humanetech-community/awesome-humane-tech

Promoting Solutions that Improve Wellbeing, Freedom and Society

Awesome Humane Tech

About this list

Tech and social media is having a big impact on our society. While many innovative technology inventions are improving our lives, there is increasing awareness on negative impacts that come with these trends, such as large-scale privacy invasion, surveillance capitalism, and tech monopolies. They lead to social media addiction, mental health issues, and are even eroding the fabric of our society.

Our mission is: To Help Improve Wellbeing, Freedom and Society!

We gladly invite you to our Humane Tech Community Forum to read more about interesting Humane Technology subjects, participate in our discussions, and become a true ❤️ Humane Tech Activist!

You can also follow us on the fediverse at @[email protected].

Give Up GitHub

This project has given up GitHub. (See Software Freedom Conservancy's Give Up GitHub site for details.)

You can now find this project at https://codeberg.org/teaserbot-labs/delightful-humane-design instead.

Any use of this project's code by GitHub Copilot, past or present, is done without our permission. We do not consent to GitHub's use of this project's code in Copilot.

Join us; you can give up GitHub too!

awesome-humane-tech's Issues

Github is not humane tech. Move this to a freedom-respecting place

MS Github is wholly contradictory to the mission purpose. To improve the credibility of the project and attract privacy-respecting developers, please consider moving away from Github.

It's particularly important to get the bug tracker off MS Github to encourage reports. Personally, I'm done contributing to Github projects (apart from asking projects to join the free world).

Direct practical problems with using Microsoft Github

1. A survey shows that 1 in 3 people withhold bug reports when the bug tracker is inside a restrictive or politically controversial walled-garden like MS Github or gitlab.com.
2. Github is Tor-hostile according to Tor project. GH has started forcing Tor users through an extra email verification step that effectively discourages bug reports:
3. MS failed to secure Github, which was breached to the tune of 500gb of private projects. Security incompetence is further showcased by an MS-imposed requirement to create and account and sign in to report an MS security bug. And for those not discouraged by that, the sign-in page is also broken. Then security was breached again in July 2020 when OAuth tokens were stolen from both Github and Gitlab.com.
4. MS suppresses democracy by blocking Github access to a project that facilitates protests in Catalonia.
5. Github has an F rating by the FSF.

Ethical problems with using Microsoft products and services

5. Microsoft harms the environment by serving the two most destructive oil companies in the world: ExxonMobil and Chevron.
   1. (#ExxonKnew) Exxon notoriously knew about climate change since 1977. They not only kept it secret from the public, but they also financed a disinformation campaign.
   2. Microsoft and Chevron were caught each paying $100k to "the Cloakroom", a project to hide bribes going from large corporations to republican politicians.
   3. Chevron's right-leaning stance is further pushed through its membership with ALEC, which doubles as a superPAC and bill mill that lobbies and writes policy for U.S. republicans.
6. Microsoft is a notorious privacy abuser:
   1. MS is a PRISM corporation prone to mass surveillance.
   2. MS supported CISPA and collaborates with the NSA.
   3. MS paid $195k to fight the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA).
   4. MS drug tests its employees, thus intruding on their privacy outside the workplace.
   5. MS finances other privacy abusers:
      1. In 2012 Microsoft spent $35 million on Facebook ads and in 2015 Microsoft was the third biggest spender on Facebook ads in the world.
      2. MS proxies through Accenture to make Sweden cashless. The war on cash is war on privacy.
   6. MS supplies Bing search service which gives high rankings to privacy-abusing CloudFlare websites.
   7. MS owns and operates Outlook Email and the LinkedIn social media site, both of which are exclusive walled-gardens that limit participation to those who have a phone number and the will to share it with Microsoft.
      1. MS supplies hotmail.com email service, which uses vigilante extremist org Spamhaus to force residential internet users to share all their e-mail metadata and payloads with a corporate third-party.
   8. MS unlawfully used people's images without consent to train their facial recognition products
   9. MS distributes a nonfree operating system, Microsoft Windows, which is jam-packed with malicious functionalities, including surveillance of users, DRM, censorship and a universal back door.
   10. MS was caught surreptitiously recording Xbox users and paying contractors to listen to the recordings.
   11. Dutch government commissioned a study which found Microsoft to have several GDPR violations. E.g. Office 365 violates GDPR article 5 ¶ 1.c, GDPR article 17, and stores the data outside the EEA (may also be a GDPR breach).
7. Microsoft is detrimental to human rights and democracy
   1. Microsoft finances AnyVision to produce facial recognition technology that the Israeli military uses as a weapon against the Palestinian people who they oppress in their occupation. Note that Israeli snipers murdered an unarmed civilian Palestinian medic (in breach of the Geneva Convention) then edited the video to deceive the public for PR damage control.
   2. Microsoft supports ICE in a variety of ways in the course of ICE's implementation of Trump's xenophobic border policies. Microsoft services an ICE contract worth $19.4 million dollars despite protest from employees. In addition to MS Office products, Microsoft has renewed a Github contract and also supplies cloud computing through its Azure platform.
   3. MS partnered with FedEx, an NRA-supporting ALEC member as well as JP Morgan Chase, the most evil bank in the world.
   4. MS conceals US military contracts to bias PR and dodge social accountablity. They have a much bigger piece these contracts than the rest of MACFANG, they lack Googles AI principles, and unlike Google they ignore employee protest and petitions.
8. MS is among the top 15 recipients of Trump's corporate tax breaks, a benefit of $128 billion. Microsoft sacked hundreds of employees immediately after receiving the tax breaks in February 2018.
9. MS is anti-consumer and anti-competitive
   1. MS tricked users into "upgrading" to Windows 10, which sabotages users in a variety of ways, one of which is to prevent cloud-free accounts.
   2. MS strong-armed nearly all PC manufacturers charge every buyer for an MS Windows license regardless of whether the user actually wants Windows.
   3. MS hoards software patents and uses them to fight free software.

Bad alternative: gitlab.com service

The Gitlab.com SaaS is often considered an alternative to MS Github, but it's even worse--

for many reasons

* Sexist treatment toward saleswomen who are [told to wear](https://web.archive.org/web/20200309145121/https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/02/06/gitlab_sales_women/) dresses, heels, etc. * Hosted by Google. * [Proxied](https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2020/01/16/gitlab-changes-to-cloudflare/) through privacy abuser CloudFlare. * [tracking](https://social.privacytools.io/@darylsun/103015834654172174) * Hostile treatment of Tor users trying to register. * Hostile treatment of new users who attempt to register with a `@spamgourmet.com` forwarding email address to track spam and to protect their more sensitive internal email address. * Hostile treatment of Tor users *after* they've established an account and have proven to be a non-spammer.

Regarding the last bullet, I was simply trying to edit an existing message that I already posted and was forced to solve a CAPTCHA (attached). There are several problems with this:

• CAPTCHAs break robots and robots are not necessarily malicious. E.g. I could have had a robot correcting a widespread misspelling error in all my posts.
• CAPTCHAs put humans to work for machines when it is machines that should work for humans.
• CAPTCHAs are defeated. Spammers find it economical to use third-world sweat shop labor for CAPTCHAs while legitimate users have this burden of broken CAPTCHAs.
• The reCAPTCHA puzzle requires a connection to Google
  1. Google's reCAPTCHAs compromise security as a consequence of surveillance capitalism that entails collection of IP address, browser print.
     • anonymity is compromised.
     • (speculative) could Google push malicious j/s that intercepts user registration information?
  2. Users are forced to execute non-free javascript (recaptcha/api.js).
  3. The reCAPTCHA requires a GUI, thus denying service to users of text-based clients.
  4. CAPTCHAs put humans to work for machines when it is machines who should be working for humans. PRISM corp Google Inc. benefits financially from the puzzle solving work, giving Google an opportunity to collect data, abuse it, and profit from it. E.g. Google can track which of their logged-in users are visiting the page presenting the CAPTCHA.
  5. The reCAPTCHAs are often broken. This amounts to a denial of service.
     • E.g.1: the CAPTCHA server itself refuses to give the puzzle saying there is too much activity.
     • E.g.2:
       
  6. The CAPTCHAs are often unsolvable.
     • E.g.1: the CAPTCHA puzzle is broken by ambiguity (is one pixel in a grid cell of a pole holding a street sign considered a street sign?)
     • E.g.2: the puzzle is expressed in a language the viewer doesn't understand.
  7. (note: for a brief moment gitlab.com switched to hCAPTCHA by Intuition Machines, Inc. but now they're back to Google's reCAPTCHA)
  8. Network neutrality abuse: there is an access inequality whereby users logged into Google accounts are given more favorable treatment the CAPTCHA (but then they take on more privacy abuse). Tor users are given extra harsh treatment.

There's nothing wrong with self-hosting an instance running Gitlab CE or using the Gitlab instance of another party.

Decent alternatives

1. self-hosting (Gogs, Gitea, Gitlab CE, etc.)
   1. (+) avoids the "shake-up" problem of shrinking the community each time the project moves (there is no risk that the privacy factors would later take a negative turn).
2. Bitbucket
   1. (-) dodgy j/s up the yin yang that clusterfucks uMatrix
   2. (-) has some relationship with Netlify, who uses AWS
   3. (-) non-free software?
3. Launchpad
4. notabug.org ("NAB") (privacy policy). Based on a liberated fork of gogs.
   1. (+) supports Tor (although the onion web UI is currently disabled in response to attack, so the onion site only accepts git connections)
   2. (+) supports SSH keys and SSH over Tor
   3. (+) no CAPTCHAs
   4. (+) registration very non-intrusive, and not controlling about where you get your email
   5. (-) noteworthy drawback unrelated to privacy: e-voting non-existent.
   6. (-) noteworthy drawback unrelated to privacy: NAB doesn't associate PGP keys to users, so PGP signed commits may be unavailable or more manual work needed.
   7. (-) IRC support channel is dead.
5. Codeberg. Runs on Gitea, which is a Gogs fork.
   1. (+) web UI works on Tor (probably SSH as well)
   2. (+) supports SSH and GPG keys
   3. (+) registration very non-intrusive, and not controlling about where you get your email
   4. (+) functions without any j/s, and the javascript that exists is all 1st-party
   5. (+) supports e-voting
   6. (-) logins don't work from all Ungoogled Chromium installations
   7. (-) no onion address
6. yerbamate.dev
7. git.openprivacy.ca
8. git.nixnet.xyz
9. git.sr.ht
10. framagit.org: Gitlab CE instance
11. git.jami.net: Gitlab CE instance, perhaps dedicated to jami
12. sourcehut.org
13. http://dweb.happybeing.com/blog/post/002-safegit-decentralised-git-on-safe-network/

Moving to Codeberg

I consider moving this entire curated list away from Github altogether (this repo will then point to the new location). It will then become a delightful list on Codeberg instead, and show on the Delightful Club website too. Note: I created delightful project as alternative to awesome that is only for FOSS, Open Data and Open Science related resources.

Evaluate candidates provided by fedizen IzzyOnDroid

Via @humanetech I received great input from IzzyOnDroid who maintains a large list of FOSS Android apps.

And also a number of candidate acceptable analytics to consider:

• ACRA (Apache-2.0)
• Crashy (Apache-2.0)
• tracedroid (Apache-2.0)

www.haveibeenpowned.com

In Security, you definitely want to add this awesome website.
It contains lists of email addresses and (hashed) passwords from most if not all the recent data breaches.
You can check if your email has appeared in a breach very easily and quickly. If paranoid, you can also download the (I remember 2GB) list of leaked emails and hashed passwords and check offline.

Update edri.org ethical web dev with new version

Thanks to Nate of Greaterthanlearning for pointing to the new version:

• https://edri.org/our-work/ethical-web-dev-2/

Update humanetech badge URL: moved from master to main branch

Attn: As per IETF recommendation and sindresorhus/awesome#1793 we moved this awesome list to use main as default branch.

The master branch has been deleted so please update your link to the 'humanetech' badge to link to main instead. This is the correct markdown syntax:

[![Awesome Humane Tech](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/humanetech-community/awesome-humane-tech/main/humane-tech-badge.svg?sanitize=true)](https://github.com/humanetech-community/awesome-humane-tech)

Which will show up as this badge:

Delegate Security to awesome-security curated list

Security is such a specialized and vast field that it falls outside the scope of humanetech. There are plenty experts that curate plenty lists of the best security-related resources.

So Security section will be delegated to a good top-level location for drilling down into specific topics. That location is awesome-security.

Consider accepting Ethical Open Source licensed projects

The current CONTRIBUTING.md bars the admission of software projects without a FSF approved license, yet many ethical software projects may seek to use ethical licenses, which the FSF refuses to acknowledge, but nevertheless are open source licenses that grant distribution and modification rights to users.

It is undeniable that these licenses align with the objectives of so much of the software featured by this project, and I'd strongly recommend allowing EOS licenses in the project.

The Ethical Source Movement collective currently curates a list of approved EOS licenses on their website.

See also: #58

Add privado

I was doing research about search engines and privacy (you know...) that led me to your page
When I clicked on Cliqz.com, the page was broken...Seems like this search engine is not available in 2020.

I did some additional research and I found Privado {https://www.privado.com/} a real private search engine, they don't store searches or IPs!

I want to suggest you replace the broken search engine to Privado, I found it was very safe and friendly.

Adjust to shortened GH panel width again

GH again shortened the width of the mail panel causing entries to no longer fit on a single line. So adjust these entries to fit.

Add CC0 license file to repo

As per @comradkingu suggestion in #84 add the CC0 license file, so that github recognizes it and indicates in the UI.

Publish as website at awesome.humanetech.community

Using the cayman Jekyll theme allows the README.md to be published to Github Pages very easily. So should publish to awesome.humanetech.community and reach a broader audience.

Example: https://github.com/protontypes/awesome-sustainable-technology

nayafia/microgrants suitable?

Hey @aschrijver

do you think https://github.com/nayafia/microgrants is suitable?

Cheers,
Peter

HT awesome list selection/updation process

Hi
So I have created and merged "pull request template" to master branch here.

Tested it first in my fork and sample PR will look like this from now on when PR raised to our master branch : gkrishnaks#4 (please check comments in raw form of template )

Wished to add more ideas on process on how to add/update to the existing list based on community oriented approach :

• PR needs to have sufficient details, at least the ones from template
• Contributor needs to check the COC checkbox in PR - very important. All checkboxes appear at the top of every PR.
• Prefer Free/Libre software as it's very hard to trust software whose sources cannot be verified if need arises. Very rare exceptions can be made for non-free software only if the community votes and opts for it.
• PR can be merged after at least one comment/thoughts regarding add/update of the proposed project from a community member.
• PR can be raised on behalf of other projects not owned by requester but the template is expected to be followed so we have future reference as to why something was added to HT awesome list.
• Mindfulness/Async approach is expected as we expect community members to discuss and decide inclusion of a project to HT awesome list based on comments in PR either in Github or if they prefer on a discussion topic in http://community.humanetech.com/ . If requester does not wish to register in CHT, one of us can create a post on their behalf to discuss on public forum there.
• If a project is created by a HT project member herself, the requester should not merge to master and await approval before merging. Exceptional cases should be rare where pre-approval decision was made in public accessible channels. Ideally it should be kept rare and PR template + comments structure should be followed for future reference as we are not expected to keep everything in our mind and can always go back and refer.

Exodify URL taken over by spam (but extension/GitHub still ok)

Thank you for this helpful list. I was clicking through to some that looked of possible interest to me. The line for Exodify goes directly to exodify dot org, but when following that link, I'm taken to a page that's seemingly selling women's apparel/lingerie in Polish. Definitely not what I expected. I imagine the domain expired and got snapped up by somebody fishy. However, searching for the extension in DuckDuckGo, I was able to find https://github.com/FacettsOpen/exodify, and tried out the FF extension, and it seems to work as expected, so I imagine the fishiness is just limited to the domain (I'll submit an issue in that repo next).

Template text to notify projects after inclusion

This is just a FYI issue to notify that you were added to the curated awesome-humane-tech in the 'YourCategory' category, and - if you like that - are now entitled to wear our badge:

[![Awesome Humane Tech](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/humanetech-community/awesome-humane-tech/main/humane-tech-badge.svg?sanitize=true)](https://github.com/humanetech-community/awesome-humane-tech)

By adding this to the README:

```markdown
[![Awesome Humane Tech](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/humanetech-community/awesome-humane-tech/main/humane-tech-badge.svg?sanitize=true)](https://github.com/humanetech-community/awesome-humane-tech)
```

https://github.com/humanetech-community/awesome-humane-tech

(Note: Our community is grassroots and entirely independent of [Center for Humane Technology](https://humanetech.com). If you were already notified or aware of the badge program before, then I humbly pardon for the disturbance)

Add Hide Likes and Intention to Mindfulness section

Hi, here are two extensions I've been using happily for the last few weeks:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/hide-likes/
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/intention/

I'd make a PR if I had more time; hope this helps :)

Minimal Twitter and MindBell new links

Minimal Twitter: https://twang.dev/minimal-twitter is broken, now it's https://www.wang.sh/minimal-twitter.
MindBell: https://www.dknapps.de/mindbell/ only works once you get rid of www.

Add Beatbump under Social Networks

Beatbump is an open source frontend for YouTube music like invidious

Restore privacytools.io entry, add Privacy Guides

There was some confusion if privacytools had moved to a different domain and look & feel, and I was too hasty making a PR merge. To correct I will restore original entry and add Privacy Guides project at the bottom of that section as a new entry.

See: #88 (comment)

Remove nudge

Hello,

Nudge asks for payment with banner like this

I think that it annoys and it doesn not add "Freedom or Wellbeing" which is promoted here

Change Invidious to https://invidious.io

It's moving domains. See iv-org/invidious#1694

"Energy efficient" category?

There are more and more resources and projects that focus on energy use of online services, and trends such as SolarPunk, LowTech and others that are becoming more popular.

Should we have a dedicated category for these entries?

Collecting candidates:

• Low-web: We build free open source tools to make internet more eco‑friendly.
  • Offering 2 interesting browser extensions on their Projects page currently: https://lowweb.tech/projects/

Create a humane tech badge

Create a badge that can be included in github projects that are contained in this awesome list.
I suggest it should have a heart icon and reddish color scheme..

Someone with some graphics design and SVG skills should be able to create this in a couple of minutes. Would be very thankful!

Add a Machine learning category?

Sebastian Lasse sent me a fediverse toot to notify about this project:

• https://github.com/charliegerard/safe-space

Github action that checks the toxicity level of comments and PR reviews to help make repos safe spaces.

It uses Tensorflow machine learning algorithms.

---

Questions are:

• Should awesome-humane-tech contain a 'Machine learning' category?
• If it does, should it contain entries that depend on Big Tech AI products?

Clarifications on the Ethics section

In #81 @comradekingu brings up some issues with the Ethics section, namely the dichotomy of:

• Requiring code projects to be open source and having FSF-approved licenses.
• Some entries in Ethics propagating non-FSF-approved licenses.

It is a valid point to raise and highlights the need for additional clarification of the Ethics section.

From the start of this list the Ethics section was more of a 'special purpose' category, in that it typically does not highlight code projects, but rather resources aiming to define ethical best-practices for software development. Now Ethics in general are quite subjective and the broader discussion on their definition often leads to controversy. This broader discussion is important however, and must take place in the tech world for our collective insights to mature.

This list only collects pointers to ethics resources with the purpose to allow technologists to inform themselves, make up their own mind. In no way is this list implying "these are proper ethics to adopt". And if one wants to engage in a particular discussion they should do so at the initiatives where they take place, not on this list.

The above stance can be more clearly stated in the list itself. I will consider making the following changes:

• Add a descriptive sentence below the Ethics section header explaining its role on the list.
• Provide some more detailed explanation in the CONTRIBUTING.md document.
• Demote the Ethics section to appear just above the "Related awesomeness" section.

Image and language

The use of language like "humane" and "ethics" raises a red flag.
In many peoples mind entities that uses this type of language are prone to deceive or at least become corrupted with time. A reason for that could be that it's the exact language that would be used by someone who wishes to exploit the trust of naive people. Similar language was used by those who wished to promote the Tuskegee syphilis study and the KKK. None the less both were green lit and aided by the government. The same government that enacted wide-scale surveillance of private citizens without a court order. At the same time civil servants themselves were never penalized despite proof of engaging in drug trafficking in Central America.

Imagine a career politician that doesn't love appealing to humanity and ethics. I won't be hard because they all do. Would you believe them at face value?

Update PR-template

Add the requirement for single-line entries to the PR template (fix as result of #93 comment).

"Bundled Service Providers" category?

PR #75 typically does not fit the awesome-humane-tech list. But it is an example of an upcoming class of service providers: Those that bundle FOSS software applications, maintain them, and offer them to other people.

I have not yet decided whether a new category like "Bundled Service Providers" is needed, and it can be hard to gauge the awesomeness of the services on offer. Maybe one requirement for inclusion would be that the source code (deployment scripts, etc.) of the provider should be available.

In any case this issue exists to track possible candidates for inclusion.. starting now:

• Silkky.Cloud: Infrastructure, resources and guides aimed at helping you to protect your privacy against global surveillance.
• Cloud68: Reliable open source digital infrastructure
• OpenDesktop: Libre Cloud Services.
• The Good Cloud: Store, sync and share your data while ensuring your privacy.
• Nomagic: Privacy, Libre Software and elbow grease.
• LibreOps: Decentralized services and tools that respect users privacy by default.
• Co-op Cloud: Public interest infrastructure. An alternative to corporate clouds built by tech co-ops.
• Chatons: A collective that aims to bring together structures offering free, ethical and decentralised online services
• Autonomic Co-operative: Technologies and infrastructure to empower users to make a positive impact on the world

A network of libre hosters: libreho.st

Should `Jami` be added to your list?

Should Jami be added to your list?

Other links related to the GNU Jami project are:

• https://jami.biz/
• https://git.jami.net/
• https://review.jami.net/

Thank you

Notify included projects of badge eligibility

The humanetech badge existed from the start, but (majority of) projects were never notified about eligibility to wear it after inclusion to the list. Going to change that by sending issues based on template in #30

Tracking progress:

• Ethics
• Security (see also #35)
• Privacy
• Tracking
• Consent
• Analytics
• Blocklists
• Fediverse
• Social networks
• Translation
• Freedom
• Geolocation
• Voice Assistants
• Internet of Things
• Gamification
• Health
• Mindfulness
• Inclusion
• Awareness
• Censorship

Notes:

• Will skip if notification involves creating new account just for that purpose.
• Some earliest entries were already notified. Avoid double-sending.
• Entries after/including 2be1f14 are already notified.