Archives

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 ⟶

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 ⟶

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 ⟶

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 ⟶

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 ⟶

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 ⟶

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 ⟶

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 ⟶

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 ⟶

Shortly after the new “national security law” became active in Hong Kong a few weeks ago, I saw a spike in traffic on the QuantumGate GitHub repository. It might have been just coincidence, but it seemed to me that perhaps people in Hong Kong and China were looking for alternative ways to hide their Internet traffic from the local criminal governments. Read more ⟶

I’ve just published the first alpha release for QuantumGate on GitHub. You can head on over to the releases page to download and try it. This version (v0.2.3-alpha) includes pre-built binaries to make it easier for interested developers to try out the library without having to set up a build environment (including all dependencies) to build the library from source code themselves. Read more ⟶

Yesterday a number of high-profile Twitter accounts got ‘hacked’ with one of the internal ‘admin’ tools Twitter uses. Read more ⟶

Private Internet Access blogged about a recent report by Access Now (February 24th 2020) titled “2019 #KeepItOn – Targeted, Cut Off, and Left in the Dark” (PDF) where they look at Internet shutdowns by criminal governments globally for the year 2019. I highly recommend reading the whole report to get an idea of how bad the situation is in various countries and the world in general. Read more ⟶

A software developer from Russia found out recently that his account on GitHub had been shadow banned. He was the only one still able to see his account and access his repositories; all other users got a 404 message in their web browsers. In an article titled “How GitHub blocked me (and all my libraries)” (March 11th 2020), ironically published on Medium, he details his experience with GitHub. Read more ⟶