There's only one reason why we're implored or forced to keep software "up to date", and it's not "security". It's so the tech industry has an instant push system for each new Big Brother powerplay as it's released. "Up to date" has never been a real necessity. It's a manufactured necessity. A brainwash.
"Unsupported browser - access denied!"… "Your security is at risk - access denied!"… "Your TLS version is out of date - access denied!"… "Your system is too slow - access denied!"… "Certificate invalid - access denied!"… "Page data cannot be authenticated - access denied!"… "Your connection is unsafe - access denied!"… "Your device has exhibited unusual behaviour - access denied!"… "This site cannot verify that you are human - access denied!"…
Do you ever get the feeling that someone's throwing obstacles at your attempts to use the internet?
That's because they are. The inexhaustive range of artificial barriers I've cobbled together above illustrate just how much our agency to freely roam the internet is waning. More and more, we're finding that software and hardware needs the approval of powerful data companies in order to function properly in cyberspace. Among other things, that means we can no longer use the technology we want to use. We have to use what we're told to use.
And the end game? Our submission to 24/7 surveillance. If a piece of technology doesn't afford tech powers the means to spy on us, it gets blocked from the internet. Most often, the block is not the decision of individual websites. It's a collusion between the browser providers and a range of immensely powerful tech corporations who have appointed themselves as the Internet Police. A besuited, shiny-shoed middle-mafia has formed between you and the sites you seek to visit. And if either you or the sites ain't playin' ball with the whims of Big Tech, more now than ever, it's access denied.
Beneath the hard wall of blocked access, there's then a wider-reaching soft wall. A wall in which search engines - the tools we use to source relevant content - are algorithmically pushing us towards the "right kind of content", and away from the "wrong kind of content". Anyone who thinks I'm chasing some wack conspiracy theory should check this…
That's DuckDuckGo pretending there's no such phrase as "Google are control freaks."
And that's Startpage pretending there's no such phrase as "Google are control freaks."
Qwant seems to find the phrase without much trouble, so it's clear DDG and Startpage are deliberately filtering the search. Startpage came out particularly badly in this test, also refusing to find "Microsoft are control freaks", and even the ever-popular "Amazon are control freaks". This scale of censorship can't be attributed to error.
It's all part of the Nineteen Eighty-Four plot that we're hoping is just a figment of our imagination. Unfortunately, it's not a figment of our imagination. This is happening. This is real.
In the dying world of personal privacy, there are even bigger problems than surveillance culture itself. We saw above that the creep of censorship is now a major issue. But the biggest issue of them all is planned obsolescence - the deliberate limitation of a product's lifespan. Planned obsolescence is driving us into a permanently-monitored corner we can't escape. It works seamlessly with surveillance culture to force us to accept a slow but endless erosion of our privacy and agency.
THE NEW FACE OF PLANNED OBSOLESCENCE
In the trad model of planned obsolescence, products were built to self-destruct. They might, for instance, be manufactured with vulnerable parts that could not realistically last longer than five years. But today we're seeing far more impatience in the land of planned obsolescence. Modern tech companies don't want to wait five years for their offerings to become obsolete. They want an almost immediate turnover.
That's why they've introduced practices like forced updates, to ensure they can reliably withdraw software versions mere weeks after introducing them. It's why they've fenced off almost the entire internet behind a "security" wall that only connects 'the right kind of people'. Namely, the people who have obligingly kept things "up to date". This mammoth control mechanism has all but killed off our greatest hope for privacy - technological revivalism.
We still have options for using old tech at present, but the pace and scale at which it's being excluded has intensified. Nearly everyone on the internet is accessing websites with software released in the past three months. And if that doesn't frighten you, it should. What do you know about the brand new technology in your "up to date" browser. I'm guessing the answer is "next to nothing", just as it is for me. We are being forced to use technology that will permanently be two steps ahead of our understanding. We don't find out what this stuff does until it's too late. That's the whole idea.
Longer-term planned obsolescence is now implemented retrospectively, by third parties - most of whom had nothing to do with the manufacture of the products they're rendering obsolete. We're fighting a new battle.
Part of the solution is to somehow avoid the pressures and imperatives to use new technology, and stick with old technology which is vastly better behaved, and which we properly understand. But that's easier said than done.
YOUR OLD COMPUTER STILL WORKS
There's nothing at all wrong with old computers or their software. A 1999 PC is failing in the 2020s not because defects were engineered into its parts, but because the powers who control the World Wide Web have erected barriers which effectively prevent the computer from operating as an internet access tool.
The computer still works perfectly, as it did when it was bought. It's the internet that no longer works properly - and that's by grand design.
Old software has been a particular threat to surveillance culture, because if we're able to use it, we can roll back our systems to 2001 standards and be immune to over 95% of the privacy violation we're subjected to today. You see, privacy is an age, not a brand. What do I mean by that? I mean that switching from Big Tech to Ethical Tech (i.e. switching brands) gains us next to nothing in privacy terms. But switching from New Tech to Old Tech gains us a huge amount. The older the tech, the less capable it is of surveillance. The less control tech powers have over us.
At all costs, the tech industry must prevent us from reviving our old tech devices and software, because if most of us were able to do that, surveillance culture would suffer a near fatal blow. But tech monoliths have for long been aware of this, and they've found ways of making sure our old computers are useless…
HOW THE TECH OVERLORDS CRIPPLE OUR OLD COMPUTERS
The history of Wikipedia encapsulates a perfect example of how this calculated blocking of old technology has worked in practice. Of how the tech powers use fake arguments like "security" and "anti-censorship" to drive their real agenda - which is to ensure that everyone on the internet is forced to use relatively new, surveillance-sharpened technology.
Wikipedia's pages haven't changed in nature over the years. They're still totally static, they look virtually the same as they did in the mid 2000s, and the user experience is just as it always was. And yet last year, those pages became inaccessible to all browsers made before summer 2013. Since then it's been difficult to access Wikipedia with old hardware.
So why did pages that haven't changed, suddenly become inaccessible to old software and hardware which could access them perfectly well a couple of years ago?
The simple answer is: the encyption racket. One of the headlining tenets of big-picture planned obsolescence. What caused the mass failure of old browsers in 2020 was the organised dumping of their security protocols, after a Google-led drive to place the whole web behind encryption.
Since 2015, Wikipedia's published pages have been encrypted. They don't need to be encrypted. There's no security risk in accessing public content just to read, and there never has been. Indeed, Wikipedia's hierarchy had openly opposed encryption until early 2015.
In the middle of that year, however, they suddenly announced not only an introduction of encryption, but a total abandonment of unencrypted connections.
And it's the deprecation of encryption protocols and versions which allow Big Tech to fully block "out of date" browsers, and thus old operating systems and old hardware, from the web.
With unencrypted connections, any browser can potentially access any HTML-based web page. But once the page is encrypted, the browser requires a compatible security protocol in order to visit it. These security protocols and versions change, and as the old ones are kicked into the sea, old browser versions lose their ability to access encrypted pages - alias pretty much the whole web. It's a revolving door.
If the vast majority of the web is encrypted, the tech collective can essentially write off old software, and ultimately old hardware, at whim. Just by switching to a new encryption standard and scrapping the old ones. This would not be possible if the web were mostly unencrypted, as it used to be. There would be nothing to stop you from visiting HTML-based sites with, say, Internet Explorer 3 in Windows 95.
In 2015, Wikipedia insisted that their decision to dump unencrypted pages was all about preventing censorship in territories where the authorities could selectively block specific URLs. How selfless that sounds.
But whilst encryption would indeed make individual URLs virtually impossible for a state to block - it was obvious the move could spectacularly backfire and result in the whole site getting blocked by disapproving governments. Which is precisely what has happened in a range of countries. Thus, the measure created a lot more censorship than it prevented. Clearly, “anti-censorship” was not the true reason why Wiki went HTTPS-only. So why did it happen?
The true reason, as with almost every other open-web publisher who switched to HTTPS (including me), was that Google bullied them/us into it by threatening to boot unencrypted HTTP pages out of the visible search results. If we didn't encrypt, we would lose our search traffic. And if we didn't bin our unencrypted connections, we would risk search bots indexing the wrong page version, and then burying the content.
There are multiple reasons why it's in Google's interests to have the whole web encrypted. I've previously hinted that it wants to cultivate and preserve a monopoly on high-value data. Without encryption, the doors were open to ISPs, the authorities, law enforcement and other entities wanting to collect big data through the back door. So, aided by its market position and its usual lobbyists (step forward Electronic Frontier Foundation), Google has closed the door on the leakage of high value data, and the authorities now have to buy it. From whom? From Google, duh.
There's also the fact that encryption tokens can be used as an alternative to web cookies for tracking purposes.
But another effect that universal encryption has is to give Big Tech a means to lock old software - and thus old hardware - out of the internet. And for companies that profit from surveillance, the implications of that are huge. They really can force the public to submit to every new generation of spy-tech. By making sure that spyware-free old tech can't access the internet, the tech collective can get the public enrolled into its cloud-based, spyware-bloated, forcibly-updating system of unstoppable surveillance and authoritarian control.
And the final twist? Brace yourself… After bullying basically everyone on the internet into dropping their unencrypted connections, Google itself has retained a regular, HTTP unencrypted version of its own search engine. It's accessible on any browser, in any operating system, and thus any hardware, going right back through the decades. I've just loaded it from… yes, you've guessed - Internet Explorer 3 in Windows 95. If Google really believes that unencrypted connections are a security issue, why is it offering an unencrypted search facility?
Answer? Google doesn't care whether we're secure or not. Pressuring the entire internet to encrypt was always about control. Not security.
SECURITY IS A SCAM
And it's here that we see what we're up against. The amount of money and power to be gained in this conquest is so great as to make the conquest unstoppable. Wars have been fought over less. We will keep hearing the "security" chestnut over and over and over again until we have submitted every last shred of our lives to the tech industry. At some point we have to recognise that "security" is a scam.
If you look at the history of the encyption security protocols and versions, it's clear that they are a system of both building obsolescence into web browsers, and policing which sites are allowed to be accessed at all. Actual progress in security itself has been unreliable at best. Newer encryption types have suffered security issues that older types didn't. Look up heartbleed. Again, the real thrust of the plot is control - not security.
There are other means of disabling old technology. Organised withdrawal of support, the normalisation of excessive and ever-increasing bloat, collusion on JavaScript implementation, etc. But the encryption racket has had the most complete impact to date.
CAN WE RECLAIM OUR OLD TECHNOLOGY?
One of the suggested options for reviving an old computer is to load it with a Linux operating system. There are indeed current Linux distributions that will install and run on RAM-boosted twenty-year-old machines - among them Q4OS, Trisquel Mini, Bodhi Legacy and AntiX. But try to get online with them and you face the same problem. You need an approved browser to access important sites and services, and…
a) Those approved browsers (current Chromium-derived or Firefox) are horrendously bloated, slowing down old machines to an unrealistic crawl.
b) The approved browsers take us back to square one of the privacy problem.
c) Most current Linux distributions have other privacy compromises, such as systemd, stalkerware-level event-logging, and applications that phone home. Install a decent firewall like Opensnitch, and you'll see straight away that Linux does not escape the grand grinding down of privacy standards. It obviously doesn't approach the abuse of Windows 10. But neither does it match the user respect of Windows ME. Privacy is an age - not a brand.
With things as far-gone as they now are, any real revival of old software and hardware would require a complete change in the way we consume content. It would require content providers to deliver their work in a different format. I'm going to explore this DIY approach to revivalism-based privacy in a rather more positive future article, so I won't go there now. But even if we reinvent the wheel, it won't stop the deeper privacy rot caused by essential services, employers and the like forcing people to use access points that won't work with anything but a new browser.
We're now in a world where, outside of Apple's ecosystem, there are only two active browser development streams that websites take seriously, and one of them is dying. When Mozilla Firefox collapses as a serious enterprise (and the way things are going that will be sooner rather than later - Mozilla are already desperate enough to incorporate a Zango-style ad bar), Google's Chromium project will serve as most people's only gateway to the internet.
Be very, very, very afraid.