OpenLabs is a set of notes from someone who got tired of renting things. It covers owning media instead of streaming it, repairing hardware instead of replacing it, and running infrastructure yourself instead of handing it to a company that will change the terms later.
Privacy — not secrecy, and not paranoia. Just the ordinary position that what I read, watch, buy and search shouldn't be a product someone else sells, and that the burden should be on anyone who wants that data to explain why they need it.
Self-hosted — a service you run is a service that can't be discontinued, repriced, enshittified, or turned into a subscription. It can break, and when it does it's yours to fix. That trade is worth making more often than people think.
Open source — code you can read is the only code you can actually verify, and it's the only kind that outlives the company that wrote it. It's also the most effective repair tool ever built: an abandoned device with an open OS is still a working device.
It would be strange to write about privacy on a page that spies on you, so:
The practical test of all that: load this page behind a blocker — Pi-hole, uBlock Origin, NextDNS, whatever you run — and watch it find nothing to do. One DNS lookup, one TLS connection, two files. There are no third-party requests to block because there are no third parties. That is what a page costs when nobody is being sold anything.
What I can't promise: this is served by a hosting provider, and like every host on earth theirs sees the requests — IP address, user agent, page requested — for operational reasons. I don't collect it, look at it, or have any interest in it, but I won't pretend it doesn't exist. If that matters to you, a VPN or Tor works fine here; nothing on this site is blocked or degraded for either.
There isn't a byline here on purpose. The arguments should stand or fall on whether they're right, and none of it needs a name attached to be useful. Nothing published here is illegal, and none of it is anyone's business either.
The technical writing here — VPN binding, kill switches, library structure, seeding — is about doing these things correctly and safely. BitTorrent is a transfer protocol used heavily for entirely legal purposes: Linux distributions, game patches, scientific datasets, public-domain archives. What you move with it, and how copyright law applies where you live, is your decision and your responsibility. I don't host content, link to specific releases, or provide access to anything.
If something here is wrong, it should be fixed. Technical claims on this site are things I've tested on my own hardware, but hardware and software both move.