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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; 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.
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