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 ⟶
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 ⟶
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 ⟶
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 ⟶
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 ⟶
If you don’t read the newspaper, you’re uninformed. If you read the newspaper, you’re misinformed. Mark Twain
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 ⟶
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 ⟶
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 ⟶
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 ⟶
The ‘net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it. John Gilmore (EFF founder)
Spyware and surveillance on Apple and Xiaomi devices
In the past I’ve warned multiple times not to use hardware and software from Chinese manufacturers such as Huawei, and more examples keep piling up showing why that’s a bad idea. Read more ⟶
Financial Censorship by Banks; Why we need Cryptocurrencies
A recent article by NRC shows how banks are engaging in financial censorship. The article is in Dutch but I’ve translated some of it to English below. Here’s from “De complotdenker bankiert maar elders, zegt de bank” (August 17th 2021): Banks and payment services regularly block accounts of organizations they consider to be spreading fake news about corona and vaccinations. Read more ⟶
Confessions of a Medical Heretic
One of the nice things about having a blog on the Internet is that you get to connect with people around the world and are able to share ideas and information with them. And the interactivity means that you can also get updates and learn from your readers. This is how I got to know about an amazing book by Robert S. Mendelsohn titled “Confessions of a Medical Heretic.” Read more ⟶
I’ve finally made time to get rid of everything from Google that I was still using on my website, including the analytics, fonts and captcha. I had already removed other social media platforms more than a year ago, and now the last pieces of tracking and spyware have been removed. Hopefully there aren’t any issues I haven’t seen; so far so good.
Stay away from Amazon Web Services (AWS); they cannot be trusted
There’s a lot to lean from the way in which Big Tech took down social media platform Parler more than a week ago, and one of the lessons to take away from that whole debacle is the fact that Amazon Web Services (AWS) can also not be trusted (with your business). Thanks to AWS stopping their service to Parler, the social media website has now been offline for days. Read more ⟶