ComputerWorld of The Freaks.Club

Cyberspace Theory

2026-03-12T03:25:41Z

Posted by: ysabetwordsmith

When you're surfing the web & face a tsunami, make home under a bridge along the information highway

I hereby propose the term "The Under-net" (or "The Undernet") to refer to our preparation for and relationship with whatever (if anything) will be left for us in a future Internet dominated by unending, disingenuous, grifting slop.

This is an analysis of what's wrong with the Internet and some things we can do to improve it, as a form of resistance against corporate takeovers and enshittification.

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poem: Robots in the Bakery

2026-03-04T22:00:49Z

Posted by: beavertech

This post was written by ysabetwordsmith

Baking used to be
the province of chefs,
but now it's shifting.

Cutesy robots with
cookies roll through
the aisles, inserting
frozen dough in ovens,
extracting baked goods,
and putting them in cases.

The bakers sleep longer
in the mornings, but perhaps
no longer dream of sugar plums.

source:FAUNC Global (archived link)

Traditional Sugar Plums Recipe | Real Sugar Plum Candy
G-Free Foodie

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Vocabulary: Permacomputing

2026-01-02T01:13:56Z

Posted by: ysabetwordsmith

Permacomputing (noun)

Permacomputing is both a concept and a community of practice oriented around issues of resilience and regenerativity in computer and network technology inspired by permaculture.

There are huge environmental and societal issues in today's computing, and permacomputing specifically wants to challenge them in the same way as permaculture has challenged industrial agriculture. With that said, permacomputing is an anti-capitalist political project. It is driven by several strands of anarchism, decoloniality, intersectional feminism, post-marxism, degrowth, ecologism.

Permacomputing is also a utopian ideal that needs a lot of rethinking, rebuilding and technical design work to put in practice. This is why a lot of material on this wiki is highly technical.

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Protecting Online Privacy; pt01: Encrypting & Anonymizing Traffic

2025-12-15T03:38:00Z

Posted by: beavertech

DNS. VPN. Tor. You've probably heard of them by now.

Yes, nearly everything on the Internet these days uses TLS or SSL encryption for traffic between your PC and the server, or between servers. That's helpful to prevent eavesdroppers from seeing passwords and such but, that's only one area that needs protection. This is typically shown with the little 🔒padlock icon near the URL bar in your web browser.

Clicking it will tell you information about the certificate. Usually Let's Encrypt provides this but, organizations will sometimes pay humans to verify that they are the ones using it. This is good because anyone can set up a website that will have SSL but, that doesn't mean it's legitimately the place you want to be.

A VPN will use the same IP address as hundreds of other people connecting to that server. This makes it so that websites don't know who you are. Most sites don't need to. An IP address should not be something that is tied to an individual. This also means ad brokers get all kinds of people going all different places all the time, dirtying up their profiling.

They also run their own DNS servers. You should change the ones your system uses. I recommend Quad9 or Mullvad. These are persistent changes to your desktop or mobile device and will take affect whenever you're not using a VPN.

For VPNs, I recommend AirVPN or Mozilla VPN. Riseup has a decent VPN that is funded by donations.
TWiT recommends Express VPN.

These are a bit different than proxy servers. Those, simply put, are machines that one connects to before connecting to another web server. This can be handy to keep one IP, used in conjunction with a VPN or not, to connect to one's bank. This way they always know it's you.

Both VPNs and proxies are handy for connecting to specific regions for content. i.e. you're out of town and want to watch your local news or PBS channel online you could connect to a server in that area. Or, if you just want to watch some good Indigenous programming via APTN and need a Canadian IP address.

Tor onion routing is a bit different altogether. Using it will route your traffic through multiple layers before reaching a destination. This makes it much more difficult to track down the origination, protecting you. It's a bit slower but, great for communication applications.

Tor websites have very long .onion addresses and allow access to a different part of the web. It's not all gross stuff, I promise! Many privacy-centric web sites and services have a .onion site. This includes DuckDuckGo, Brave, Riseup, and many others.

Beyond all this there is i2p. This is focused more on a peer-to-peer distributed web and is newer. I suggest reading more and getting started with all these as soon as you're comfortable!

More info:
Cybernews: ISPs sell data
Geeks for Geeks: What is a proxy server?
i2p homepage

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Protecting Online Privacy; An Overview. pt00

2025-12-14T23:28:16Z

Posted by: beavertech

This is the precursor to a series of articles that will be coming about protecting oneself from the horrors of the web these days. It will include:

Encrypting & Anonymizing Traffic

Depersonalizing with Multiple Personas

Soverignty + Aliasing

Communication: IM & calls

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Adverts & Netcasts

2025-12-01T11:51:24Z

Posted by: beavertech

A long time ago we had radio broadcasts. Terrestrial AM & FM radio stations in most areas. Operated by schools, communities, corporations, and even individuals with smaller towers. These were funded by townsfolk and businesses advertising. Especially on the AM stations there were talk radio programs.

Fast forward and this all directly becomes netcasting. Sometimes with the inclusion of a video component. This was great for a long time. In the very beginning it was a rather niche thing and self-funded as individuals did it in their spare time. As they grew in popularity so did the costs, length, depth of shows. Many began to garner the attention of businesses and advertising agencies while others sought out sponsors to help pay for their time, hosting, bandwidth, computers & other equipment, as well as editors and other behind the scenes people or even co-hosts.

This was great for a long time. Many were able to negotiate directly with brands to find products or services tailored to their audiences. This paid more as it had a bigger return on investment. Hosts wrote advert segments based on criteria the marketers sent and read them "on air". Since this was a more-or-less natural thing and related to the show, the audience generally didn't care much. Some were even happy to find useful things. I, myself, have found out about plenty of great things this way.

Well, eventually things turned out to be not so great. As popularity continued to increase, centralized networks began to incorporate them into their own streaming platforms and insert their own ads. Some split the proceeds to the netcasts but, most of it, if not all of it, has gone to the platforms. The platform tracks everything it can on ~~listeners~~ users and sells that to the ad brokers. Dynamic, generic adverts get injected awkwardly and seemingly completely random places in the shows, often interrupting the hosts mid-sentence. The hosts have little to no control over this and, if getting any of the revenue, it isn't much.

This is really bad for the audience, the hosts, and everyone but the data brokers, ad brokers, and centralized platforms. Only the first two are really needed. The rest are parasites killing one of the last great spaces / methods of virtual, and often, in person communities and information sharing.

What does help, is member support. Things like Patreon, Ko-Fi, Buymeacoffee, LibraPay, and cryptocurrency. Particularly the Podcasting 2.0 stuff and applications like Podverse.

I say, let's turn this "ad winter" turned "ad apocalypse" upside down. If anyone's got any money to spare, please contribute to all the great "content creators" in any amount you can. Do not use platforms like ~~spotify~~ or ~~youtube~~ because they actively harm everything that is netcasting. I strongly recommend Podverse and/or AntennaPod. What also helps is being active in their community (and ours, too, while you're here!).

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poem: An Old Diversion

2025-11-02T01:49:30Z

Posted by: beavertech

Written by the infamous ysebetwordsmith

Gaming is among our earliest urges,
Ancient -- plum stones, knucklebones,
Men carving fox-and-geese on steps.
It's an old diversion, essential, becoming
New again in roleplaying and video games,
Going from past to future, unbroken.

Notes:

The history of games includes plum stones, knucklebones, and the family of fox games. It is part of humanity.

Roleplaying games may go far back in history, with the modern era starting in the 1970s. A crucial juncture occurred with "How Effective Is a Panzerfaust Against a Troll, Heinz?" as a crossover between military wargames and fantasy.

Video games date back to the 1950s with computer simulations.

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Affiliated Community

2025-07-06T09:51:22Z

Posted by: beavertech

Check out scienceworld ! Discussions, news, and more about technology, sci-fi, and other such fun, interesting things.

While you're at it, join thefreaksclub

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