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 ⟶
Brain Damage has infiltrated the Open Source Initiative
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 ⟶
Go for repairability
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 ⟶
UDP Support coming to QuantumGate
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 ⟶
Disappointing launch of Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020
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 ⟶
Building a Chat Application using the QuantumGate P2P Networking Library
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 ⟶
I just fixed an issue on my blog where comments and notes disappeared after upgrading to the latest WordPress release 2 days ago. After the upgrade the site appeared to work well after a quick glance but I didn’t notice that comments weren’t shown below posts by my custom theme. So it’s now fixed. Hopefully no more surprises.
Secure and Private Communications via QuantumGate
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 ⟶
Very First QuantumGate Alpha Release
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 ⟶
I took a short break of a few months working on QuantumGate when the COVID-19 ‘pandemic’ began and the sheep in my area of the world also started to panic. It was also time for the elections on the plantation where I’m held hostage, so I took the time to try and spread some awareness about the evils of voting. I briefly got back on Facebook in order to reach more people through ads and wrote several articles which were published in the local media — all of which I also translated and published here on my blog. I also took the time to play some games after a long while, specifically Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 and Grand Theft Auto 5 (GTA5). Even after 7 years, GTA5 is still a very impressive game and it’s easy to see why Rockstar is making millions of dollars with it even after such a long time.
With regard to QuantumGate, I’m preparing to finally release some pre-built binaries so that people can more easily try it out without having to set up a whole development environment to build the binaries themselves. I’ll have more details in a few days.
Evidence of Twitter Shadow Banning Users
Yesterday a number of high-profile Twitter accounts got ‘hacked’ with one of the internal ‘admin’ tools Twitter uses. Read more ⟶
Internet Throttling is being used for Censorship
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 ⟶
GitHub shadow bans user and blocks access to repos
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 ⟶
Response to “Cybercrime in Suriname Increasingly More Aggressive”
I read the article “Cybercrime in Suriname Increasingly More Aggressive” (January 23rd 2020) by Mr. Sitaram with great interest. I’ve also noticed that it had some effect based on the publications that followed. However, I think that Mr. Sitaram is still too optimistic about the current state of affairs; I can assure you from my own experience that the situation is far worse than many people suspect. Read more ⟶
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 ⟶
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.
ICT Supply Chain Integrity
A paper published recently by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace titled “ICT Supply Chain Integrity: Principles for Governmental and Corporate Policies” goes into various threats to security and privacy via supply chain vulnerabilities and attacks. Read more ⟶
WhatsApp is completely fucked; stop using it
Boy am I glad I stopped using WhatsApp. The shit seems to have hit the fan in a rather serious way for WhatsApp (owned by Facebook) as recent developments show. WhatsApp is now suing an Israeli company called NSO Group for abusing vulnerabilities in WhatsApp to hack into people’s phones in order to spy on them. Read more ⟶
China adopts law on cryptography
The criminal Chinese government has made a new law that they claim is to “encourage and support the research and application of the science and technology in cryptography.” The law takes effect on January 1st 2020 and here’s some of what’s coming to the slave population of China: According to the provisions, the country encourages the research, academic exchanges, conversion of academic achievements and application of the ... Read more ⟶
Audio and Video Communications with QuantumGate
Back in March I mentioned that I was working on an example extender for QuantumGate that would demonstrate how to do video and audio communications, comparable to video and audio calls via WhatsApp and Skype. One of the reasons for that was to provide yet another example to show interested developers how to use and build on top of QuantumGate. Read more ⟶