Dear readers & customers,
bit by bit we’re starting to remove all of our advertisments from our websites.
Firstly, we never made any revenue from these. We’re serious right here.
Secondly, we never were convinced that concepts such as “Google Adsense” or “Adshot” are here to suit small indie publishers.
Thirdly, the “DSGVO” is doing its thing to make it harder for us small publishers to support big advertisement corporations as these never did comply with EU regulations and thus their code snippets are illegal, buggy & not up to date.
Fourthly, but not least: these are too old concepts and are rests of a TV and radio era. We from AETHYX MEDIAE never supported that, by the way, and thus don’t think it will be too much of a hard step for us.
As we’re living and working remotely from anywhere on this planet in the 21. century, there are more agile and end-user friendly ways of supporting websites.
Following is a list of payment options we support.
From the beginning we supported “Flattr” for example, a Swedish microdonation service which started in 2010. Through this service alone a user/reader/fan can tip our websites in an instant.
All of our websites support “Bitcoin” since 2014, a decentralised cryptocurrency from 2008/2009 which will some day (with other derivates) take over traditional, state-backed currencies. We added a button on every website we built where a user receives our donation address by a simple click of this button. Keep in mind this protocol is not officially supported by the W3C (WorldWideWebConsortium) and thus is not working in every browser or smartphone. In this case just copy our Bitcoin address please from your browser address bar and make your donation.
It’s more easier using the “Ethereum” button, if you want to spend Ether: firstly we designed and implemented this button ourselves, find the project and source code here. Secondly you will be redirected to “Etherscan.io” directly and may use an official link or a QR barcode directly to make donations.
So far these will be our current, one and only future ways of making money out of our projects.
For small indie online publishers “Google Adsense”, etc. never were an useful option. Our most popular blog project for example, gizmeo.eu, accumulates 15 readers per day at the moment and thus it never, since 2010 as this medium started, accumulated any kind of valuable revenue. So f*** that! ^^
We are heavily dependent of donations and strongly advise you to donate if you read and/or use our websites, apps & source code repositories!
Please take into consideration: as an indie publisher we never may guarantee that a medium exists for long if no one is interested in it. To this date we did so much to develop the new media ecosphere further but never got anything back to make a living. As we’re also pretty long in this game, since 1999/2000, we don’t think this will be the future we may support any longer.
GRANDS. DON’T. COME. FOR. FREE.
Keep rollin’ & take care,
the aethyx staff
Dear readers,
we still believe in free speech.
Though times get harder every day for those who want to find a voice for their opinion.
Thus, we created an Email post box which exists solely in the dark web since November: aethyx@torbox3uiot6wchz.onion.
From time to time we’ll check for new mails. Not on a daily basis but several times a month.
There were a few reasons why we chose TorBox as a provider:
* good reputation
* offer their services for a pretty long time already
* are not available through the clearnet
* 25 MB are free
* it’s easy to set up
Who knows, maybe we’ll widen the experiment some day in the future. Right now we’re taking part, observing. Today, it’s just an experiment.
We share the opinion that the dark web (or darknet, as it’s synonymously used) is still in it’s early stages of development. But as we stated above and elsewhere on our sites, things won’t get easier from last year on. Democracy is under attack and also its citizens. And for millions, who knows how many, the dark web became their one and only spot to communicate, to trade, and source of information. We are an independent online publisher, we support that. And want to be part of it. And no, we don’t think you’re paranoid: you are just normal.
Let’s fight for our freedom!
Sincerely,
the aethyx staff
Good evening dear readers,
2013: whistleblower Edward Snowden flees from the NSA to Hongkong and then to Russia while informing the world about secret spy activities against American citizens as well as those of other countries
2017: we read about the Vault 7 series by Wikileaks informing the world about the biggest intelligence leak to this date in covering similar techniques by the CIA
Times are changing and they are changing fast.
So, in a small time frame of only 16 months, our “prophecy” become true unfortunately, that the open web, the open internet is dead. And believe us, we also didn’t want to hear or read this, but http, the de-facto web protocol we all love and grew up with, is deprecated by now. This is like, well, telling millions over millions of web developers & users, bloggers, online journalists, artists, etc. all over the world “if you use insecure http, you suck!” It’s not fair, it’s not even their fault. But we pay for the bills in the end.
So, this March 2017 we did heavy work, project wide, under the hood: we switched from http to https. Everywhere. You can count us now to the 50% (at least according to Firefox statistics) of the web which implemented and use it already. This was no easy part and still there are issues. Let’s give you an overview of some of the problems we faced:
- 1. after all, find free and good CA sites. The most promising project by now is Let’s Encrypt. Their work is in fact so promising and backed by heavy champions of the industry, they really could achieve their goal to encrypt the entire www
- 2. read about the redirect methods in your
.htaccess, if you didn’t know already about it. Otherwise your sites will crash/not use https - 3. eliminate mixed content: unfortunately Mozilla, Google and Apple won’t accept https 100% when you start using using it. You need to invest time to eliminate all your old links to documents, graphics, counters, etc. Double check your databases too. This will take most of your time maybe, but it should be worth it
- 4. Relax, drink a beer, enjoy sun. You finally made it!
Working with the internet today is almost entirely defined by working with the WWW. No matter what you do, the most of the stuff you do online you do via your web browser. Heck, even smartphone apps use the web as their platform.
We may have lost the fight to keep the web an open medium. Not a good sign. But we are still in fighting to keep it a secure medium. Which is, well, until someone in maybe 27 years from now on (remember, the web was born around 1990) will know new facts, read between the lines again and state “https is deprecated”!
Never stop fighing. Never.
Enjoy SSL everywhere,
the aethyx staff
Greetings!
We realised our plan as promised and as of a few weeks we’re finally available at our European URL
aethyx.eu!
Please update your bookmarks as soon as possible as this action will support our intentions in reaching the top spots again of all those search engines out there.
What didn’t change, however, is the way you can reach us: All of our contact data, e.g. Email addresses, stay the same. It’s easier to use our fast secure contact form anyway. See here: aethyx.eu/contact/. Hear from you soon!
See you around in beautiful Europe!
Sincerely,
the aethyx staff