Hacker Culture

I got a free Nexus 5 so I decided to load up Ubuntu Touch.

As a hacker I am always out to learn new skills and recently it has been Emacs. I love Vim though so this is a touchy subject...

The following instructions are for Arch Linux without Xorg (so  essentially terminal only arch or what you get after a fresh Arch Linux  install). If you are using Ubuntu server or another distro, the steps  should be close to the same. But not exact so please do your research.  You may get lucky and just have to edit the config file.

Many people use an ad blocker like uBlockOrigin to block ads from  tracking us around the web but this only works on the devices it is  installed on. We can do one better and prevent them all across any  network in our control.

"Welcome to Matrix: An open network for secure, decentralized communication."

Last week we talked about a new app I found called Webapps Sandboxed. This week I talk about what it was like using it for as many apps as possible.

"The idea behind it is to provide a secure way to browse popular webapps by eliminating referrers, 3rd party requests, insecure HTTP requests, etc. It accomplishes this by providing a sandbox for multiple webapps. Each webapp will run in it's own sandbox, with 3rd party requests blocked, and all external links opening in an external default web browser. Homescreen shortcuts can be created to any of the saved webapps." - Toby Kurien, creator of WebApps Sandboxed Browser.

"Unicode is a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems. The standard is maintained by the Unicode Consortium, and as of  June 2018 the most recent version, Unicode 11.0, contains a repertoire of 137,439 characters covering 146 modern and historic scripts, as well as multiple symbol sets and emoji." - Wikipedia

Then I was browsing YouTube at the end of the night to relax before bed  and came across a video talking about note-taking applications that are  both cross-platform and robust. This is where I heard about Notion  again. I can't remember where I first heard about it, but the first  time I chose not to give it a go. After that first video, I looked up  some others on Notion and saw how much this app can do and aims to achieve.

One day awhile back I chose to learn about a cryptocurrency that previously I knew nothing about. The pick was Monero, a coin (at the time) ranked thirteenth by market cap on coinmarketcap.com and eighth by price. What I found interesting about this coin was the mining algorithm, CryptoNight.

My mind has been on the Domain Name System (DNS) server for about a week now. I've been mulling over whether VPNs are necessary and what level of trust should be placed in a DNS provider. It's evident not to trust your ISP's DNS since some companies have been caught manipulating the data or using you DNS metadata to sell to other companies.

Both of which suck.

This collection of data via the DNS still happens even when a user connects to a VPN. The data between the user and the site is encrypted but the request to what IP address ties to the requested domain name, is not. Worst of all the user is almost always using their ISP's default servers which they control.

A VPN is an encrypted tunnel between your computer and the internet  at large. They exist to allow employees access to internal intranets of a  company to do work remotely.

That's it.

They are merely a tunnel and not a means to keep your data/metadata  private. Any VPN provider you use can see what you access, how often,  and for how long. It's not hard either; I do this in my own home from  time to time with a program called Wireshark; cause I'm a nerd.

Just being on a VPN does not make your data private.