Archives

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 ⟶

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 ⟶

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 ⟶

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 ⟶

WhatsApp has given users an ultimatum to agree to sharing more information with Facebook before February 8th 2021 if they want to continue using the application. As I’ve written about ever since August 2019, Mark Fuckerberg planned to integrate WhatsApp and Instagram much more with Facebook, and this also included advertising and sharing of (user) data. The coming change to WhatsApp will be an even bigger violation of users’ privacy. Read more ⟶

Yesterday I tried sharing a speech by Malcolm X on Facebook and noticed that Facebook is censoring part of the speech based on copyright claims. The speech is included in a cartoon animation video, illustrating the things that Malcolm X talks about, namely the difference between what he calls ‘house negroes’ and ‘field negroes.’ You can see the notification I got from Facebook below. Read more ⟶

Zhang Zhan, a 37-year old journalist in China, has been sentenced to 4 years in jail for reporting about the COVID-19 outbreak in China. Read more ⟶

A team from the University of Michigan published a study titled “Censored Planet: An Internet-wide, Longitudinal Censorship Observatory” where they look at censorship around the world. Things appear to be getting worse as mentioned: “What we see from our study is that no country is completely free,” said Ram Sundara Raman, U-M doctoral candidate in computer science and engineering and first author of the study. Read more ⟶

After Linus Torvalds got castrated and Richard M. Stallman was forced out of the organization he founded, Eric S. Raymond recently got banned as well from the mailing list of the Open Source Initiative (OSI) which he founded. Read more ⟶

Apple appears to have become the monster that they initially set out to fight. Read more ⟶

The Internet Archive posted on their blog about implementing “fact checks” and “context” notifications on the Wayback Machine, similar to how various social media platforms such as Facebook have implemented for a while now. You may recall that I blogged a few months ago about censorship on the Internet Archive by requiring users to login to view certain content. Read more ⟶

Here’s another important reason for why you should stop using your Facebook, Google and Apple accounts for anything that’s important to you. Apart from the 30-day bans that Facebook has become known for, they’re now also completely blocking accounts used by people to register their Quest 2 VR headsets. Read more ⟶

I recently got an email from someone who wrote something that really resonated with me. I won’t say who they are to protect the innocent, but they are free to leave a comment below in case they want to reveal who they are. Read more ⟶

The past 7 days I’ve been working on adding support to QuantumGate for connections using the UDP protocol. Currently QuantumGate only supports the TCP protocol but adding UDP support will enable some extra cool features. Read more ⟶

When Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 was announced a while back I was very excited. The game looked absolutely stunning and very promising. If you’ve read my post from back then I think it’s very obvious how excited I was. I also was fortunate to get accepted into the early alpha testing of the game and had a great time playing testing the game. Read more ⟶

I published a new tutorial showing how to build a simple chat application on top of QuantumGate. You can read the full tutorial over at the CodeProject website. I’ve also given this sample application its own repo on GitHub where the full source code is available along with instructions, and pre-built releases that people can try out without having to build the project themselves. Read more ⟶