About CHIP

Intro

Our world is overrun by exploitative technology nobody ever wanted. 'Needs' are manufactured. Many long for a revival of simplicity and genuine interaction. This is our contribution. No ads, no nonsense. No holding back.

Articles that go beyond tech etc. are tagged personal and not shown on the homepage.

CHIP authors can be anonymous, providing individual works or group efforts.

Contact

Contributions and feedback are welcomed. Send plaintext e-mail to hi (AT) chip (DOT) icu.

We have a private chat where we discuss the world and tech. Send us a polite message and we may invite you.

Join the forum at bb.chip.icu (JS currently required).

Tech

The site is tested with resolutions down to 320x480. JS is not required, but might be used for syntax highlighting. Web 'standards' contradict themselves, but great care has been taken to create a reasonable setup.

Dark-mode is supported and follows your browser setting. Alternatively, you may turn off CSS altogether and still get a nicely readable experience. Or supply your own. Text-based browsers work well (links, lynx, etc.).

Known Issues

Tables logically cannot be scaled well, but will allow you to scroll.
Chrom-* currently has a bug with pixel rounding, leading to slightly off borders.
Syntax highlighting may be removed, as it's unnecessary bloat, there is only one choice with working autoload, and accuracy is not ideal. The theme is also not yet dark-mode aware, as getting the colors properly readable takes time.
Ordered lists are a CSS nightmare and non-scalable even with browser defaults. The current solution seems best as it at least lines up as expected. A maximum of 3 digits applies, and they extend into the gutter.
- Safari/Webkit are broken as the attribute needed to fix it is only yet in 'TP'. A limit of 2 digits applies with the fallback, and they don't line up perfectly.
Some mobile browsers are very random and shift slightly.
Firefox does not understand how fallbacks work. It's a rollercoaster. It works in Chrom-*.
Firefox has a longstanding FOUC problem that cannot be solved without violating standards. Once cached, irrelevant.

Bureaucracy

Privacy

HTTP logs are regularly anonymized and wiped.
The main site does not currently employ any statistics tool, not even self-hosted. No cookies are set.

The bb, chat, and other interactive services, logically require the use of cookies/session storage/etc. pp. That's technical fact, and shouldn't come as a surprise. The EU and GDPR are comically inept.

Most modern software does not even feature real deletion by design (i.e. messengers, forums, etc.). We manually patch this misleading behavior where possible. This entails leviathan efforts, and thus may not be up-to-date. There is no funding available to dedicate yet another full-time task to fixing upstream issues. It demands tremendous individual study, and modifying large codebases de facto requires a dedicated full-time team, if done properly. (You break every chance of upstream support, after all.) Tracking upstream at today's speed is absurd, even for wealthy corporations.
We therefore focus on what matters most, and educate.

The bb stores IPs per post indefinitely. If deletion is desired, a manual attempt can be made as a courtesy, given time and software viability.
The other services have been either modified to the best of our ability, or respect expiries by default.

Deletion in general is not a 'right'. One cannot simply create a 'law' without any understanding, and expect bytes to magically arrange themselves. Send us $100M+ to reinvent the entire chain, and maybe we could afford development. More likely billions today. We'd rather spend it on fixing the hunger crisis in the '1st world' urban hell. Even given such 'billionaire pocket change', it would require decades. Modern systems are like matryoshkas: To guarantee anything, one has to dissect every part of the ever-changing chains. This doesn't even take into account external infrastructure, which can easily evade virtually everything you throw at it.
If someone claims otherwise, he's lying.
How do you deal with caching? Infrastructure metadata? Intransparent hardware? Even if you had the funds to fork every major upstream project, you cannot control everything, unless you're 'google'-sized. Even they don't reinvent the wheel. Governments and large corporations abuse these intricacies. Specialized profiling software exists, and is routinely used by the EU/CN/UK/US/AU/etc. At best, the ones writing the laws are obtuse, more realistically, cold and calculating in their agenda.
To sum it up: Just fixing the very first step, the users' frontends, is excessive. The rest of the chain is convoluted enough to instantly prove the absurdity of any such 'laws'.

CHIP follows reasonable practices, and does not pretend.

The mainstream, corporate solution is to lie. They present you with 'dark patterns', the illusion of choice. The infinite automatic 'yes' prompts, classic conditioning, brainwashing. We prefer to tell you the truth instead. Better to be dependent on donations, and honest, than a part of this system. All the 'GDPR' and similar only burdened small organizations, and actual humans. Corporate simply circumvents it. How many TOS/PP did you read and reject? Even had the chance to reject, without sacrificing food and survival?

By using our services, you acknowledge reality, and accept these technical facts.

Copyright

As society has become obsessively greedy and blatant abuse has become the norm, all rights are reserved unless explicitly expressed otherwise. We do not serve your false idols as free content source.

We are in desperate need of food, shelter, healthcare, as well as funding for the village. We have no ads, affiliates, or youtube deals. This is not copying from someone who already has more than he needs. We depend on donations.

We see the reality of the so called internet "community" 'monetizing' everything. Even "FOSS" has become a sham, with more scheming every day. You won't find that here.