Boeing has admitted that the recent two crashes involving their 737 MAX aircraft model was due to a problem with the software running on the aircraft. The problem involves the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS) that was introduced to compensate for changes in the design of the newer 737 model compared to earlier versions. Read more ⟶
April 2019
Medium suspended my account
Here’s another example showing why you can’t trust and rely on the major content publishing and social media websites these days. Two days ago I received an email from Medium that they suspended my account (which I’ve had at least since February 2016). I didn’t receive any warnings beforehand nor a chance to possibly correct any mistakes. Read more ⟶
I don’t trust Cloudflare’s 1.1.1.1 App and Warp VPN
Cloudflare announced their new VPN product called Warp, which is based on their own implementation of WireGuard. This product seems to fit into their general strategy of wanting to man-in-the-middle (MITM) themselves into most of the traffic on the Internet, like I discussed in a previous post. As I explained there, they did the same thing with IPFS as well. Read more ⟶
March 2019
Right now I’m working on an extender for QuantumGate that demonstrates how to do video and audio communications, comparable to video and audio calls via WhatsApp and Skype. With this extender I want to test QuantumGate’s performance with real-time communications as well as provide other programmers with another example of how to build an extender for QuantumGate. Currently there’s already an example extender included in the project’s source code that demonstrates chat- and file transfer functionality. Once this new extender is finished, it should be relatively easy for someone to learn from these examples and use them to build a WhatsApp- or Skype like application running on top of QuantumGate. There are still many things on my to-do list for QuantumGate, but currently, having some more examples demonstrating how to use it has high priority.
I told you not to trust Huawei
Back in Januari 2019 I had already warned not to use equipment from Huawei if security and privacy are important to you. I warned my friends and colleagues who wanted to buy Huawei phones not to do so, and here on my blog I wrote: If you’re using (networking, computing, and communications) equipment from Huawei, it would be wise for you to assume that the Chinese government can easily gain access to your information via Huawei. Read more ⟶
More censorship and totalitarianism coming to Russia
Russia is clearly heading into the same direction as China when it comes to control of the Internet, censorship and totalitarianism. Putin recently signed two bills into law giving the government even more power to enforce censorship. Read more ⟶
Deboosting and Shadow Banning on Facebook and other social media platforms
Project Veritas published an interview with a former Facebook employee revealing, among other things, the fact that Facebook has been censoring information on its platform with functionality called “deboosting”. This functionality enables Facebook to actively limit the reach certain information has by blocking (groups of) people from seeing it — the opposite effect of boosting content on Facebook. Read more ⟶
February 2019
The secret lives of Facebook moderators in America
The Verge published an interesting article about what the people at Facebook in charge of censoring content experience while doing their “work”. I found the following quote hilarious: The moderators told me it’s a place where the conspiracy videos and memes that they see each day gradually lead them to embrace fringe views. […] A former employee told me he has begun to question certain aspects of the Holocaust. Read more ⟶
Stay away from the JP Morgan (JPM) Coin
JP Morgan launched their cryptocurrency called JPM coin, and from what I’ve read it’s a very dangerous development which will allow them, and other banks who follow in their footsteps, to create an even bigger banking scam. Here’s from the BBC: US investment bank JP Morgan has created a crypto-currency to help settle payments between clients in its wholesale payments business. Read more ⟶
You know what feels awesome? Rewriting a SQL query that took over 4 minutes to run to now run in 0.3 seconds. This on the basic free version of Microsoft SQL Server on a simple desktop computer. You don’t always have to upgrade to more CPU and RAM to improve performance. It’s amazing what you can do when you have deeper knowledge of how things work under the hood and take advantage of that. In other news I’m currently keeping myself busy with programming WebGL vertex and fragment (pixel) shaders for a web project I’m working on. This is one area of software development where you certainly have to be at least a little good at math. In between I’m working on QuantumGate, making small improvements and working out the next major components that I’m planning to build. I noticed more people taking a look at it on GitHub, so that’s a good development.