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'.