I planed to discontinue this feature anyway. It causes a lot effort, to manually create a text-only version of every new blog post. In fact, it demotivates me to create new blog posts to keep your posted and involved about Whonix developments and plans.
The question for you is: How many are using this Tor Browser Recommended / Whonix News Blogs Offline feature anyway?
Occq suggested to make remove the Tor Browser Recommended icon from Whonix’s desktop among other desktop icon and start menu changes. (https://www.whonix.org/forum/index.php/topic,184.0.html) Looks like a good time to discuss discontinuation of this feature.
and posting a last news, that this feature has been discontinued should be sufficient
Removing this from whonixcheck Whonix News and Whonix torbrowser starter wouldn’t improve security or code readability. And in future when someone finds time and interest in maintaining this feature, we can re-enable it [without desktop shortcut].
That was the case until Whonix 0.5.7 or Whonix 7. RSS is non-ideal, because it increases the attack surface. Offline news is supposed to be more secure than normal news.
Having all users always connect to Whonix’s blog invites someone to takeover the blog and add an exploit. With RSS it gets even worse. The RSS reader would have to parse the html and then again the browser would have to parse the rss html.
The current implementation just tells firefox to open plain text files. I haven’t found out how to automate rss -> plain text on server side.
The text files only create a negligible attack surface. Since Whonix News still exists, almost none at all. I just was demotivated to write a blog post if I then have to manually create a plain text version for Whonix Offline News Blogs… Knowing, that probably no one cares about that feature anyway…
Neurodrive I thought you were asking for RSS to be enabled for the blog by default in Whonix, and so that’s the reason I thought it was a bad idea. Reason is, if the site is compromised and there is a flaw in the reader, we don’t want every Whonix user to be infected. Patrick and I discussed this threat model already and I imagined thats what you meant.
