En français
This page is brought to you by the site «For happiness of all beings»
En français
This page is brought to you by the site «For happiness of all beings»
This site is a normal site, without tracking cookies or advertising stalking!!
This is the reason why it has no annoying banner asking for your «consent».
(Strictly speaking, there is a legit cookie, used by the web host OVH, for statistics. I do not control it)
This is so, first and foremost out of respect for you, visitors.
But it is also to show that we can contribute positively to the Internet, without needing to look at the buttocks of the users, neither to be financially controlled by strangers.
I allow and encourage everybody to link to this page, or to reproduce it on your site without tracking cookies, to the strict condition of not distorting its purpose.
No freedom without practical means to exert it: Buggy software - Internet et liberté
In the beginning, the Internet was designed as a free and egalitarian network: everyone had the same means of expressing themselves, while Internet users had equal chances of finding what they look for, thanks to socially neutral search engines without ideology.
But today, some egocentric and evildoers are trying to cheat with this model, in order to draw attention on them, to the detriment of legitimate contributors.
They allow sites (invisible from our browser) to spy on what we are looking at. They can then filter and manipulate the results of our searches, in order to attract us to their sites, instead of the sites which interest us!
Given the danger of such practices, the governments are passing laws requiring sites to ask for our consent to provide them with private information. Hence those annoying banners like «we care about your privacy». You should never click yes: this is how they violate it.
If you do not see these banners, it is because you are connecting from a country which is not protecting your rights.
Other tracking methods are bounce tracking (when a hyperlink passes through a redirection in a third party site) and one pixel images from a spy site. For instance your health insurance can know that you bought heart medicines in a pharmacy, or an sexist lobby that you bought abortive pills.
What we can do:
🐌Browse from a private window (for example The Opera browser, or the Brave browser), a VPN, etc. Please note, however, that a private window does not retain your passwords, cache, history, cart, etc. To do this you will need to accept honest cookies dedicated to this use, by connecting from a public window.
🐱Against bounce tracking, check that the arrival URL is not the one displayed in the link. The URL in the link is the one of the spy site (and it is ot a legit redirection).
🐦If you need to create a link toward a cookies site, add this little warning in the text of the link: (⚠cookies) (⚠cookies)
It was presented as a method for «liberating» the Internet. This is a lie: on the contrary, financing through advertising allows to hide the true source of financing, and therefore the manipulative intention behind what we see. Worse, by overcharging the adds, it allows a site to be massively financed, while making it look independent. Of course, the site must have its content dictated, otherwise it will cease to exist.
What we can do:
🐮A site like this one only costs me around 7 euros per month (with OVH, free advertising) More generally, a normal website is financed by its creator (this site), by its users (if you wish), by the activity it generates (vendor sites), by subscriptions, etc.
🐔Support the sites which request it, by making them known, by creating links to them, financially if we can, etc.
🐝-Ad blockers are the most effective Internet cleansers. The Opera browser, or the Brave browser have native ones, Firefox has one to be activated. (We can still make them accept relevant ads).
🐯-Do not consider sites with inappropriate advertising as reliable sources: we do not know who funds/controls them, and how they select or distort the content.
🐌-Do not consider sites with tracking cookies as reliable sources: they are part of a network of manipulative crooks.
This is classic disinformation, or an abusive generalization. In reality, all the reliable sources also are on the Internet. Just that it is up to us to consult serious sites, instead of anonymous sites publishing rubbish.
What we can do:
🐭Check who controls a site: a credible source (usually visible) or a dishonest source (often hidden).
🐴Use fact-checking sites, such as Snopes.
🐼Cross-reference the different sources with each other, or with verifiable sources. This is essential if we want to follow «hot» news like a war.
🐱Crowd sourcing sites place the idiot on the same footing as the expert, automatically giving the power to the first. Especially wikipedia is not neutral: it is an atheistic libertarian site.
-«Notoriety», or the number of times a source is mentioned. The first manipulation is to say that a result which is often mentioned is more legitimate. In facts, it is very easy to inflate this number out of all proportion, with a swarm of bogus sites or media under orders, or even followers sold by bales of 10,000 (I saw this). The second manipulation is to say that we speak of people because they are famous, while it is the contrary: it is to speak of them which makes them notorious. The Internet manipulators know this well: they give the search results they want to favor, and ignore the others.
-The «important sites» are the one that the system promotes. Understand: ours are «not important, and thus poorly indexed, or even not at all.
-The spamming of a keyword with multiple pages of media blather repeating by dozens, with no real content, making relevant primary sources impossible to find.
This is perfectly demonstrated by the votes results in this page on daylight saving time (in the end): votes increased from 2002 to 2011, with the growth of Internet. But starting 2011, they decreased until becoming nearby null from 2019 onward. Why so? Until 2011, this page was indexed by Google with the only other 3 or 4 relevant pages (primary sources) including 2 of the French government. But after 2011 appeared hundreds of pages of media blather with no informative content: secondary sources, not even bothering to echo the primary information. Google then indexed those hundreds of empty pages in first, making impossible to find the primary sources, and even the government pages! THIS IS HOW THE MEDIA AND SOME SEARCH ENGINES ARE KILLING THE INTERNET, making relevant content impossible to find, even official.
What we can do:
🐧Do not read just the first 10 results of a search engine. Interesting results often are relegated in the 50th position or more.
🐌Test the different search engines, with a target that we know. There are huge differences between the engines. My latest search engine test shows Google going down, while Bing and yandex.com have joined the leaders along with Ecosia, Lilo, DuckduckGo and Qwant. Perhaps the landscape has changed again since then. Added November 2024: indeed it changes fast: yandex.com, now European, got rid off its activities in Russia, yandex.ru et dzen.ru, sites blocked par avast antivirus. UPDATE YOUR BOOKMARKS toward yandex.com!
🐒Sometimes an additional detail keyword helps to bypass spam.
Quote from the ARCEP website (I translate): «Net neutrality is one of the founding principles of the Internet, which excludes the creation of "multi-speed" Internet access, through management favoring certain flows of information to the detriment of others (discrimination), or through the creation of limited internet access (to certain content or certain platforms)»
Neutrality is to the net what Human Rights are to society. Indeed, the Net is constantly threatened by lobbies of selfish «content providers» who seek to divert attention toward their sites, to the detriment of real contributors.
What we can do:
🦊Only vote for politicians intelligent enough to understand this. The others will only cause us trouble anyway.
🐫Do not use the libertarian social networks.
Or worse, «popular searches». The utmost arbitrariness reigns there, often in favor of futile or provocative concerns. In addition, they can be manipulated by unscrupulous Internet users.
What we can do:
🐝Do not read them, deactivate them if possible. We use a search engine for our own searches, not for those of others.
This is probably the most direct cheat: a computer cannot know who is «a celebrity», at some point you have to enter this information manually into the system. We are told that there are algorithms detecting the number of occurrences of a name, to estimate a notoriety, which is then qualified as «objective». But this method is... notoriously known for being very easily manipulated. Just put the name to promote in the «search suggestions». Or to post thousands of pages without real content, but waving the name to promote. Either way, it is a self-fulfilling prophecy: nobody is intrinsically notorious, it is talking about them which makes them known, while lowering everyone else in an equal measure.
As a reminder, we can say that indexing by notoriety is the same scam as money: the more we have, the more we are given. But if we don't have any, they take it from us.
What we can do:
🐰Be wary of any source which highlights «celebrities» and ignores ordinary people or facts.
The founder of wikipedia is a libertarian. There are numerous exemples of falsehood, ideological biases and even deleted pages. wikipedia prefers secondary sources, that is media pages, over primary sources: witnesses, science studies, etc.
They discredit the Internet and make it unpleasant to use, in addition to serious risks for society or for individuals.
What we can do:
🐝Never respond to trolls, climate deniers, conspirationists, anti-Semites, etc. so as not to give them importance. In addition, they are now AI, from which you will not be able to get anything.
🐕If you can, silently delete their posts or even their accounts.
🐝Tell their coordinates to the police will not change things in the short term, but they will better figure the trolls networks, and later arrest the criminals behind them.
🐙Report them to moderation. If it does nothing, then it is a manipulative site, which is better to abandon.
🐱Before accepting an information from a media or a social network, always look for a credible source. Normally posters must indicate this themselves. If they do not, then it probably is a lie.
🐼Use fact check sites, such as Snopes.
🐬Find the primary source behind a media article or a social media post. Normally they must indicate it.
🐡If we pass on information, always provide a link to the primary source.
This very abusive generalization allows to censor many relevant sites, from researchers, artists, thinkers, etc. which do not have the support of finance or institutions. To fully understand the problem: if the Internet had existed in Galileo's time, his site would have been considered a «personal page» by some search engines, and poorly indexed. Wikipedia would have rejected it as «personal philosophy», or even as «pseudoscience».
What we can do:
🐫Consider that what makes the value of an idea or information is not the person who produces it, nor the number of times it is displayed, but this information itself.
🐊Follow the gaze of denigration: it tells the good much more often than the evil.
(for instance blogs) under the pretext of «protecting» us from «harmful content».
What we can do:
🐛We can also post videos or blogs on a personal site, instead of relying on social networks.
They force webmasters to constantly maintain their sites and their indexing, a workload which selects the rich.
What we can do:
🐶Stick to simple methods based on stable Internet standards like HTML5.
Have one page per content, without using query parameters to navigate from one page to another. In 2024 I had to convert this entire site to this system, while bracing for the next fad.
🐫Use a search engine giving effective and consistent results. See my latest search engine test.
This often hides relevant answers when there are many.
What we can do:
🦁Look at the following results. Many interesting results arrive at 40th or 100th.
An antisocial video has 300,000 views in two hours, while ours has only three clicks in a year: this does not happen by the «magic of the Internet», nor by «the buzz». This is happening because a dishonest media reported on it. This is the media bias, in favor of unpleasant things.
What we can do:
🐊Do not read racist, conspiratorial, sensationalist media, etc.
🐠Do not go to sites with advertising, or use an ad blocker, so as not to finance lying or malicious media.
It is formed when search engines select results which support our expectations or opinions. It can completely derealize its victims, who then live in an imaginary world, dangerously removed from the real world.
What we can do:
🐛At times, «get out» of our usual environment, meet other people, consult other sources, etc.
🐢Do not click on banners asking to violate our privacy (if we need the page, open it in a private window).
☺Delete our cookies regularly (which will require to log in to the sites again)
🐈Browse in private windows, where sites cannot identify or tag us.
Exactly, not: artists, scientists, etc. need time and resources to create this content, which is also protected by copyright laws. You do not fund Leonardo da Vinci or the JWST by selling T-shirts on the street corner.
What we can do:
🐦Always check the license of the designs we use.
🐉Support independent creators, by talking about them, linking to them, donating if we can, or purchasing their creations.
🐜Do not use the content of «sharing sites» which do not indicate licenses. This may be stolen content.
What makes the strength of Internet is that any browser running on any computer can display any site, thanks to standards: HTML, HTTP, CSS, etc. So everyone can express themselves and be seen by everyone.
Creating exceptions to this rule allows inflated egos to funnel visitors to their sites, while obscuring other sites. We have several examples:
-Apps, on computers and especially on cellphones, are in fact non-standard websites. Since the number of apps on a phone is necessarily limited, this system induces an effective self-censorship of the majority of the Internet. Not to mention other shenanigans like apps which send personal data to unknown servers.
-For a long time, the quasi-monopoly of Internet Explorer, a non-standard browser, allowed it to disfigure sites which did not obeyed Microsoft. Even today, when a site does not work well, we try it with Edge, and oh miraculously it works!!
-amazon publish detects our browser and asks for Google Chrome.
What we can do:
🐩Use standards-compliant browsers. Today all known browsers do it, even Microsoft Edge. Search for «ACID test».
🐍Do not use apps unless they do something a site cannot do, like taking photos.
🐛If you are making a site, use HTML5, CSS, Javascript (ecmascript), AJAX, etc.
🐭After the end of Flash and the failure of SVG (Because they did not implemented sound!! Yet I warned them...), we can still make animations, but with videos, finally standardized with HTML5. Videos on which HTML clickable areas can be overlaid. Ultimately it is just as good as flash, much cheaper and easier to do. Just «curious» that all the talented flash animators disappeared together with it...
As soon as we stop paying our web host, all our contributions disappear. «Social» sites can censor or remove it, or even they close (Deuxième Monde, Blaxxun, Inworldz, Orcut, Google+... The graveyard of Internet is filling fast). Even whole systems can disappear (VRML, Flash, Halcyon... ) destroying millennia of work.
What we can do:
🐌Save our work on Internet Archives. There are several, the most well known being Internet Archive, also called Wayback machine. The Internet Archive is not perfect, but I there are others, so that it is advisable to use several.