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Comment by noinsight | Hacker News Reader

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).

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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.

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.

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