Hacker News Reader

Comment by lighthawk | Hacker News Reader

He also tends not to view websites like HN, GitHub, etc., at least as of a few years ago. I'm not sure if it is because he is still in text mode all the time, because he disagrees with using sites that might somehow involve something that isn't free source, or because he just delegates to others the task of surfing the web and getting information for him. He definitely spends a lot of time emailing though.

I admire him a lot. From some discussion with him and what I've read, I have the feeling that he is in a constant battle with much of the world to try to get them to free all software. I really can't say for certain whether he is really going too far, but his dedication and courage go far beyond what most people are capable of. Even if you disagree with him, it's difficult not to admire him for that.

View on HN

  He also tends not to view websites like HN, GitHub, etc.,
  at least as of a few years ago. I'm not sure if it is
  because he is still in text mode all the time

just as a side note, not that I think he's wasting his precious time like us anyway:

at least for vim, there's a nice plugin [0] for reading HN. most probably there would be something for his emacs/org-mode as well.

[0] https://github.com/ryanss/vim-hackernews

This is the very last thing I need.

Stallman using vim. Good joke.

Yes, there is a hackernews package for Emacs. I've never used it, though.

https://github.com/clarete/hackernews.el

For personal reasons he doesn't have a personal internet connection at all.

He has some sort of bot that he emails links to and it sends the source (or plaintext?) back to him for reading.

(At least it was like that a couple of years ago)

I believe he also has issues with non-free JavaScript which I suppose precludes him from using websites that use JavaScript (or I guess he could block it).

As of a few months ago, he has been browsing the web (sometimes) using IceCat and Tor.

https://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html

I wonder if he realises that browsing over Tor with IceCat will be causing him to have quite a distinct browser fingerprint. He should just use Tor Browser.

He could just be changing his user agent to normalize it.

There is a lot more than just the useragent when it comes to Tor Browser versus any other browser. Tor Browser has many changes to try and make every instance of Tor Browser look identical, everything from the HTTP headers to window size to timing functions being rounded uniformly. Although I am guessing he browses with javascript turned off, which does defeat most of the fingerprinting techniques.

I used to think his browsing/emailing habits were silly, but then I started working in the park about 5 years ago on nice days. My phone data plan at the time was pretty crappy, so I rigged up a system using a local imap server and offlineimap/msmtp/msmtp-queue to effectively work offline. I'd get my batch of emails once at the beginning of the day, and I could attend to them (reply, forward, copy, etc) over the course of the work day, and batch-send them all out when I'd be connected again.

I never got to the point of having a bot fetch web pages for me, but I can see it as an extension of what I had set up. For someone who travels as much as Stallman, I think it's a very efficient way to browse and email when internet connections are either spotty or not to be trusted.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com