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authorNick White <git@njw.me.uk>2010-09-26 12:51:14 +0100
committerNick White <git@njw.me.uk>2010-09-26 12:51:14 +0100
commit33d710efd825eb493459494821dda22467011973 (patch)
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downloadnjw-website-33d710efd825eb493459494821dda22467011973.tar.bz2
njw-website-33d710efd825eb493459494821dda22467011973.zip
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-Unburn
-=======================================================================
-
-### How and why to eschew feedburner
-
-Feedburner is fucked up. It is a way of proxying feeds through their
-centralised service for purposes of surveillance and advertising. It
-is owned and operated by Google, so it's very likely that the data
-collected about your reading habits is linked with the existing profile
-Google has on you.
-
-## Background
-
-Feeds are not supposed to be like this. The web is not supposed to be
-like this. The web is decentralised. Feeds make it easy to quickly
-collect information from many different places together.
-
-The decentralisation of the web makes it difficult for someone to
-find out all of the different websites you visit (except by
-internet service providers and those with influence over them,
-though this can be defeated using [Tor](https://www.torproject.org).)
-This makes practical surveillance of your reading habits difficult.
-Decentralisation also creates a resiliant infrastructure which is very
-difficult to censor.
-
-## The problem
-
-Feedburner seeks to disrupt this in the name of profit. It offers
-website owners a way of sending all requests for their feeds through
-a central website. In exchange they offer website owners the ability
-to inject advertising into feeds and view more information about the
-readers of their website. Feedburner collect and analyse information
-about each readers' habits, which they use to better divert readers
-attention to the commercial, either directly through their own
-adverts, or by selling detailed reader profiles to anybody
-willing to pay.
-
-To summarise; feedburner surveils your reading habits, sharing them
-with anyone powerful enough to pay, undermines the censorship
-resistant infrastructure of the web, and interrupts your reading
-with adverts.
-
-## The solution
-
-Fortunately it is quite easy to defeat the redirects to feedburner.
-
-Firstly though we need to find out which feeds are redirected through
-feedburner. This script will print any url from the file 'urls' which
-currently goes through feedburner:
-
- #!/bin/sh
- urlfile=urls
- sed -e '/^#/d' -e '/^$/d' < $urlfile | awk '{print $1}' \
- | while read u; do
- fb=`curl -s -I $u | grep -c feedburner`
- test $fb -gt 0 && echo $u needs unburning
- done
-
-Now you know the feeds to deal with, you can go ahead and unburn them.
-
-The key is to claim to be feedburner to the website, and it will
-dutifully let you through to the real feeds. Do this by setting the
-User-Agent string to 'feedburner' in your HTTP request.
-
-If using a newsreader which supports Snownews extensions, this is easy
-to integrate. Create a simple shell script called unburn.sh:
-
- !#/bin/sh
- curl -s -A 'feedburner' "$1"`
-
-Then replace the url entry in your newsreader with
-`"exec:sh unburn.sh http://feedurl/"`
-
-Other newsreaders will have different procedures, but the same
-principle applies; just set the User-Agent header string to
-'feedburner'.