What is randrss?

Normal RSS readers usually fetch all feeds more or less at the same time at constant intervals. This leaves a signature for anyone who observes internet traffic. By looking for this pattern, you are more easily identified.

randrss fetches all your feeds at random intervals at an random order over a certain period of time. The feeds will be downloaded and you then serve tjhem using you a web server. The added benefits of this approach are that you don't have to worry about how your client deals with cookies etc.

Also, by having only one client fetching the feeds and your readers pointed to the randrss's downloaded feeds, you avoid certain trackers that may identify you across devices (google's feed proxy, cloudflare), because it's very likely that the combination of feeds you read are unique. As your feeds are on a single server now, you can isolate your RSS reader to its own network container so it can only contact your server. This is probably what you should do to be sure your client does not contact the feed servers in any way. In Thunderbird, set browser.chrome.favicons to false.

The only drawback of this approach is that the time you get new feeds is delayed, but that should be acceptable.

By default, torsocks is used to fetch the feeds.

Usage

Fetchers

Scripts that request the feeds while trying to look like a normal client.

Config file

For each feed, an individual config file is used.

Example: A simple example config file for kernel.org: FEED_URL="https://www.kernel.org/feeds/kdist.xml" FEED_OUTPUT="/var/www/feeds/kernelreleases.feed"

Launch

randrss [path to directory containing the config files] [fetchersfile]

fetchersfile: take a look at the example file in the repo. It lists the paths to the fetchers that will randomly be used.

optional third paramater: "syncnow". Do not sleep for random intervals. Fetch all feeds and exit.