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; they make the radically distributed infrastructure of the web more usable. They work by publishing information in a standard way (RSS or Atom), so that new works from sites of interest can be discovered without the need to regularly visit many separate websites. 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.) 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 Feedburner works by forwarding requests for a feed through feedburner's own servers, tracking each person and adding advertising as they do so. Fortunately it is quite easy to defeat the redirects to feedburner. Feedburner needs to be able to read the feed properly, so redirects are usually set up to let requests which claim to be from 'feedburner' through to the original feed. Firstly though we need to find out which feeds are redirected through feedburner. A simple way to do ths on a unix like system is to use curl: curl -I http://url.com/feed | grep Location If a feedburner address is printed, then the feed is being redirected, so it's time to go ahead and unburn it. The key is to claim to be feedburner to the website, and it will dutifully let you through to the real feed. 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 do. Create a simple 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'. ### Other methods There are two other ways for feedburner to infect feeds, which are more difficult to deal with. These are 'hidden feeds' or subdomain redirects. In each case, the real feed location is somewhere else, and the advertised location is only served by feedburner. In these cases changing the user agent will not work. Feedburner are also active in podcasting, where they brand themselves "podtrac". These podcasts also tend to use subdomain redirects. Your only option in this case is either to try to guess the real location of the feed, or to ask the site owner directly (depending on their disposition, you could make the case against feedburner, or just claim that you have problems accessing feedburner's servers.) ## Conclusion Website owners: respect your readers. Don't sell them out for a few pennies a month. If you want to better understand your readers, ask them to write to you. If you want to make money, do so in a way that is more respectful to your readers and your work than advertising and spying. Readers: there is a big market in trying to disrupt your life. The internet is seen by many as a perfect tool for surveilling and consumerising. However it doesn't have to be so. With good information and tools, we can keep the internet as a decentralised and free space.