Following is an English translation of an article I wrote that was published on Starnieuws earlier today. The original article is in Dutch and you can read it on Starnieuws if you prefer that version. Read more ⟶
January 2020
Using the QuantumGate Socks5 extender for private encrypted communications
During the last few weeks I’ve done a lot of work on QuantumGate. It’s still in experimental stages right now, but very usable. A lot of the time I spent on working on it went into optimizations. I’ve been using it in the last few days together with the SOCKS 5 test extender (Socks5 Extender) for browsing the Internet and it’s been working quite well. Read more ⟶
December 2019
I’ve been busy working on various projects including QuantumGate. I just pushed version 0.2 to the master branch on GitHub, and this includes the new AVExtender example and many updates to the API. The projects have also been upgraded to Visual Studio 2019 and will now require C++20 to compile. The documentation on GitHub has also been updated. In the coming weeks I’ll be working on more API updates eventually leading to an alpha release with pre-compiled binaries to make it easy for people who want to try it out quickly. Still lots of work to do, and I’m also thinking of taking a break sometime soon and relaxing a little; probably do some more photography. All this time behind my computer caused me to develop dark circles around my eyes.
November 2019
The strange case of the bathroom lights
On the early morning of October 16th 2019 at around 4:00am I woke up in my bedroom at home to find that the light in the bathroom was on. It was not supposed to be on since, as far as I could remember, I had turned it off before going to sleep earlier that night. I never leave it on. My initial thoughts, as I lied in bed looking over my shoulder, was that perhaps someone had gotten into my house and had turned on the light. Read more ⟶
October 2019
Mining for a Heart of Gold
For some reason it happens more frequently these days that people comment on the fact that I choose to live alone. I figured I should probably start writing about the reasons for that so that I won’t have to keep repeating myself in the future. There are many reasons for why I choose to be alone, basically all having to do with one of the most important things to me in life: freedom. Read more ⟶
This is a last note to let everyone know that I am now no longer on WhatsApp. It can’t be trusted, and every week there’s more in the news confirming that if you care about privacy and security, you shouldn’t be using WhatsApp. Nor Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. I wrote before about why exactly WhatsApp can’t be trusted and have recently also updated that post with additional notes. Click here to read it. If you want to reach me via instant messaging you can use Signal.
September 2019
My post about Hitler is being reported on Facebook
For a while now I’ve noticed Facebook’s internal review website appearing in the traffic statistics for my blog. It appears that people are sharing my post “Adolf Hitler: The Greatest Story NEVER Told” on Facebook, and that other people are reporting the link to Facebook for it to get taken down. Read more ⟶
I’m very busy these days with various projects but wanted to mention that I’m also still working on QuantumGate. While clients have priority (gotta keep the lights on), it’s QuantumGate that I think about before falling asleep every night. There’s some very, very cool things coming to QuantumGate in the future that haven’t been done before, as far as I know. At least one very interesting problem that I’m trying to solve.
I’m also trying to eliminate the backlog of important topics that I’ve been meaning to blog about. For years I’ve had them waiting for me in my “drafts” folder, and I’ve been urged to get back to work on them. I’m sure you’ve noticed the recent steady stream of long-form posts on the blog; there’s more coming soon.
August 2019
This is the audio version of the essay “No Treason: The Constitution of No Authority” (1867) by Lysander Spooner. I listened to it last night and can highly recommend it. Murray N. Rothbard considered this essay “the greatest case for anarchist political philosophy ever written.” Will be worth the 2 hours of your time. If you’d rather read it, you can download a PDF on Archive.org. Read more ⟶
Hello slaves. I’m leaving most social media platforms today, including Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Twitter. For now, I’ll still be on LinkedIn and GitHub. Back in 2017 I had already decided that I was going to leave the major social media platforms because of all the censorship going on. Things have only gotten worse when it comes to censorship, and in addition we have all the privacy violations, tracking and security issues.
I’m leaving most platforms effective immediately; I’ll leave the accounts online for now but will not be monitoring, posting or commenting. Do not contact me there and do not expect a response. I’m using a longer grace period for WhatsApp of a month or two, but have already moved to using Signal for instant messaging; WhatsApp cannot be trusted anymore.
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Censorship and Shadow Banning on Reddit
Censorship, shadow banning, deboosting and deplatforming are hot topics these days on the Internet, especially when it concerns the major social media platforms. I’ve blogged about this often in the last few months, and this time I want to detail one of my recent experiences on Reddit so that others can learn from it. Read more ⟶
May 2019
I’m Rich and Successful
One of the things that I’ve realized and have been thinking about often in the last few weeks is how rich and successful I am. And I don’t mean this in the way that most people understand these terms, which is usually in the financial sense, because I don’t care about being rich and successful in that way. In fact, I’ve written before about the fact that I never want to get rich in that sense. 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.
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 ⟶
January 2019
A Self-Portrait
The last time I did a portrait photoshoot for myself for social media was back in 2013, so it was time to do another one. I didn’t want to spend (waste) too much time on it so I kept it very simple. It’s also very difficult to do a self-portrait with the equipment that I currently use so there was lots of trial and error involved. Read more ⟶
Women, your vagina does become less tight
Unfortunately I keep coming across women online who claim that a woman’s vagina doesn’t become less tight over time, either because of having sex or with age. Read more ⟶
December 2018
I’ve activated the new theme for my blog. I’m still working on it and tweaking it a little so you might notice things looking weird and/or not (fully) working from time to time. I also need to double check older content, deactivate old and unused plugins and remove stuff that’s not needed anymore. If there are any problems that persist after today let me know in a comment.
Work on the new design for my blog is progressing nicely. I think I have the major work done; now it’s mostly about fine tuning, testing in different browsers and devices, and making sure all the many years of old content looks decent in the new design. As things stand now, I’ll probably be putting the new design live during next week when most people are busy celebrating and pretending to be happy and traffic will be low. I’ll then be doing most of the fine tuning on the live blog; so if you see weird stuff happening you know I’m working on it.
August 2018
QuantumGate source code published
I’ve published the latest version of the QuantumGate source code to the GitHub repository. From now on that repository is going to receive frequent updates as I continue to work on QuantumGate. You can download the source code and follow the build instructions in the README file if you’re interested in trying it out. Read more ⟶
Introducing QuantumGate, a peer-to-peer (P2P) communications protocol, library and API written in C++
For the last twelve months I’ve worked almost fulltime on one of my projects that I started in 2006 and have been postponing since 2007. I’m now in the final stages of preparing for an alpha release of the source code and accompanying documentation. It’s one of the most ambitious and complex projects I’ve worked on up until now, especially considering the goals that I have for it. Read more ⟶