Good afternoon, sexually suppressed slaves of plantation Earth. It’s been a month after I left most social media, including Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp and I have to say, I don’t miss it at all. This is the last month I’ll still be checking WhatsApp occasionally for people who haven’t gotten the memo yet, but starting in October I’m only going to be on Signal. I’ve also been looking more into alternatives for Google; for example I’ve been using DuckDuckGo for search for a while now and don’t miss Google at all. Also have been checking out PureOS as an alternative to Windows. And most importantly, the Librem 5 phone is now starting to ship; if you like freedom, privacy and security, then check it out.
September 2019
Brain damage has infiltrated CppCon 2019
CppCon 2019 began this week and the keynote presentation by C++ inventor Bjarne Stroustrup is now online on YouTube. I’m looking forward to watching most of the presentations this year; usually I binge-watch them as they come online which after a week becomes very exhausting. But I can’t help myself. Read more ⟶
The Risks and Dangers of Bioengineering
An interesting article by security expert Bruce Schneier and Larisa Rudenko explains how the upcoming field of bioengineering is a lot like software engineering and talks about the associated risks and dangers. Here’s from “What digital nerds and bio geeks have to worry about” (September 13th 2019) published on CNN: Genes and genomes are based on code — just like the digital language of computers. 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
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 ⟶
Cloudflare proves they can never be trusted
About two years ago Cloudflare’s CEO Matthew Prince mentioned how nobody should have the power to decide whether or not someone should be allowed on the Internet, after he decided to take down The Daily Stormer website. Here’s what the moron had to say: Literally, I woke up in a bad mood and decided someone shouldn’t be allowed on the Internet. No one should have that power. Read more ⟶
June 2019
The danger of “Software as a Service” and “Infrastructure as a Service”
Eric Raymond blogged about the danger of using “Software as a Service” (SAS) in light of Salesforce.com recently banning customers from selling firearms. Read more ⟶
May 2019
Banned from PayPal; Another Warning
Weeks ago I blogged about the fact that you should “NOT trust Patreon, PayPal, Stripe and Slack.” If that warning wasn’t enough, a few days ago I came across the following post on Niteo’s blog: You’d think that being a legitimate online business, having 12 years of history with PayPal, and hundreds of thousands of dollars processed, you’d gain some credibility with them. Not so. Read more ⟶
My latest work for OuroX
OuroX, a FinTech startup incorporated in Delaware, went live with their new website a few days ago. I did the webdesign and web development for their new website. Below are a few screenshots; you can take a look at the website at https://ourox.io/. Read more ⟶
April 2019
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 ⟶
February 2019
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.
January 2019
Learning China’s Forbidden History, So They Can Censor It
An article on the New York Times discusses the business of censorship in China, showing just how far the Chinese government is willing to go to brainwash their people. I can imagine that in a few years from now, young people growing up in China will be living in an alternate reality fully controlled by their masters in government. 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.
Do NOT trust Patreon, PayPal, Stripe and Slack
Do not trust Patreon, PayPal, Stripe and Slack. Do not become dependent on their services and stay away from them if possible. A few days ago Patreon banned another creator from their platform in what can only rationally be described as censorship. Read more ⟶
September 2018
Thank you, Jack Poulson
Jack Poulson, a senior Google scientist, recently resigned because of the work Google is doing on censorship. Here’s from The Intercept: Jack Poulson worked for Google’s research and machine intelligence department, where he was focused on improving the accuracy of the company’s search systems. Read more ⟶
I don’t trust Cloudflare with IPFS
Cloudflare recently announced their own IPFS gateway: Today we’re excited to introduce Cloudflare’s IPFS Gateway, an easy way to access content from the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) that doesn’t require installing and running any special software on your computer. We hope that our gateway, hosted at cloudflare-ipfs.com, will serve as the platform for many new highly-reliable and security-enhanced web applications. Read more ⟶
I’m very disappointed in Linus Torvalds
Linus Torvalds, inventor and lead developer of the Linux kernel, recently stepped down “temporarily” from his role in the Linux project due to controversy surrounding his management style. The New Yorker published an article (archived) about it right after Torvalds’ announcement. Read more ⟶