Feeling Luddite

Yesterday I received e-mail whose useful content came in the form of a PDF attachment that was enormously tall, thin and hyperlink-filled. I think I was meant to be reading it by swiping in some smartphone MUA. I further think that I don't feel inclined to do anything of the sort.

I got to thinking about how usage changes. I found the Internet quite usable before it became synonymous with the WWW. If I wanted to find some document or software then I had Archie to help me find from where to FTP it. If I wanted to find somebody's e-mail address then I could normally track down their institution via Gopher then ask the postmaster. I could real-time chat using Unix's talk program and its descendants. Aside from this journal most of my non-work online group chat is still via console clients that use openly specified text-based protocols. (At work we use Slack but I get away with using its IRC gateway.)

One thing I hate about the WWW is how many sites then use it to conflate the UI with the useful backend stuff. Like, with banking, there isn't some useful online banking protocol that my opensource client can talk, instead the interface is determined by which bank my actual accounts are at. Or, where there is a choice, people are ignorant of it: for instance they post to Usenet via Google Groups and have no idea how much worse their article looks to others. And, at work, I keep getting e-mail that I think is designed for Outlook Calendar stuff to recognize, which offers a link to instead get these messages in some other format I also don't want. At least some sites, probably this one too (it's on my to-do list to investigate backing up this journal) offer a simple RESTful API through which I may mirror stuff locally, applying SWISH++ to indexing it, etc.

This may be an instance of telling the tide to turn back. The world may jump down a Steve-Jobs-ian rabbit hole of you must let us suck you wholly into our platform and I may end up with no practical choice but to follow. But, goodness, if I do, it won't be without some sorrow and regret that I am not in a world in which others don't expect to control my whole experience.

Update: On the question of backing up this journal, I now find that the Dreamwidth API documentation … doesn't quite exist yet.

Worthwhile anonymous peer-to-peer

Our home Internet connection typically has some spare bandwidth and it occurs to me that I could donate a portion to running a peer-to-peer network node. I would probably quite like to support some network that offers state-of-the-art anonymity but there's the whole issue of how one actually uses such technologies: I would quite like to assist civil liberties campaigners in totalitarian states but I would rather not provide copyright-violating movie downloads and aid the circulation of child pornography. I don't know if the features or culture of some networks tends to bring them different kinds of user or use. I wonder if adding a node to any in particular would on balance be a moral good, enough to make it worth the cost.