... although I can't tell if this is because my body is slowing down or if I was wrong and I do have winter-induced seasonal affective disorder after all and the lethargy is sapping my will to do anything. Theoretically, all is in place for my impending demise. May or November, I'm not entirely sure: I asked for an extension so my future-wife would have time to complete her own studies, but apparently her campus has erupted in fiery riots and she's temporarily fled for her own safety, and the "reconciling with my parents" thing is not going well, no matter how hard I try.</p>
 				<p>A traditionally hosted website (that is, not peer-to-peer) can be broken down into three major parts:</p>
 				<ol>
 					<li>the domain</li>

blog/2022/may/divide.html

@@ -282,7 +282,7 @@ done
 				), use to take down content and bring to justice those responsible. Not that I suddenly like the cops or trust them to do anything correctly in this hellworld. But something needs to be done.</p>
 				<p>And what am I to do?</p>
 				<p>I wrestled with this question for several weeks, but first with Freenet, which <a href="https://archive.ph/https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/03/man-jailed-indefinitely-for-refusing-to-decrypt-hard-drives-loses-appeal/">has a reputation</a> for <a href="https://archive.ph/https://www.texarkanagazette.com/news/2022/apr/28/feds-charge-texarkana-man-with-child-porn/">being a haven</a> for <a href="https://archive.ph/https://www.vice.com/en/article/gvymzx/one-step-ahead-pedophiles-on-the-deep-web">pedophiles</a>. When one requests content on Freenet, said content is cached partially on every node that it passes through on route to the person who requested it. This is how popular content lives longer and is faster to access. But this also means that one has no idea what is being stored on their node at any given time and there is a non-zero chance one is helping in the dissemination of child sexual abuse material.</p>
-				<p>There is a small child in my life. <a href="../../2021/september/fire.html">She lives in the house behind me</a> and frequently comes to visit with her mother. <a href="../../2021/december/exhausted.html">We hold craft nights together.</a> She calls me her best friend. I cherish her very much. I cannot stand the thought of her, or any other child, coming to harm of any kind. The harms I supposedly wrought on strangers <a href="https://deadendshrine.online/p5.html">in a previous life</a>? I don't remember any of it, and I was being manipulated as basically a barely-sentient tool. I can live with myself. The harms I unknowingly inflicted on others in my childhood this life, only recognized decades after the fact looking back at memories of places I will never set foot in again? I can live with myself, difficult as it is in my weaker moments. But I could never and I would never live with myself knowing I, as I am now, helped a pedophile harm a small child and evade the consequences.</p>
+				<p>There is a small child in my life. <a href="../../2021/september/fire.html">She lives in the house behind me</a> and frequently comes to visit with her mother. We hold craft nights together. She calls me her best friend. I cherish her very much. I cannot stand the thought of her, or any other child, coming to harm of any kind. The harms I supposedly wrought on strangers <a href="https://deadendshrine.online/p5.html">in a previous life</a>? I don't remember any of it, and I was being manipulated as basically a barely-sentient tool. I can live with myself. The harms I unknowingly inflicted on others in my childhood this life, only recognized decades after the fact looking back at memories of places I will never set foot in again? I can live with myself, difficult as it is in my weaker moments. But I could never and I would never live with myself knowing I, as I am now, helped a pedophile harm a small child and evade the consequences.</p>
 				<p>So it would logically follow that I would refuse to support technologies that I <em>know</em> enable others to harm children. Except... Tor and Freenet and other darknets aren't used by just pedophiles. They're used by activists and people under repressive regimes and those seeking to leave abusive households and students wanting to get around school firewalls and webmasters who don't want to pay for domains or cloud hosting or a static IP. Unfortunately I have no way of quantifying what goes on in exit nodes. (A study done by others estimates <a href="https://archive.ph/o9Z5K#selection-1149.0-1161.43">98% of Tor traffic is through exit nodes and only 2% is to hidden services</a><!-- https://theconversation.com/how-the-worlds-biggest-dark-web-platform-spreads-millions-of-items-of-child-sex-abuse-material-and-why-its-hard-to-stop-167107 -->, but I have no data about what amount of that 98% was for non-illegal purposes.) The existence of that four to ten percent of Tor hidden services not dedicated to harm... does it outweigh the ninety-plus percent of abusive sites on the network?</p>
 				<p>I mean, child molestation is far older than any darknet, or even the Internet. A theoretical shutdown of Freenet or Tor or whatever wouldn't stop the spread of CSAM, and the bot spam on imageboards proves that plenty of illicit material gets traded on the clearnet anyway, but it <em>would</em> harm those legitimate users seeking more computing freedom. Never mind that, with peer-to-peer systems, a shutdown wouldn't even work since the source code is already out there. (Tor could theoretically be shut down, though, given that the whole network is dependent on a small handful of <a href="https://archive.ph/LPAJK">hardcoded consensus nodes</a>.)</p>
 				<p>The genie is out of the bottle. The <a href="../../2020/july/signal.html">signal can't be stopped.</a> There is no "universal backdoor" that would help law enforcement catch pedophiles without weakening legitimate and liberatory uses for the technology. All anyone can hope for, I guess, is that these scumbags mess up their OPSEC and get exposed whenever they pop up. The same tactics as always.</p>