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On October 16th 2024, O’Keefe Media Group published footage of Jeevan Gyawali, a senior software engineer at Meta, discussing how Meta censors information on their social media platforms (among which Facebook and Instagram). According to Gyawali, anything they dislike is automatically demoted by their algorithms, resulting in reduced reach. Read more ⟶

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 ⟶

I recently purchased a new SIM card from a local telecom company in Suriname. I was assigned a ‘new’ phone number with this SIM card. After inserting the SIM card into a phone, I installed WhatsApp and tried to activate a WhatsApp account with the ‘new’ phone number. To my surprise, another person’s profile picture and status text appeared in ‘my’ WhatsApp account after activation. 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 ⟶

“Censorship of wrongthink by Big Tech at the behest of the government is government censorship, which violates the First Amendment,” writes Jenin Younes in an article on Tablet magazine titled “The U.S. Government’s Vast New Privatized Censorship Regime” (September 21st 2020). Read more ⟶

If you’ve been paying attention to what happened a few weeks ago with PayPal, you’ve seen a glimpse of the dystopian future that awaits us. Read more ⟶

Both Cloudflare and the Internet Archive have proven again that they cannot be trusted. This time they’ve worked together to erase a website called Kiwi Farms from the Internet. As reported by The Verge: The Internet Archive is no longer hosting backups of Kiwi Farms, continuing the forum’s removal from major web platforms. Read more ⟶

Apparently you can’t talk about mental illness on LinkedIn. I posted a video by Matt Walsh (originally posted on YouTube) on LinkedIn and got the notification you can see in the screenshot below after a day. Apparently my post only got 8 impressions, but somehow it still managed to attract LinkedIn’s attention. Looks like it was probably flagged by an automatic moderation system. Read more ⟶

In the past I’ve warned multiple times not to use hardware and software from Chinese manufacturers such as Huawei, and more examples keep piling up showing why that’s a bad idea. Read more ⟶

A recent article by NRC shows how banks are engaging in financial censorship. The article is in Dutch but I’ve translated some of it to English below. Here’s from “De complotdenker bankiert maar elders, zegt de bank” (August 17th 2021): Banks and payment services regularly block accounts of organizations they consider to be spreading fake news about corona and vaccinations. Read more ⟶

One of the nice things about having a blog on the Internet is that you get to connect with people around the world and are able to share ideas and information with them. And the interactivity means that you can also get updates and learn from your readers. This is how I got to know about an amazing book by Robert S. Mendelsohn titled “Confessions of a Medical Heretic.” Read more ⟶

I’m featured again in the April 2021 edition of Parbode magazine, this time regarding the COVID-19 vaccinations. The article titled “COVID-19-vaccins in Suriname: vacci-naties of vacci-nazi’s?”  (April 8th 2021) is in Dutch and you can read part of it online by clicking here. I’ve also included an English translation of the online portion below. Read more ⟶

Ever wonder why Plato chose to speak and write in the dialogue form? If so, you’re not alone. I’ve wondered that myself in the past while reading some of his work. And even back then it seemed to me that he was trying to somehow record some important knowledge, sometimes philosophical concepts and sometimes even (alternative) history, without getting into trouble. 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 ⟶

WhatsApp has given users an ultimatum to agree to sharing more information with Facebook before February 8th 2021 if they want to continue using the application. As I’ve written about ever since August 2019, Mark Fuckerberg planned to integrate WhatsApp and Instagram much more with Facebook, and this also included advertising and sharing of (user) data. The coming change to WhatsApp will be an even bigger violation of users’ privacy. Read more ⟶

Yesterday I tried sharing a speech by Malcolm X on Facebook and noticed that Facebook is censoring part of the speech based on copyright claims. The speech is included in a cartoon animation video, illustrating the things that Malcolm X talks about, namely the difference between what he calls ‘house negroes’ and ‘field negroes.’ You can see the notification I got from Facebook below. Read more ⟶

Zhang Zhan, a 37-year old journalist in China, has been sentenced to 4 years in jail for reporting about the COVID-19 outbreak in China. Read more ⟶

I’m featured in the December 2020 edition of Parbode magazine regarding the so called COVID-19 ‘pandemic.’ The article titled “Mondkapje versus muilkorf: COVID-19 één grote poppenkast?”  (December 10th 2020) is in Dutch and you can read part of it online by clicking here. I’ve also included an English translation of the online portion below. Read more ⟶

A team from the University of Michigan published a study titled “Censored Planet: An Internet-wide, Longitudinal Censorship Observatory” where they look at censorship around the world. Things appear to be getting worse as mentioned: “What we see from our study is that no country is completely free,” said Ram Sundara Raman, U-M doctoral candidate in computer science and engineering and first author of the study. Read more ⟶