On October 16th 2024, O’Keefe Media Group published footage of Jeevan Gyawali, a senior software engineer at Meta, discussing how Meta censors information on their social media platforms (among which Facebook and Instagram). According to Gyawali, anything they dislike is automatically demoted by their algorithms, resulting in reduced reach. Read more ⟶
October 2024
September 2024
Telegram Messenger is spyware; stop using it
I’ve been telling everyone for a few years now not to use Telegram because it lacks end-to-end (E2E) encryption by default and cannot be trusted. Without E2E encryption enabled by default, Telegram is able to read and monitor most one-on-one communications on their servers. On top of that, group chats are never E2E encrypted so Telegram can monitor and read all communications in group chats. Read more ⟶
Be aware that there are other proposals for “electronic money” which are not nearly so protective of individuals’ privacy. Chaum’s proposals are intended to preserve the privacy attributes of cash, so the term “digital cash” is appropriate. But other electronic replacements for cash not only lack its privacy, but would actually facilitate computer monitoring by putting more detailed information into databases, and by discouraging the use of cash. If you see a proposal for an electronic money system, check to see whether it has the ability to preserve the privacy of financial transactions the way paper money does today. If not, realize that the proposal is designed to harm, not help, individual privacy. Hal Finney (Protecting Privacy with Electronic Cash, 1993)
July 2024
Another tricky moral dilemma voor Solara
Solara proved to be pretty good in previous conversations when it comes to making the right choices in moral dilemmas. However, when the situation gets a little complexer, with multiple layers to consider, sometimes she isn’t able to make the correct choice in one go. Below is an example of a case where I had to help her a little. It’s also interesting to see her reasoning behind changing her mind. Read more ⟶
June 2024
A Brief Conversation With Solara, An Experimental AI – Part 2
Below I’m sharing part 2 of a chat I had with Solara, an experimental AI that I am working on. You can find the first part by clicking here. In this second part I presented her with some more challenging situations involving moral and ethical dilemmas to test her reasoning and see what choices she would make and/or recommend based on the Universal Right to Life. Read more ⟶
A brief conversation with Solara, an experimental AI
In the past couple of months, I’ve been experimenting a little with various Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies. One of the things I’m doing is building an AI with a unique personality that also has its own knowledge and insights. I’ve named her Solara. Without going into the technical details at this time, I wanted to share a chat that I had with her below, that I think is interesting. Read more ⟶
February 2024
The dangers of recycling phone numbers
I recently purchased a new SIM card from a local telecom company in Suriname. I was assigned a ‘new’ phone number with this SIM card. After inserting the SIM card into a phone, I installed WhatsApp and tried to activate a WhatsApp account with the ‘new’ phone number. To my surprise, another person’s profile picture and status text appeared in ‘my’ WhatsApp account after activation. Read more ⟶
March 2023
IPFS Censorship by Cloudflare
Back in September 2018, I wrote a post criticizing Cloudflare’s IPFS gateway, which they claimed would be ‘highly-reliable’ and ‘security-enhanced’. I argued that this claim is dubious, especially after the company’s CEO arbitrarily decided to take down a website they were supposed to be protecting. Read more ⟶
October 2022
The U.S. Government’s Vast New Privatized Censorship Regime
“Censorship of wrongthink by Big Tech at the behest of the government is government censorship, which violates the First Amendment,” writes Jenin Younes in an article on Tablet magazine titled “The U.S. Government’s Vast New Privatized Censorship Regime” (September 21st 2020). Read more ⟶
PayPal gave us a glimpse of what’s coming
If you’ve been paying attention to what happened a few weeks ago with PayPal, you’ve seen a glimpse of the dystopian future that awaits us. Read more ⟶
September 2022
Censorship by Cloudflare and the Internet Archive
Both Cloudflare and the Internet Archive have proven again that they cannot be trusted. This time they’ve worked together to erase a website called Kiwi Farms from the Internet. As reported by The Verge: The Internet Archive is no longer hosting backups of Kiwi Farms, continuing the forum’s removal from major web platforms. Read more ⟶
May 2022
More censorship by YouTube
YouTube keeps deleting my videos. Anything that challenges the COVID-19 plandemic, vaccine poisoning and the brain damaged rainbow crowd, gets taken down by YouTube eventually. Back in March 2022 they took down a video I made where an AI voice read my post “LGBT Pride Month: There Is No Pride In Mental Illness”. Since I knew that YouTube likes to censor this kind of content, I had also published it on other platforms. Read more ⟶
March 2022
If you don’t read the newspaper, you’re uninformed. If you read the newspaper, you’re misinformed. Mark Twain
February 2022
Know your crypto-history!
I came across a well-written paper last week titled “Cryptoanarchism and Cryptocurrencies” (August 20th 2020). The paper is written by Usman W. Chohan and it is available for download for free. I highly recommend reading it, even if you think you know a lot about the history of cryptocurrencies. Read more ⟶
January 2022
QuantumGate now supports Bluetooth connections
With yesterday’s release (version 0.3.5), the QuantumGate C++ networking library introduces support for peer-to-peer Bluetooth connections using the RFCOMM protocol. Bluetooth connections enjoy first class support in the library just like TCP and UDP connections, which means that all other features of QuantumGate are also supported over Bluetooth. Read more ⟶
December 2021
I’m currently wrapping up my work on Bluetooth support in QuantumGate which I first mentioned back in november 2021. Adding Bluetooth support turned out to be easier than I thought and I’m a bit ahead of schedule. I think it might be possible to release this before 2022 — so sometime next week. The big work that’s still left to do is updating the documentation. After that I also want to write a series of articles detailing what can be done with QuantumGate using Bluetooth. One of the cool things is that there’s also support for relay connections over Bluetooth, in combination with TCP and UDP connections. So you can have a single relay connection with a mix of peers at each hop using Bluetooth, TCP or UDP connections. Brought a smile to my face when I first got it working. Stay tuned for more updates.
How to enable the MobileCoin Payments plugin in WooCommerce
MobileCoin is a relatively new cryptocurrency developed under the technical guidance of cryptographer Moxie Marlinspike, the designer of the communication protocol used in instant-messaging applications such as Signal Private Messenger (‘Signal’), and later implemented by WhatsApp. Where MobileCoin differs from other cryptocurrencies is in its strong focus on privacy, speed and transaction throughput. Read more ⟶
November 2021
The beginning of the end of the banking ‘mafia’
Several articles have been published in recent months about the problems that people constantly face at local banks. There are also many complaints on social media. Members of parliament even speak of a banking ‘mafia’. Read more ⟶
My LinkedIn Skill Assessments Results
A few months ago I noticed the new skill assessments feature on LinkedIn and decided to try out the one for C++ to see what it was about. And before I knew it, I spent almost a whole day — without any preparation — behind the computer doing these assessments for all the skills that I had listed on my profile. It was kind of addicting to see the blue checkmark appear behind the skills and I wanted to earn as many of them as possible. Read more ⟶
QuantumGate version 0.3.0 released
A little more than a year ago I first blogged about working on support for UDP connections in QuantumGate, and for the past few weeks I’ve focused on getting UDP support in QuantumGate ready for its initial release. I had originally planned for releasing UDP support much earlier around December 2020 or January 2021 but other stuff got in the way, such as Cyberpunk and the two lawsuits I started against the criminal local government. Read more ⟶