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This is my personal site where I note down my thoughts. Enjoy!
Enshittification
by Cory Doctorow
An interesting read explaining in detail how the web has become enshittified to serve only the profits of BigTech.
An interesting quotes from the book:
When capitalisms philosopher-theorists lionized free markets they didnt mean markets that were free from regulation, they meant markets that were free from rent.
The chapter on the administrability of legislation is interesting. This shows how it is not enough to have legislation. The legislation needs to actually be enforceable.
For example, a right-to-exit a platform can be easily validated by regulators. Likewise a principle similar to network neutrality whereby intermediaries show you the results you asked for not the ones of the highest bidders can be checked. The business offering the service you asked for should not need to outbid other businesses in order for them to appear at the top of your feed.
An intermediaries job is to faithfully serve the parties it sits between. Facebook's job is to deliver the data you asked for, not the ads they wished you'd asked for. Then all parties using Facebook will be protected from shakedown demands to pay to boost the content to reach their confirmed subscribers.
Overall this is a good book with a clear left of centre lean, demanding better regulation and improved workers rights. It makes the point that this is not something revolutionary, but actually how things were until about 40 years ago.
From 18.11.2025 to 12.12.2025
Self Hosting
Self hosting this site
Before the Summer I tried to self-host this site and wanted to automate the process of creating new sites based on my static site generator using some shell scripts. In the end gave up because automating the whole proess proved too complicated.
Still I was interested in running my sites on my own server, as a learning exercise. I had done most of the work already. My scripts worked well, except for the certbot automation to get the SSL certificates using letsencrypt. I had to manually edit some apache vhost files which certbot messed up by insisting on using mod_rewrite to point http to https. I don't need mod_rewrite, so want that disabled. A plain redirect is enough, and is the preferred method according to apache.
I changed my certbot command to only generate the certificate, not configure the site on the server:
sudo certbot certonly --webroot -w /var/www/robin_is -d robin.is --force-renewal --non-interactive --agree-tos --email webmaster@robin.is
I realise I could have used --apache and saved myself the -w parameter, but this way it is more explicit what is happening.
I then updated the vhost file with the correct SSL settings:
<VirtualHost *:443>
ServerAdmin webmaster@localhost
ServerName robin.is
DocumentRoot /var/www/robin_is
ErrorLog /var/log/apache2/error.log
CustomLog /var/log/apache2/access.log combined
Redirect / https://www.robin.is/
Include /etc/letsencrypt/options-ssl-apache.conf
SSLCertificateFile /etc/letsencrypt/live/robin.is/fullchain.pem
SSLCertificateKeyFile /etc/letsencrypt/live/robin.is/privkey.pem
</VirtualHost>
I also improved my scripts generally so that adding a new site will be a straightforward task of running a set of shell scripts.
This site is now live and self-hosted on hetzner.com.
The Internet Con
by Cory Doctorow
A well written book explaining in detail how BigTech got so big that it is too big to fail (lack of enforcement of anti-trust laws), how it stayed too big to fail (anti-circumvention laws) and what we can do about it (forced interoperability). The author coins the term comcom in this book: Competitive Compatibility.
There is nothing revolutionary in this book, but it shows very clearly how BigTech is working with governments to control how we use the internet. To be clear: thisbook is not about China, but about democratic countries such as the US, UK and Canada or the Member States of the EU.
A very important point made is that whilst BigTech is hardly the biggest problem facing the world, it is the fundmental problem. We won't be able to address climate change, intolerance of diversity, the growing extreme right as well as all the other challenges the world faces, without first fixing BigTech.
A quick and easy to follow book well worth the time investment it takes to read it.
From 10.11.2025 to 17.11.2025
