I have great pleasure in launching my new, bespoke website — made for me by Sander Venema, the founder of Asteroid Interactive in the Netherlands.
This is a new company that really listens to what you want, both in terms of design and the back-end system, and I cannot recommend them enough.
So what did I want and why?
First of all, I wanted to get out of the USA domain-name hegemony. Recently the US has been increasingly flexing its legal muscles internationally. It is now claiming global dominion over all the old domains originally set up in its territory: .com, .org, .net, .info, you name it.
And it does not matter if you are are a citizen of another country, living in another country, your website is hosted on another country’s servers, and you have nothing whatsoever to do with the good ol’ US of A: if you use one of these domain names, the US government can pull the plug on your site, with no warning and no redress. This has already started to happen.
So I am now safely ensconced in Switzerland — notably the only country not to take down the Wikileaks website in 2010, despite massive global push-back from the US et al. Switzerland still seems to be taking basic human rights seriously.
The US continually bleats on about the “free market”, so let’s vote with our wallets and remove our custom beyond its pernicious reach.
Secondly, I also wanted to walk the walk and move on to an open source platform and CMS (the software that makes it easy to publish without typing a lot of HTML by hand). This is the only way to ensure that you are not dependent on closed, proprietary software companies, which can be legally pressurised by nasties like the NSA or GCHQ into implanting convenient little “back doors” to spy on or manipulate your data. I made this move on my laptop years ago and have since enjoyed at least a relative sense of security.
Also, as you can see, I value both my privacy and respect yours when it comes to the usual “share” buttons. But I’m also very happy for you to use my material under the Creative Commons Licence.
And finally, my old site was looking messy — so much information, so little time.……
It needed a revamp, and I hope you find this site more user-friendly, and that you can find the information you want quickly. Please feel free to comment, or email me with any thoughts or suggestions.
I think Sander has come up with a beautiful design. The building in the banner incorporates an image of the old Stasi HQ in Berlin. I like the idea — an image of a panoptic police state that seemed brutally immutable, but that has now just.… gone.
great job annie!.
keep the good work!.
you can show my email adress if you want. cause the establisment is afraid of me and not the way around.
Congratulations with your new website, Annie. 🙂
2012: bye bye prohibition.. maybe?
I really do like this new website; although It’s early days I think it could be a very relevant and interesting site. I like the idea of being able to post comments; I believe that many people know something of interest and together they know much more.
It would be nice if, Annie, you can load up your book Spies Lies and Whistleblowers directly onto your site. Every time when I go on Scribd to read your book, the computer will freeze. Scribd seems very bad for computers. I know David has already spent all that energy loading your book there…
It would also be nice if you can have a page for people to pose questions, about your book or anything else, and you can respond to some of them when you have time. Everything you say in your book seems believable, there is just your and David’s confirmation of the “official story” about who did the Lockerbie bombing which really threw me off. Everywhere else it is said that the Libyan is framed, that the CIA and the Syrians did it. But I don’t know how to ask you how it is that you and David somehow agree with the official story.
Your new website looks good.
One of the features of the now defunct WikiLeaks.org website which made it hard to censor, was its success in getting multiple alternative domain names or sub-domains — “cover names”, registered by volunteers around the world, pointing to the actual web site content.
Please publish one or more PGP / GnuPG Public Encryption Keys, together with Fingerprints, as a text file or blog posting page (use the HTML“pre” tag) on this website and on the public PGP Keyservers.
Good suggestion. Now all in the Privacy page:
http://anniemachon.ch/privacy
Nice layout and easy to read front page, will check out the rest in time. Glad to know you are still around,
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