I like to create a few ( location / language /user ) specific landing pages. A word by word translation is ineffective for example for the main page and for the donation page. Such as the US version of Whonix’s homepage would talk about given rights in constitution. The German version would talk about IT Grundrecht (constitutional guarantee of confidentiality and integrity of IT systems). Or the German version of the donation page would advertise services other than paypal, which are better than paypal but only available inside Germany.
Lately, I’ve been thinking if Whonix ™ - Anonymous Operating System is a good url at all. I guess “wiki” is a positive mental association and can be kept. What about “Main_Page”?
For the German version of the main page, I’ve been thinking to use either
(The url Whonix ™ - Anonymous Operating System is already taken by our translation extension. [Word for word translations work well for other pages such as the download page. That extension is useful there.])
I think we do not want to use geolocation/tracking, i.e. re-directing the user automatically upon browser fingerprint, geoIP, you name it? I at least would dislike that. Wouldn’t make to much sense anyways as our users use Tor (hopefully).
Now, what about following the approach Wikipedia is implementing?
A landing page at https://www.wikipedia.org/ - we could also link forums, blog (i.e english-only resources) there? - maybe some custom coded static html at https://www.whonix.org/ ?
No worries about privacy here. Geolocation based IP won’t be our way. I guess a big share of our users are Tor users, so using IP to detect the location would be futile. Since we’re using apache-mod-removeip, our web apps don’t get to see IP addresses anyway, so can’t be used for geolocation.
What could be done is using what the browser tells us, if a regular browser tells us the user is US/DE user, they can be redirected to the respective landing pages. Should be legitimate and there shouldn’t be privacy concerns here. But that would only be a small later improvement. Didn’t have this ind mind for now.
Those landing pages also wouldn’t necessarily need to be advertised on the main page.
It would be sufficient if they were available on search engines for the audience they’re targeting or if local communities (ex: localized linux blogs/forums) would be aware of these localized landing page and prefer that link over others.
I need to ask fortasse how difficult it would be to implement (de/us).whonix.org. us.whonix.org could most likely just be a redirection to whonix.org/wiki/landing/us so we still need to figure out what domain naming schema should be used.
“A word by word translation is ineffective for example for the main page and for the donation page. Such as the US version of Whonix’s homepage would talk about given rights in constitution. The German version would talk about IT Grundrecht (constitutional guarantee of confidentiality and integrity of IT systems). Or the German version of the donation page would advertise services other than paypal, which are better than paypal but only available inside Germany.”
Sure. I don’t see how page privacy would suffer by this.
Well, maybe you mean this. When you are on Whonix - Overview it’s the English version by default. Now, when one clicks for example on Whonix - Overview or https://www.whonix.org/wiki/Main_Page/fr (wiki translate extension), our webhost could guess that someone would rather read the German/French version of that page. Weighting to risk, i.e. never reading something in your native language and therefore misunderstanding something vs. not letting the server know that someone is rather interested in the native language is a choice everyone has to make. While I still was anonymous, I most times used the latter option and if not, I used new identity quickly afterwards. Anyhow, as long as the link has a fair name, i.e. includes /de /German or something like that in its name, I don’t see how it can be any worse than with wiki translate extension.
[quote=“Patrick, post:5, topic:125”][quote author=Occq link=topic=116.msg882#msg882 date=1394131789]
I dislike the idea of any kind website personalization based on location.[/quote]
Why?[/quote]
Because my first though is tracking. I don’t like websites making personalization decisions for me. That choice should be mine only.
[quote author=Occq link=topic=116.msg882#msg882 date=1394131789]What are the benefits?[/quote]
Advantages are written in the original post:
“A word by word translation is ineffective for example for the main page and for the donation page. Such as the US version of Whonix’s homepage would talk about given rights in constitution. The German version would talk about IT Grundrecht (constitutional guarantee of confidentiality and integrity of IT systems). Or the German version of the donation page would advertise services other than paypal, which are better than paypal but only available inside Germany.”
I still don’t see the benefits. For donation just add a German type payment with a comment “Germany” only. Mixing philosophy and politics with Whonix is not needed IMO, especially since laws work differently in theory then in practice.
[quote author=Occq link=topic=116.msg882#msg882 date=1394131789]website privacy concern problems can't be associated to security projects like Whonix.[/quote]
Sure. I don't see how page privacy would suffer by this.
Well, maybe you mean this. When you are on Whonix - Overview it’s the English version by default. Now, when one clicks for example on Whonix - Overview or https://www.whonix.org/wiki/Main_Page/fr (wiki translate extension), our webhost could guess that someone would rather read the German/French version of that page. Weighting to risk, i.e. never reading something in your native language and therefore misunderstanding something vs. not letting the server know that someone is rather interested in the native language is a choice everyone has to make. While I still was anonymous, I most times used the latter option and if not, I used new identity quickly afterwards. Anyhow, as long as the link has a fair name, i.e. includes /de /German or something like that in its name, I don’t see how it can be any worse than with wiki translate extension.
Offer DE/FR options but let the user choose if he wants it. No auto recognition, no guessing. Free choice.
For donation just add a German type payment with a comment "Germany" only.
That would add more text for both, international and German readers. For such a page, as for many pages, it is important to be as concise as possibly for best efficiency.
Mixing philosophy and politics with Whonix is not needed IMO, especially since laws work differently in theory then in practice.
I feel it urgent to spread the good news and to end the ignorance, that anonymity isn't some kind level 5 (higher number, lower level) hierarchic law and also not a loophole where no law against has been issued yet, but already recognized as a most fundamental right.
The struggle for keeping anonymity tools legal in western countries is ongoing. More and more countries ban anonymity tools. Whonix isn’t neutral, it already is a political statement “pro privacy, you have the right”. Since I won’t have time to build up another initiative to support anonymity staying legal, I do what I can, and advertise it in places I am around. When anonymity tools get banned, I don’t want to have to tell myself, that it was me who did nothing.
No auto recognition, no guessing.
Well, that would be step two. Isn't the scope of this topic, which is about (landing) page urls. When these are implemented, we can start to think about auto recognition. The server wouldn't have to ask, the browser shuts out this information to the world anyway with every request and without whonix.org storing that information, of course. But this is a bit theoretic for now. I don't know if we have someone capable to implement it and I don't know if enough browsers are still sending this information. And this discussion is independent from the outcome of this thread above.
Free choice.
Choices won't be limited. And internal in/out from/to such pages will be clearly available.
I like it. It’s best to customize your message to your audience. I also like trying an alternative to the paragraph-for-paragraph translator module we still haven’t mastered.
But how to do links work? I’m try to avoid too much work for fortasse and complexity in the wiki. I’m sure there are other issues we’ll run into it. We need fortasse’s opinion.
I guess fortasse doesn’t mind about url naming schema.
But from existing discussions I can tell, that subdomain.domain.org is generally more difficult to implement (needs DNS changes) than domain.org/something. subdomain.domain.org would also clash with our hidden service, because hidden services don’t support subdomains.
It would be up to these landing pages to ensure that their internal links to other pages are functional. I don’t see a problem here. I had these landing pages only in mind as additions for cases were word by word translations doesn’t work well, not as replacement for the translate extension.
For most pages the translate extension should work fine as soon as figured out how to use it. And the translate extension seems like the only maintainable way to keep the more technical explanations up to date once the English version has been changed.