From 4a43cd79f1cd901f7988260b1872d1d306f2a848 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: Nick White <git@njw.me.uk>
Date: Tue, 20 Jul 2010 14:34:25 +0100
Subject: First draft of unburn article, and article build infrastructure

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(limited to 'articles')

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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'.
-- 
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