Terms of Use & Privacy Policy

Image: Australian Parliament. Aditya Joshi.

Terms of Use

Last updated: August 26, 2026

Binary Thoughts is a personal blog written and run by me, Eric Pesch. It is a static website: a set of files served to your browser. There are no accounts, no comments, and nothing to sign up for. By reading it you agree to the terms below.

Intellectual property

The writing and images here are mine unless credited otherwise. You are welcome to quote from a post with attribution and a link back. Please ask before republishing a piece in full.

Code samples in posts are provided for you to learn from and use freely, without warranty.

Disclaimer

This site is provided "as is" and "as available", without warranties of any kind. Everything here is my own opinion, written at a particular moment, and not professional advice. Posts age: a technique that was sound when I wrote about it may be wrong by the time you read it. Verify anything you plan to rely on.

I do not guarantee that the site will be available, uninterrupted, or free of errors.

Limitation of liability

To the extent permitted by law, I am not liable for any loss or damage arising from your use of this site or from anything you obtained here. Some jurisdictions do not allow certain limitations of liability, so parts of this may not apply to you.

Governing law

These terms are governed by the laws of the State of California, United States. If any provision is found unenforceable, the rest remains in effect.

Privacy Policy

Last updated: August 28, 2026

The short version: nothing about you leaves your browser. This site sets no cookies, loads no analytics script, shows no advertising, and makes no third-party requests. I do count how many people read which posts, from the web server's own logs — but that counting happens entirely on machines I own, and what it records cannot be traced back to you. I cannot tell who reads it.

No data collection

There is no server-side application, no database, and no form anywhere on this site — so there is no mechanism for me to collect your name, email address, or any other personal information, and I do not. There are no accounts to register and no comments to post.

No cookies, scripts, or trackers

This site sets no cookies. It loads no analytics script and contains no tracking pixels, beacons, tags, advertising, or embedded third-party scripts. Nothing runs in your browser that watches you.

It also makes no automatic requests to any other server. Pages load only from blog.binaryhud.com — including fonts, which come from the ones already on your device, and the small site icons shown beside sources in a post's Research Timeline, which are copies stored on this site rather than fetched from anyone else. Nothing about your visit reaches a third party.

Server logs

The web server that delivers these pages keeps standard access logs, as almost every web server does. A log line records the IP address that made the request, the time, the page requested, the referring page if your browser sent one, and your browser's user-agent string. These logs stay on the server for 30 days, and are then deleted.

Counting readers

I like knowing which posts people actually read, so I count them — from those logs, and from nothing else. There is no script on this page doing it.

Every few minutes a computer in my house asks the server for a summary of new requests. Before anything is sent, the server turns the IP address and user-agent into a one-way fingerprint, mixed with a random secret generated fresh for that day. The fingerprint cannot be turned back into an address, and the day's secret is destroyed when the day ends — so yesterday's fingerprints can never be matched up with today's. No IP address ever leaves the server.

What reaches my end is the time, the page, the response code, the host that linked here if there was one, and that day's fingerprint. I keep it for a long time, which is the reason for building it this way: a record like that says no more about you after five years than it did on the first day.

That computer is mine, in my house. Nothing goes to an analytics company, I do not combine any of this with anything else, and I do not share or sell it.

Sharing buttons

Each post has buttons for sharing it by email or to Facebook, LinkedIn, Threads, or WhatsApp. Nothing is sent to any of those services unless you click one. If you do, it opens that platform's own share window and passes along the post's title and address.

The address it passes along carries a short tag naming which of those buttons was used — for example utm_source=linkedin. The tag says how a link left this site, so that I can see which posts get shared and where. It says nothing about you: it is the same tag for everyone who uses that button, it is attached before you click rather than derived from anything about you, and the sharing happens in your browser, so I never learn that you were the one who shared it.

What happens after that is governed by that platform's privacy policy.

Google Search Console

This site is verified with Google Search Console, which shows me aggregate statistics about how it appears in Google's search results — which queries surfaced it and how many people clicked. That information comes from Google's own records of its search results, not from anything running on this site, and it is never tied to an individual reader. Verification itself is a meta tag and a file that sit in the page source and send nothing.

Links to other sites

Posts link out to other websites, and a post's Research Timeline lists the sources behind it. Those links are ordinary links: nothing is requested from those sites until you click through. Once you do, you are on someone else's site under their privacy policy, not this one. I have no control over how they handle your information.

Children

This site is not directed at children and knowingly collects no information from anyone, of any age.

Changes to this policy

If what the site does changes, I will update this page and the "Last updated" date above.

Contact

Questions about any of this: binaryhud@gmail.com