the reset button has been hit

On April 18, 1972, they locked him in a six-by-nine-foot box. It became the longest solitary confinement in US history.

Albert Woodfox was twenty-five years old. The facility was the Louisiana State Penitentiary, known as Angola. It sat on the grounds of a former plantation.

The warden’s order was twenty-three hours a day behind solid steel. One hour in a fenced concrete yard. No unmonitored communication.

The stated reason was his conviction for the death of a guard. The unstated reason was his organizing. He had recently started a chapter of the Black Panther Party inside the walls to protest the living conditions.

The first year usually broke a man's mind. The walls seemed to move inward. Woodfox found himself pacing the four steps from the toilet to the door until his feet went numb.

He filed appeals. They were denied. The administration’s policy was explicit: he would remain in "Closed Cell Restricted" indefinitely.

At the time, the United Nations considered any period of solitary confinement exceeding fifteen days to be a form of psychological torture. The Angola prison review board evaluated Woodfox's status every ninety days. For over four decades, the board checked the same box on the evaluation form, citing "original reason for lockdown" as the sole justification for his continued isolation.

The 1970s bled into the 1980s. Woodfox realized the state did not have to execute him to kill him. The isolation was an administrative mechanism designed to dissolve human identity.

So he built a mental architecture. He read math textbooks. He copied out legal codes. When they took his books away, he taught himself to read the shifting shadows on the wall to calculate the exact time of day.

He communicated through the air vents. He taught the men in the adjacent cells how to read. They shouted historical facts and legal precedents through the iron grates.

He wasn't always calm. In 1993, after a guard confiscated a meager stack of his letters, Woodfox lost control. He threw a cup of bodily waste at the cell bars. They revoked his yard time for a month.

In 1998, a judge overturned his conviction. The state immediately appealed and kept him in the cell. In 2008, another judge overturned it again. The state appealed again. He remained in the box.

On February 19, 2016, a federal judge ordered his immediate release. The state was barred from trying him a third time.

He was sixty-nine years old. He walked out of the prison gates on his own feet.

He had spent 43 years, 10 months, and one day in solitary. His mother had died while he was inside. His sister had died.

The state built a room to erase his mind. He used it to educate the men next door.

Albert Woodfox died in August 2022. He spent his final six years speaking to lawmakers about the psychology of isolation. The six-by-nine-foot cells at Angola are still there. The review board still meets every ninety days. They still use the same forms.

Albert Woodfox: the man who outlived the silence.

Source: Albert Woodfox, "Solitary: Unbroken by Four Decades in Solitary Confinement."

Verified via: The National Archives, NPR Legal Records.

''Real glad to see you boys.'' ↳ Ellen Harvelle

I have switched to using Startpage.com and vastly prefer it. for one thing, instead of displaying an "AI summary" at the top of the search results (unless you turn it off, yes I know), it displays the first paragraph of the Wikipedia article, with link, whenever it finds one that's relevant.

also a waaayyyyy better sense of design than duckduckgo

Search Engines

Infinity Search is an alternative search engine with a special focus on privacy

DuckDuckGo is a popular search engine for those who value their privacy and are put off by the thought of their every query being tracked and logged. Uses bangs, ![site] for in-page search (sells your data to microsoft and draws from fucking bing)

WolframAlpha is a privately owned search engine that allows you to “compute expert-level answers using Wolfram’s breakthrough algorithms, knowledgebase, and AI technology.” A data search engine.

Boardreader is a search engine for forums and message boards. It allows you to search forums and then filter down results by date and language.

Based in France, Qwant is a privacy-based search engine that won’t record your searches or use your personal details for advertising. Uses “&” as a bang search.

Another privacy-based search engine is Search Encrypt, which uses local encryption to ensure that users’ identifiable information cannot be tracked. Metasearch across multiple engines. 

Offering unbiased results from several sources, SearX is a metasearch engine that aims to present a free, decentralized view of the internet. Can be self-hosted. 

Gibiru’s tagline is “Unfiltered private search” and that’s exactly what it offers. Requires AnonymoX Firefox add-on for privacy. 

Disconnect allows you to conduct anonymous searches through a search engine of your choice.

Swisscows provides fully encrypted searches to protect your privacy and security. Built-in violence/porn filter cannot be overridden. 

MetaGer offers “Privacy Protected Search & Find” through its anonymised search. A plugin will allow it to be made a default.

Gigablast is a private search engine that indexes millions of websites and servers real-time information without tracking your data, keeping you hidden from marketers and spammers. Variety of filtration and refinement options for searching. 

Oscobo is a search engine that protects your privacy while you search the web. By not using any third-party tools or scripts, your data is protected from hacking and misuse. Has a Chrome extension to allow use in toolbar. 

https://search.marginalia.nu/ an independent DIY search engine that focuses on non-commercial content, and attempts to show you sites you perhaps weren't aware of in favor of the sort of sites you probably already knew existed. Use old-school searching rather than query-based for the best results. 

https://www.mojeek.com/ 

https://wiby.me/ - It’s goal is to index as many personalized websites as possible, and NOT commercial sites. 

https://4get.ca/ it works a lot like SearX, but honestly better. It doesn’t have its own index, but pulls from many others. I think it’s the best for research, since it allows you to search for answers from different indexes, is easy to configure, add free, and avoids censorship as much as it can.

https://www.searchenginemap.com/ for more on how search engines relate to each other.

https://yep.com/ is a crawler

https://www.etools.ch/ retrieves from Google, Mojeek, Bing, and Yandex, like Searx

https://www.dogpile.com/ 

https://searxng.org/ (next gen Searx)

https://luxxle.com/ - possibly conservative?

https://presearch.com/ - good for academic?

https://kagi.com/smallweb - free/randomised Kagi.

Other Searchers

www.refseek.com - Academic Resource Search. More than a billion sources: encyclopedia, monographies, magazines.

www.worldcat.org - a search for the contents of 20 thousand worldwide libraries. Find out where lies the nearest rare book you need.

https://link.springer.com - access to more than 10 million scientific documents: books, articles, research protocols.

www.bioline.org.br is a library of scientific bioscience journals published in developing countries.

http://repec.org - volunteers from 102 countries have collected almost 4 million publications on economics and related science.

www.science.gov is an American state search engine on 2200+ scientific sites. More than 200 million articles are indexed.

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