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🪦(📧→🌐) Please bring this back from the 1990s: email→web gateway (slrpnk.net)
submitted 11 months ago by to c/tor@infosec.pub
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In the early web days there was a service where you email an URL to a certain email address and it responded with an email with the webpage attached.

We need that back. We need it to escape arbitrary anti-Tor anti-VPN forms of enshitification.

archive.org is very useful but we cannot rely on it.

Email has also become enshitified and it’s rightfully distrusted and even abandoned by the few true resisters who exist. So ideally it would be an onion email address that takes in the requests. Perhaps an onion activitypub UI as well.

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[–] 3 points 11 months ago (2 children)

I think the issue here is that someone has to pay to run that, and while I don’t want to discount your use case, I think this is already solved in a variety of (cheaper) ways.

Would you pay for a service like this, and if so, how much?

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  • [–] [S] 1 point 11 months ago* (1 child)

    If the tool were combined with this web audit tool, so I get back an attachment reflecting the website from an in-country residential IP, and diffs for the same site from other kinds of IPs from other regions, along with an audit report, I might pay ⅛ of a Big Mac per transaction.

    Note that the OONI project might have an interest in this so perhaps they would fund some of it.

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  • [–] 1 point 11 months ago

    That makes sense. I just don’t think the economics work for anyone to spend time developing this. It would take work to get to the point where it’s functional (which is potentially quite expensive). Beyond that, a domain name is $10-$15 a year and hosting would be $5-$7 a month. For $0.65 per request, it’s just not worth it.

    I’d need a little over a hundred requests a year to break even on just mandatory external costs (development costs are harder to estimate and would almost certainly be 10x, 20x or more of the other costs).

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