Not a browser war but a Web war

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Today’s invite to use Firefox and Firefox-based browsers is not about the browser war the Internet and Web community is typically involved in, but a war for open and free (as in freedom) Web. Since Google is trying to take away our freedom in Web browsing, it is now our duty to fight against Google and its plans.

One of Google’s power arms in this battle is Chrome. Through Chrome (and its base, Chromium), Google is enforcing new made-up standards that nobody wants except Google itself. Standards forced on users that are solely there to benefit Google and its partners. It’s now our duty to fight against them. It has always been our duty.

Any Chromium-based browser should be avoided. Doesn’t matter how the company behind your browser is removing Google’s DRM or how they advertise themselves to you, they should be avoided. I saw companies like Brave and Vivaldi protesting Google’s new war on Web but I think that’s ridiculous. They are some of the companies that are helping Google dominate in the Web browser war.

Using Chromium, which only results in Google winning the Web war, is a betrayal to the Internet and Web community and to all of us. There’s no excuse, there’s not “but”, there’s no good reason, it’s all false and hopeless justification of helping Google take away our precious Web.

Of course, I’m not saying Firefox and Mozilla are perfect but they’re now our only tools and power to fight Google. Our best shot is now Firefox and the cooperation of webmasters and sysadmins and an online civil disobedience against the Google’s efforts to impose its dictatorship on us.

Managed and controlled sleep: end of experiment

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I’m super tired right now. Since I started my experiment, I’ve been trying very hard to keep up with it and it’s been 15 days since I started not sleeping well intentionally. 15 very hard days indeed.

At first I thought it becomes easy when I go with the experiment a few days. i thought it’s hard at first and I get used to it but as I was moving forward, it became harder and harder. I’ve become exhausted more and more and I tried to get energy with food and sleeping in quiet rooms to make up for it but it wasn’t working.

I tried to save my energy with limiting my movement and avoid hard work and drinking a lot of water for hydration but it also wasn’t enough.

More I went on with the experiment, more I got distracted and I became less and less focused. It was hurting my job and I couldn’t keep up with everything that was going on. After the first week, to better my work quality and prevent damages to my business, I changed the schedule to bring sleeping hours closer together but it wasn’t enough.

Sometimes I would suddenly come to my senses and realize that I had not been conscious for the previous minutes. But in the same moments that I was doing something, I was aware that I was doing it. I didn’t pass out, I just phased out for some minutes. Something like a muscle memory, you’re aware that you’re doing something but you do it automatically and without your control. For example, I did sell the products and did log the record on my computer but I did them unaware of myself. It was like looking at myself in third-person.

I didn’t have any problem driving or eating. Nothing was changed and I didn’t phase out or sleepy. I didn’t notice any change and nobody told me anything so I guess even if there were some change or inconveniences, it wasn’t that much for people to notice.

Communicating with other people was also good. Only a few people told me I look tired and I could keep up with people and conversations. I also faced no issue with remembering stuff. I thought my short-term memory would be affected but I faced no problem.

Sleeping became hard at some point. I had trouble going to sleep a few times but it wasn’t too much of trouble. I think it was the fifth day of the experiment. Waking up was also hard. It was the hardest part of the experiment. i thought about giving up a few times.

I could still go on with the experiment. I still have some energy left in me, enough to continue the experiment for at least another week but I stopped because I didn’t want to bother my business or people around me anymore. Sleeping hours and crankiness didn’t only affect me, it also affected those around me.

Anyway, I’m gonna sleep like a baby tonight and I’m gonna enjoy every second of it. It was a good experiment and I’m not regretting it. I enjoyed it overall.

Google launches another war at web

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I was going to put an exclamation mark after the title but I realized there’s no need as I don’t get surprised by hearing Google is doing something bad to the web. As Google does, they’re launching another attack on free Internet, this time by “Web Environment Integrity”.

Put in simple words, Google is giving developers an API through which they can approve certain browser configurations while forbidding others from accessing a service or a page. This means, assuming one implements it, one can prevent you from accessing their web page or using a service because you used Firefox instead of their choice of web browser.

The intro explains that the goal is to make sure the browser hasn’t been modified or tampered with in any unapproved ways. Given that Google is behind this, unapproved ways surely means whatever hurts Google’s tracking and data-harvesting.

See how you can read this post using your favorite web browser or RSS reader? That’ll no longer be the case if this WEI thingy is put in work. Do you use tracker-blockers on your browser for safe and painless browsing? With WEI they can force you to use the browser the way they want and it can force you not to block ads.

Imagine being forced to use an specific browser of their choice (not yours but theirs) and being tracked not by cookies only but by the browser itself (just like how Google Chrome does) and worse than that, imagine you’re blocked from accessing a web site because you tried to block trackers using an extension.

Well of course they claim that’s not the goal but what’s stopping them? Google has a long history of abusing users and collecting personal information to sell or use for advertisers. Google is not a hero when it comes to keeping promises and they’re not trusted with people’s data.

In the “non-goals” section of the project, it says they don’t want to “interfere with browser functionality, including plugins and extensions.” That’s a promise to not killing ad-blockers, even though the project mentions better advertising support as some of its goals.

It’s dangerous. Google will do anything to collect more and more information from users and to fight those who resist it. It’s dangerous to privacy, security, freedom, and integrity of open web. It will cause a lot of problems for people which are far more bigger than whether we see or not see advertisements.

Think about political activists who are forced to browse web using Chrome instead of Tor and their data is collected by someone who sells them to tyrannical governments. Imagine a human rights campaign organizer being forced to give away personal data and the whole campaign being compromised because of it. The Internet and web were never completely safe but imagine the last traces of privacy being wiped for the profit of a company and some CEOs.

It’s against everything that we stand for but most importantly it’s against our freedom. It’s targeting our freedom of choice, freedom of computing, freedom for information, freedom for Internet and people using it, and freedom of us against tyranny. We should fight against it. It’ll destroy what’s left of our free web and Internet.

Managed and controlled sleep: an experiment

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It’s been days since I had a good sleep. I’m going to bed late and wake up early these days. I get no more than 5 hours of sleep a day and it made me exhausted, until it didn’t!

Since three days ago, it’s been hard for me to wake up because I feel very tired but then when I get ready and go to work, I no longer feel the tiredness. It made me thinking about how sleeping and resting works so I’m gonna start an experiment.

Starting tonight I’m gonna manage my sleep. I’m gonna add to the number of times I’m gonna sleep in 24 hours but in each session, I’m gonna sleep no more or less than 2 hours. I’m gonna have 4 sleep sessions during day and night so I’ll get eight hours of sleep in every 24 hours.

The sleep schedule will be two hours from 1 to 3, Two hours from 6 to 8, Two hours from 14 to 16, and two hours from 20 to 22. Since the two hours from 20 to 22 I’ll be at work, I’m gonna liquidize the schedule and adopt changes if necessary. My partner will take over when I have to sleep during work hours so the business won’t get hurt.

I’m not gonna achieve anything from this experiment, I’m just curious to see what happens if instead of eight hours straight, we sleep for two hours, four times a day.

The urge of microblogging

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I’m doing backups right now. I take a backup of everything I know I’ll need of my computers get lost or stolen or wiped and I encrypt them and store them on storage I have on different locations. I store copies on different storage to be able to recover my stuff if one of the copies gets destroyed or inaccessible.

While doing the backups (which includes a copy of this web site), I wanted to share with my friends that backing up stuff we care about is important and a must do. However, I’m not on any social network! That urge that I wanted to enter a URL on my browser and type to my friends that they must back up their stuff is amazing.

It may be an old habit of course, because I was microblogging for a long time, but it still fascinates me that I want to share small notes with my friends and communicate with them on a social network even after I have deleted all my accounts and decided I no longer have to use them.

I have considered signing up on a Mastodon instance a few times since I left and some people even told me that they miss me there and I should go back but I still have resisted it. I still believe I’ll be more healthy mentally and physically without social networks. My blog is enough for me (even though I even thought about deleting this blog as well).

Microblogging is so addictive. Whatever you do or whatever interesting happens to you will go online with microblogs and we do that unconsciously because we’re used to it. We see that kind of stuff and we do that so constantly that we don’t even realize what we’re doing no more. That scares me. The urge for microblogging, no matter how wonderful it is, scares me.

I’m still resisting this urge and I still tell myself that if there’s something so important that I have to tell other people, there’s my blog for it. I’m not gonna use my blog for microblogging or stuff like that. I’m gonna use it as a real blog like we used to do 20 years ago and I’m gonna keep it that way. All important stuff that need to be shared with others goes here.

For example, back up your important stuff people. Backups are important. I’m doing it right now and it takes about 10 minutes of my day. You can do it as well.

Move people to free software

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Meta (formerly Facebook) has recently published a social networking app to compete with Twitter. It’s named Threads. Threads allows users to create text-based posts with up to 500 characters, share photos, and upload videos up to five minutes long. It looks similar to Twitter, with an interface that gives users the option to like, comment, repost, and share threads.

Users can choose to log in with their Instagram usernames or create a new account. Threads does not currently support ActivityPub, but there are plans to integrate the protocol later down the line.

The plan to support ActivityPub is good news. However, the app is proprietary and it will be privacy-violating. The app is not available in the Europe due to the EU’s strict privacy regulations. That’s how dangerous it is for people’s privacy. (Update: I came to realization that them supporting ActivityPub is not actually good news!)

But privacy issues aside, Meta is a huge proprietor. The news about supporting ActivityPub, which is the protocol behind the fediverse (most notably Mastodon), should not misguide us about the nonfree app. We should move people to free software and open networks. The solution to Twitter, and the opportunity we now have, is to guide people to use free programs and networks such those that build Mastodon.

People should be in control of their computing and that’ll be possible only by using free software. Using social networks such as Mastodon which are built upon the idea of openness and freedom will encourage people to learn more about the issues we’re worried about and will enhance the ability of activists in our movement to promote freedom more and more and help more people understand what we stand for.

We should help our developers and activists to teach more people about freedom now that we have the opportunity to move people from proprietary software to freedom.

We’re afraid of being called names!

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I’ve been training myself to not care about being called names. I don’t care if people try to hurt or insult me with words. I don’t care about their insults, they can’t upset me, and won’t be able to affect me in any way. I simply don’t care about what they say to me and no matter how hard they try to insult me, they’ll be unsuccessful.

I also follow the Crocker’s rules. The Crocker’s rules gives me opportunity to receive most information in least amount of time. It also means that I won’t be offended if someone is not polite to me. I’m not afraid of someone calling me an idiot. If I get offended, it’s my fault.

I believe more people, specially politicians, should adopt this behavior. We’re not too afraid of being called a name and this is affecting us as a society and is causing malfunction. Last night I was watching an episode of “The Problem with Jon Stewart” and he was talking about the economy and mentioned the same problem.

He mentioned that we’re going bankrupt because of all the things we’re paying for out of pocket that other countries pay for with taxes. The basic tax proposition is simple: You pay taxes to the government in the form of the money and the government pools that money and uses it to provide the people with essential goods and services that they need.

That would be efficient but there’s one catch: We can’t do it in that way because getting anything directly from the government or through cost-controlled industries would be considered [THUNDER and DRUM ROLL] socialism.

Isn’t this insane? The government and capitalists made people too afraid of socialism and have been calling anything they don’t like communist that doing something in an efficient way would be impossible because they don’t want to be called a name. Too much afraid of being called a socialist or communist that we rather destroy the economy than adopting a policy that works.

We should stop this madness. People may still get fooled by some politicians but they’re not dumb. We need to man up and start talking sense to them. We should sit with them and explain to them how things work without being afraid of all the name-callings and populism we face.

For the sake of our own future, we should shut the hell up when we hear words. We should stop being triggered by words and start building a behavior and personality both individually and socially to be able to work something out. Words, no matter how offensive, are far more harmless than bad policies.

The reality may differ

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I’ve been watching the American crime drama TV series “The Rookie” lately and it’s very enjoyable. Apart from the action and partial comedy you see in it, it’s kind of more realistic than other police dramas I’ve seen. I’ve seen “Brooklyn Nine-Nine” for example and that was kind of comedy that you don’t get the feeling of real police work being done.

Spoiler alert! In the episode eight of the season one, officer Nolan shot someone dead. He chased the man and when the man turned back and pointed his pistol at him, John shoots the man in the chest and the man drops dead. It happened very quick and the episode showed John Nolan in shock and in a very uncomfortable upsetting mood.

Now I know it’s not the case for every police shooting and homicide done by cops, you should know that by reading my previous posts condemning police brutality, but we should consider that many of the shootings and killings by cops are probably done in situations like this one. I’ve been thinking about this and imagining myself in a situation like that and I think I wouldn’t have done anything differently. I tried to convince myself that I could duck down or something like that but realistically I would’ve not.

The situation showed in the episode was so intense and quickly escalating that it would’ve left any of us doing the same thing officer Nolan did, that’s if we didn’t freeze from shock. That’s hard work done by cops. They put themselves in danger for the sake of our safety. Of course that many of police officers are corrupt and do harmful things, such as abusing their power and misusing their position but generalizing officers is wrong.

And I should also mention that the movie doesn’t make me a fan of cops. It won’t change my opinion that the policing done by cops is not wrong and the methods and how they do their job is correct. I still believe the system is flawed and the job they do does a lot of harm to many people but I also believe there’s hope and they do a lot of good work and their hard work should be seriously considered.

That was just one example for me. An example of what I have believed for so long and how I came to realization that the truth and reality may differ and being absolutely sure of something may be wrong. The reality may differ and that’s a true statement for 99 percent of the time.

I always have believed that people should have an open mind and be accepting of one another no matter what are our differences and I always believed that we should change our minds when new evidence is provided and I believe it’s one those times. I regret that for a while I called cops ‘thugs’ or ‘pigs’. Of course many of them deserve such calling but that’s unfair to those officers who are good.

This is not just about cops, it’s about any time I’ve generalized a group or people or a matter. It’s about me not trying hard enough to correct myself and act good even though I knew better than that. It’s about trying hard enough from now on to be a better person and not to judge people based on what I hear or see because the reality may differ. It’s not about cops, it’s about people and matters in general and the ability to accept that I may not be able to judge accordingly and be smaller than a bigger matter.