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Month: June 2020

Practice what you preach

Posted on by Doug Belshaw

I spend a lot of time looking at screens and interacting with other people in a mediated way through digital technologies. That’s why it’s important to continually review the means by which I communicate with others, either synchronously (e.g. through a chat app or video conference software) or asynchronously (e.g. via email or this blog).

When I started following a bunch of people who are using the #100DaysToOffload hashtag, some of them followed me back:

@dajbelshaw you have a really beautiful site that doesn't open for me. First it's not compatible with LibreJs and then uMatrix block Cloudflare's ajax and you'll not get further than loading screen.

I know that some people are quite hardcore about not loading JavaScript for privacy reasons, but I didn’t know what ‘LibreJs’ was. Although uMatrix rang a bell, I thought it would be a good opportunity to find out more.

It turns out LibreJS is a browser extension maintained by the GNU project:

GNU LibreJS aims to address the JavaScript problem described in Richard Stallman’s article The JavaScript Trap. LibreJS is a free add-on for GNU IceCat and other Mozilla-based browsers. It blocks nonfree nontrivial JavaScript while allowing JavaScript that is free and/or trivial.

Meanwhile uMatrix seems to be another browser extension that adds a kind of ‘firewall’ to page loading:

Point & click to forbid/allow any class of requests made by your browser. Use it to block scripts, iframes, ads, facebook, etc.

Meanwhile, the extensions that I use when browsing the web to maintain some semblance of privacy, and to block annoying advertising, are:

So just running the tools I use on my own site leads to the following:

Privacy Badger found 18 potential trackers on dougbelshaw.com:

web.archive.org
ajax.cloudflare.com
assets.digitalclimatestrike.net
www.google-analytics.com
docs.google.com
play.google.com
lh3.googleusercontent.com
lh4.googleusercontent.com
lh5.googleusercontent.com
lh6.googleusercontent.com
licensebuttons.net
www.loom.com
public-api.wordpress.com
pixel.wp.com
s0.wp.com
s1.wp.com
stats.wp.com
widgets.wp.com

Disconnect produced a graph which shows the scale of the problem:

Graph produced by Disconnect showing trackers for dougbelshwa.com

This was the output from uBlock Origin:

Output from uBlock Origin for dougbelshaw.com

It’s entirely possible to make a blog that involves no JavaScript or trackers. It’s just that, to also make it look nice, you have to do some additional work.

I’m going to start the process of removing as many of these trackers as I can from my blog. It’s really is insidious how additional functionality and ease-of-use for blog owners adds to the tracking burden for those reading their output.

Recently, I embedded a Google Slides deck in a weeknote I wrote. I’m genuinely shocked at how many trackers just including that embed added to my blog: 84! Suffice to say that I’ve replaced it with an archive.org embed.

I was surprised to see the Privacy Badger was reporting tracking by Facebook and Pinterest. I’m particularly hostile to Facebook services, and don’t use any of them (including WhatsApp and Instagram). Upon further investigation, it turns out that even if you have ‘share to X’ buttons turned off, Jetpack still allows social networks to phone home. So that’s gone, too.

There’s still work to be done here, including a new theme that doesn’t include Google Fonts. I’m also a bit baffled by what’s using Google Analytics, and I’ll need to stop using Cloudflare as a CDN.

But, as ever, it’s a work in progress and, as Antoine de Saint-Exupéry famously said, “Perfection is achieved when there is nothing left to take away.”

This post is day two of my #100DaysToOffload challenge. Want to get involved? Find out more at 100daystooffload.com

Header image by Gordon Johnson

#100DaysToOffload: Day 1 – Introduction

Posted on by Doug Belshaw

Yesterday, I came across someone using the #100DaysToOffload hashtag on Mastodon. Curious to find out more, I clicked the links on a few updates that contained the hashtag, and eventually discovered this blog post from Kev Quirk:

What if we had a hashtag that encourages both existing and new bloggers to start writing? The posts don’t need to be long-form, technical masterpieces that should earn you a masters in English. But instead, just a simple and fun way to get people writing and sharing their thoughts. You never know, the whole might be cathartic too.

Kev Quirk

There’s now a site complete with some guidelines: 100daystooffload.com

It feels weird for me to need encouragement to write on a daily basis, as my happiest and most productive times have been when I’ve done exactly that. There are many pressures that feed into that, most of them (as my therapist points out) that are entirely of my own making.

So here we go. 100 posts within the space of a year. It would be very like me to put the additional pressure on myself of blogging every day, but instead I’ll just number them and see how far I get.

I’m not sure what I’m going to talk about yet, but its sure to be an eclectic mix. I definitely want to focus on the future rather than the past.

Feel free to comment as I go, or perhaps join me in the endeavour. It might even be a nice introduction to the Fediverse for some people, as there are some very interesting things being shared on the hashtag!

Header image by Aaron Barnaby

Weeknote 24/2020

Posted on by Doug Belshaw

This week I’ve enjoyed getting stuck into work funded by the Social Mobility Commission and Catalyst. Our co-op, along with Erica Neve and Peram Parasmand has started to help UpRising and nine other charities on their digital transformation journeys. I sent out a digital skills/confidence survey early in the week and then have been analysing the results.

I’ve also enjoyed the work that I’ve done on the Greenpeace Planet 4 project, and talking to various people about ways we might be able to help them. Do get in touch if we can help, as I’ll have more capacity from the week beginning 22nd June.

On the Moodle front, this past week can be summed up by me, as outgoing Product Manager, publishing a post to the MoodleNet blog and an hour later it being taken down. Thankfully, there’s a snapshot of it on archive.org. I’m still not sure what the problem is with any of the text, but I guess a narrative is being constructed and this doesn’t fit it. See my last weeknote for context.

Yesterday, I managed to put together a link roundup this week for Thought Shrapnel entitled Saturday soundings. It’s discombobulating trying to even keep up with everything that’s going on in the world, never mind trying to make sense of it. However, I have found that Comments on the Society of the Spectacle helpful in that regard. Chances are I’ll write more about that soon.

Thanks to everyone who has been in touch by email, chat apps, and social networks. I’m fine, thanks. Really. I mean, if I’m honest, I could do without the stress-induced migraines, but they’re caused by two years of micro-aggressions that will be a thing of the past after June 19th.

Header image by Rene Böhmer

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