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 ⟶
March 2020
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 ⟶
February 2020
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 ⟶
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
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 ⟶
October 2019
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 ⟶
China’s New Cybersecurity Program: NO Place to Hide
If you were still in doubt about the level of detail in which the criminal Chinese government is trying to implement George Orwell’s ‘1984’ then perhaps this article might be of some help. Here’s from “China’s New Cybersecurity Program: NO Place to Hide” (September 30th 2019): The Chinese government has been working for several years on a comprehensive Internet security/surveillance program. Read more ⟶
September 2019
Criminal US government seeks to confiscate Snowden’s Income
The criminal US government is trying to confiscate some of Edward Snowden’s income from his latest book “Permanent Record.” You would think they would have something better to do, like for example, investigating who gave stand-down orders to the US Air Force on 9/11, and exactly how the WTC buildings were brought down by controlled demolitions. The CIA, FBI and Mossad might know more about that. Read more ⟶
Brain Damage in Tech
Continuing where I left off in the last post about brain damage at CppCon 2019, where I made the remark that “the ‘pride/diversity’ agenda is spreading all throughout tech like a virus,” we know that this is deliberate policy in tech these days. Read more ⟶
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.
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” (SaaS) 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 ⟶