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diff --git a/articles/unburn.txt b/articles/unburn.txt deleted file mode 100644 index 9fdd9ab..0000000 --- a/articles/unburn.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,76 +0,0 @@ -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'. |