Visited my parents again today!

Arrived home.

Suddenly my sister starts to talk about the new dutch mass surveillance law and how it's all bad and the possible consequences.

😶😐😮

Normally I'm the one who says that and is told to shut up after a while.

I'm a proud brother!

BAM! It's official. The Dutch people have voted against the new surveillance law!

It's about 49 percent against vs 46 percent in favor and the other part voted blank.

I'm happy as fuck!

Just watched a video where someone (in relation to the new mass surveillance law in the netherlands) asked people on the street if they had something to hide.

Everyone said no.

"Could you get your phone and show me around?"

Everyone said yes.

"May I take a look at your messages/pictures/browsing history?"

Suddenly 80 percent said no.

"But you said you had nothing to hide!"

"I'm going to take that back."

The new Dutch mass surveillance law goes into action on the first of May. I'll of course have a good security setup ready but that does not stop the bulk data collection.

I just setup a website which (still in English at the moment) requests a random search result from bing, google or DuckDuckGo every 3 seconds.

Will work on making it more 'real' :)

If stopping the surveillance isn't an option, let's add more data to filter out for them!

After it was revealed that the Equifax hack was even bigger yet again, the US government said something that really made me say/think something in the trend of "WHAT the actual FUCK?!"

"This data is in the hands of cyber criminals anyways".

You run the biggest mass surveillance program in the world, sucking up more than a million terabytes every hour, then at least could you PRETEND to care/take interest when the personal data of about all your citizens appears on the Internet?!

Fucking hell.

The Dutch referendum about the new mass surveillance law is a go, fuck yeah!

Also, due to a some stuff, a delay is postponing the start of the mass surveillance to May next year.

A little more time to setup secure stuffs :3

In may this year, the new mass surveillance law in the Netherlands went into effect. Loads of people were against it with the arguments that everyone's privacy was not protected well enough, data gathered through dragnet surveillance might not be discarded quickly after the target data was filtered out and the dragnet surveillance wouldn't be that 'targeted'.

They were put into the 'paranoid' corner mostly and to assure enough support/votes, it was promised that:
- dragnet surveillance would be done as targeted as possible.
- target data would be filtered out soon and data of non-targets would be discarded automatically by systems designed for that (which would have to be out in place ASAP).
- data of non-targets would NOT be analyzed as that would be a major privacy breach.
- dragnet surveillance could only be done if enough proof would be delivered and if the urgency could justify the actions.

A month ago it was already revealed that there has been a relatively (in this context) high amount of cases where special measures (dragnet surveillance/non-target hacking to get to targets and so on) were used when/while there wasn't enough proof or the measures did not justify the urgency.
Privacy activists were anything but happy but this could be improved and the guarantees which were given to assure privacy of innocent people were in place according to the politicians... we'll see how this goes..

Today it was revealed that:
-there are no systems in place for automatic data discarding (data of innocent civilians) and there are hardly any protocols for how to handle not-needed or non-target data.
- in real life, the 'as targeted dragnet as possible' isn't really as targeted as possible. There aren't any/much checks in place to assure that the dragnets are aimed as targeted as possible.
- there isn't really any data filtering which filters out non-targers, mostly everything is analyzed.

Dear Dutch government and intelligence agency; not so kindly to fuck yourself.

Hardly any of the promised checks which made that this law could go through are actually in place (yet).

Fuck you.

Mother of fucking god, its astonishing to see how difficult it is to entirely block out Google from your computer.

Actually, its very easy and I wrote something to automate that but the second you block out that goddamned mass surveillance network, every login page of every goddamn site with a fucking recaptcha just doesn't work anymore.

Google, go fuck yourself and with that, every motherfucking site which uses recaptcha.

With the wake of some rants shouting at Linuxers who express their opinion in a considered to be very not good way, I decided to make such a rant. Not to be annoying but because, although I get that fanboyism in that way isn't even good in MY opinion, I do think that one should be able to express their opinion.

But, If you'd like to express your opinion, I think you at least should do that with some good arguments. Not everyone might agree with those arguments but hey, that's the point of opinions sometimes :)

I don't hate windows/mac for being windows or mac. Nope.

I hate the systems for not giving the user freedom to do what they wish with the system but more importantly, for integrating their users in worlds biggest mass surveillance program AND on top of fucking that, not giving peoples the option to look at the source code aka at what's ACTUALLY going on in the system. Next to that, Windows 10's data collection is officially not legal in the netherlands so don't even try justifying their fucking data slurping.

Of course there's a chance that they don't contain any bad stuffs but since the Snowden revelations I don't trust those commercial companies anymore on their 'blue' eyes.

Yeah, I've ranted about this before, I know, felt like doing it again in combination with my reason above. I also know that I will probs receive hate for this but oh well, i'm used to that by now.

So yeah, windows and osx: go fuck yourself.

Fuck yeah.

Last year our government voted out new mass surveillance law through like it was nothing AND with a huge amount of votes in favor and hardly any against. (remember that the government is *supposed* to represent the people of the country)

A few students made a referendum happen, 48 percent of our people came to vote for this.

The first exit poll results are about 50/50!

I'm happy as fuck, damn!

Sorry for this slightly political posts and if this entirely violates all terms, I'll remove it. I thought this fits, though, because of what this new law.

I have multiple but one of my biggest ones:

Build an entire suite of services which can replace the popular Google/microsoft/facebook (etc) services.

Of course: privacy respecting, preferrably everything possible end-to-end encrypted.

Because fuck mass surveillance and those companies and if I can do anything to fuck them (quite literally) and help people getting to user friendly alternatives, I'll do the best I can.

To all dutch people on here, the new surveillance law I ranted about a month or something ago has passed if my source is correct.

Passed as in, the government has voted in favor.

Time to start encrypting/vpn'ing/torring and securing your computers!

Feel free to use this rant's comment section as Q/A and tips section for this subject as well :)

So the country I live in is going to get a huge mass surveillance law. Currently we're trying to force a referendum because this is highly (privacy) intrusive. We can still sign them for a little bit and a friend of mine hadn't done that yet. His reasoning was that it I isn't binding anyways.

We've got this John Oliver equivilant in the Netherlands who did a piece about this.

I put it on for my friend saying that I just wanted him to watch it. If he wouldn't change his mind afterwards, I wouldn't pressure him or anything.

We watched it.

Afterwards he looked at me with eyes like 😵😧😷😲😮😫.

"they'll REALLY be able to do this shit!?!"
"where can I sign this fucking thing to get this referendum going?"

So I asked him why he suddenly was all for it.

"I'm not much of a privacy guy but this shit just crossed a fucking line".

He's going to sign it as fast as possible 😁

So I heard (a while ago) from one of my teachers at my previous study that they're waiting for the new european data protection laws to kick in so that they'll be able to start using Google for everything.

That would mean that every student is required to have a (school/school domain though) Google account.

"The data will remain in this country"

Yeah fuck off I'm not going to believe google on it's 'blue eyes'.

It's sad how an educational institution can force their students into a mass surveillance network. Really makes me angry as hell.

Luckily I got out before they're going to implement this.

Installed my pihole a few days ago and not a very high percentage blocked.

Added google/facebook/twitter and some more to the wildcard (regex) blacklist and BAM, so many blocked queries!

Fuck Google, Facebook, twitter and other mass surveillance companies.

I'd love to finish a few projects I'm currently working on:

- An add-on which gives a middle finger to websites which use services/products ran by companies which are known to be integrated within the biggest mass surveillance system ever created (US powered). Not because just fuck those websites but because I think (@PonySlaystation came up with this idea) that its only fair that people get to know which websites 'sell them out'. Oh and "but not everyone cares about that" - you don't HAVE to install the addon.
(will be open sourced)

- Notes service with a fun thing.

- PHP based server/website/whateverthefuckyouwant monitoring system which is pretty much module based and works with json files as configuration. (kinda works but still loads of bugs to solve and gotta improve the module system a lot).
(will be open sourced)

- PHP based pihole alternative which suits my needs (will be open sourced)

- Forgot one 😅

Do you know what annoys the living fuck out of me?
Me: no...?
Me: may I tell?
Me: yes, please do!
Me: okay here we go:

Sites which use Google fonts or apis or ajax or other Google-hosted libraries.

It takes fucking ages to load those sites (if they lost et-all) since I block as much as possible from that cocksucking mass surveillance network.

Google, feel free to die in a fucking corner while getting an acid shower and being stripped of your skin layer by layer, as slow as possible to increase the pain and suffering.

Started working on a pihole alternative a while ago.

I like pihole a lot but one of the features I am missing is to be able to define a list of mass surveillance related domains (Snowden leaks; PRISM program and such) and show statistics based on dns queries containing blacklisted domains, prases/words and surveillance-related domains/words (google/facebook/microsoft/apple etc).

Started working on one based on an existing (php based) dns server which is open source and slowly but surely developed something which worked.
Then, I found out that the php resolving function (dns resolving) uses the system default, which can, of course, be google's dns as well. Changing this would be ideal but while the documentation suggested that it could be done some way, it didn't work for me so I chose a library which can do it with specific dns servers (to use as external dns servers).
This library used a different way of showing the retrieved dns query results and really wasn't in for converting everything by hand so i kinda quit the project a while ago.

A few days ago I thought fuck it and started again.
Now have a working version based on the new dns resolving library and made some other good improvements.

For those who are wondering why I chose PHP for this: why the fuck not?

Happy happy happy.

Sorry for being late, stuffs came inbetween!

I have done a few privacy rants/posts before but why not another one. @tahnik did one a few days ago so I thought I'd do a new one myself based on his rant.

So, online privacy. Some people say it's entirely dead, that's bullshit. It's up to an individual, though, how far they want to go as for protecting it.

I personally want to retain as much control over my data as possible (this seems to be a weird thing these days for unknown reasons...). That's why I spend quite some time/effort to take precautions, read myself into how to protect my data more and so on.

'Everyone should have the choice of what services they use' - fully agreed, no doubt about that.

I just find one thing problematic. Some services/companies handle data in a way or have certain business models which takes the control which some people want/have over their data away when you communicate with someone using that service.

Some people (like me) don't want anything to do with google but even when I want to email my best fucking friend, I lose the control over that email data since he uses gmail.

So, when someone chooses to use gmail and I *HAVE* to email them, my choice is gone.

TO BE VERY CLEAR: I'm not blaming that on the users, I'm blaming that on the company/service.

Then for example, google analytics. It's a very good/powerful when you're solely looking at its functions.
I just don't want to be part of their data collection as I don't want to get any data into the google engine.

There's a solution for that: installing an addon in order to opt out.

I'm sorry, WHAT?! --> I <-- have to install an addon in order to opt out of something that is happening on my own motherfucking computer?! What the actual fuck, I don't call that a fucking solution. I'll use Privacy Badger + hosts files to block that instead.

Google vs 'privacy' friendly search engines - I don't trust DDG completely because their backend is closed/not available to the public but I'd rather use them then a search engine which is known to be integrated into PRISM/other surveillance engines by default.

I don't mind the existence of certain services, as long as they don't integrated you with data hungry companies/mass surveillance without you even using their services.

Now lets see how fast the comment section explodes!

Fuck old farts trying to enslave us by censoring internet,
fuck socialism,
fuck globalization,
fuck cloud services,
fuck city surveillance,
fuck internet surveillance,
fuck RFID that enslaved animals,
fuck IoT constantly looking at our life,
fuck artificial intelligence.
It’s becoming fucking nightmare.
Time to make tools to fight against technology and people that intrude our life with this shit.
Where the fuck is John Connor ?

"we use cookies to give you a better experience on our site"

A better experience? Really?

It looks like you're using more than 100 external parties for whatever fucking reason. It is nearly impossible to disallow these, except for some stuff like analytics, which I don't like since it includes mass surveillance parties like Google and Facebook, but I'd at least, to some extent, understand that better.
But, the amount of dark pattern here is staggering and this kind of 'consent' you're using wouldn't, in a million years, hold up under the GDPR.

You know what would be a better experience? No tracking and no ads.

Go fuck your better experience (would that be a better sex experience....?)

Yeah, finally ungoogled my phone.

Fuck big tech companies. Fuck their surveillance capitalism. Fuck their monopolies and anti-competitive bullshit. Fuck their tax dodging. Fuck their fighting against the right to repair. Fuck their worship of revenue above all else. Fuck their 30% cut on everything. Fuck their world-destroying revenue models built on heartless AI and zero customer service. Fuck their automated banning systems with zero explanation as to why the fuck they've banned you, with zero fucking recourse. Fuck their amoral psychopathic CEOs and their fucking space rockets. Fuck all this shit. When I'm done with this IT project I'm fucking done with tech.

Okay I'm done now.

I don't think I could give the best advice on this since I don't follow all the best practices (lack of knowledge, mostly) but fuck it;

- learn how to use search engines. And no, not specifically Google because I don't want to drag kids into the use of mass surveillance networks and I neither want to promote them (even if they already use it).
- try not to give up too easily. This is one I'm still profiting from (I'm a stubborn motherfucker)
- start with open source technologies. Not just "because open source" but because open source, in general, gives one the ability to hack around and explore and learn more!
- Try to program securely and with privacy in mind (the less data you save, the less can be abused, compromised, leaked, etc)
- don't be afraid to ask questions
-enjoy it!

So I'm back from vacation! It's my first day back, and I'm feeling refreshed and chipper, and motivated to get a bunch of things done quickly so I can slack off a bit later. It's a great plan.

First up: I need to finish up tiny thing from my previous ticket -- I had overlooked it in the description before. (I couldn't test this feature [push notifications] locally so I left it to QA to test while I was gone.)

It amounted to changing how we pull a due date out of the DB; some merchants use X, a couple use Y. Instead of hardcoding them, it would use a setting that admins can update on the fly.

Several methods deep, the current due date gets pulled indirectly from another class, so it's non-trivial to update; I start working through it.

But wait, if we're displaying a due date that differs from the date we're actually using internally, that's legit bad. So I investigate if I need to update the internals, too.

After awhile, I start to make lunch. I ask my boss if it's display-only (best case) and... no response. More investigating.

I start to make a late lunch. A wild sickness appears! Rush to bathroom; lose two turns.

I come back and get distracted by more investigating. I start to make an early dinner... and end up making dinner for my monster instead.

Boss responds, tells me it's just for display (yay!) and that we should use <macro resource feature> instead.

I talk to Mr. Product about which macros I should add; he doesn't respond.

I go back to making lunch-turn-dinner for myself; monster comes back and he's still hungry (as he never asks for more), so I make him dinner.

I check Slack again; Mr. Product still hasn't responded. I go back to making dinner.

Most of the way through cooking, I get a notification! Product says he's talking it through with my boss, who will update me on it. Okay fine. I finish making dinner and go eat.

No response from boss; I start looking through my next ticket.

No response from boss. I ping him and ask for an update, and he says "What are you talking about?" Apparently product never talked to bossmang =/ I ask him about the resources, and he says there's no need to create any more as the one I need already exists! Yay!

So my feature went from a large, complex refactor all the way down to a -1+2 diff. That's freaking amazing, and it only took the entire day!

I run the related specs, which take forever, then commit and push.

Push rejected; pull first! Fair, I have been gone for two weeks. I pull, and git complains about my .gitignore and some local changes. fine, whatever. Except I forgot I had my .gitignore ignored (skipped worktree). Finally figure that out, clean up my tree, and merge.

Time to run the specs again! Gems are out of date. Okay, I go run `bundle install` and ... Ruby is no longer installed? Turns out one of the changes was an upgrade to Ruby 2.5.8.

Alright, I run `rvm use ruby-2.5.8` and.... rvm: command not found. What. I inspect the errors from before and... ah! Someone's brain fell out and they installed rbenv instead of the expected rvm on my mac. Fine, time to figure it out. `rbenv which ruby`; error. `rbenv install --list`; skyscraper-long list that contains bloody everything EXCEPT 2.5.8! Literally 2.5 through 2.5.7 and then 2.6.0-dev. asjdfklasdjf

Then I remember before I left people on Slack made a big deal about upgrading Ruby, so I go looking. Dummy me forgot about the search feature for a painful ten minutes. :( Search found the upgrade instructions right away, ofc. I follow them, and... each step takes freaking forever. Meanwhile my children are having a yelling duet in the immediate background, punctuated with screams and banging toys on furniture.

Eventually (seriously like twenty-five minutes later) I make it through the list. I cd into my project directory and... I get an error message and I'm not in the project directory? what. Oh, it's a zsh thing. k, I work around that, and try to run my specs. Fail.

I need to update my gems; k. `bundle install` and... twenty minutes later... all done.

I go to run my specs and... RubyMine reports I'm using 2.5.4 instead of 2.5.8? That can't be right. `ruby --version` reports 2.5.8; `rbenv version` reports 2.5.8? Fuck it, I've fought with this long enough. Restarting fixes everything, right? So I restart. when my mac comes back to life, I try again; same issue. After fighting for another ten minutes, I find a version toggle in RubyMine's settings, and update it to 2.5.8. It indexes for five minutes. ugh.

Also! After the restart, this company-installed surveillance "security" runs and lags my computer to hell. Highest spec MacBook Pro and it takes 2-5 seconds just to switch between desktops!

I run specs again. Hey look! Missing dependency: no execjs. I can't run the specs.

Fuck. This. I'll just push and let the CI run specs for me.

I just don't care anymore. It's now 8pm and I've spent the past 11 hours on a -1+2 diff!

What a great first day back! Everything is just the way I left it.

I hate silicon valley.

They enable so much of the state's and federal government's bullshit, the corporations and the banks subversion and destruction of society.

It's time to pop their fucking tech bubble.

From here on out, any time you hear or read the words 'startup', be sure to comment with "you mean speculative marketing investments?"

Because most tech runs on shit-tier semi-polished iterations of glorified CRUD anyway, thats all most of it is. And it 100% relies on grabbing network share through massive advertising and presence campaigns. A lot of vc money is being flushed straight down the toilet and this is a point to emphasize. Crash the fucking tech sector. Do it.

It'll have a knock on effect to the advertising space, which will put the hurt on google's bottom line when they and their ilk are already under pressure for all the poisonous, monopolist shit they pull like helping china build their surveillance tech.

Extra points for emphasizing "pot-fueled ideas sketched out on napkins while sitting in fucking chipotle, in unwashed sweater vests, originated by guys who are fresh out of college and never ran a business in their life. 90% of them fail in the first year. VCs and investor are losing their shirts." etc.

The entire dishonest fucking trade relies on other people's money, being bought out in either techno land-grabs or turf-protection e.x. atlassian acquiring trello, a **glorified todo app**.

Thats the business model. Hell go build your own and make a buck.

Build your own. Build something better and most of all... *fuck silicon valley*.

Let it burn, let burn, let it burn.

python machine learning tutorials:
- import preprocessed dataset in perfect format specially crafted to match the model instead of reading from file like an actual real life would work
- use images data for recurrent neural network and see no problem
- use Conv1D for 2d input data like images
- use two letter variable names that only tutorial creator knows what they mean.
- do 10 data transformation in 1 line with no explanation of what is going on
- just enter these magic words
- okey guys thanks for watching make sure to hit that subscribe button

ehh, the machine learning ecosystem is burning pile of shit let me give you some examples:

- thanks to years of object oriented programming research and most wonderful abstractions we have "loss.backward()" which have no apparent connection to model but it affects the model, good to know
- cannot install the python packages because python must be >= 3.9 and at the same time < 3.9
- runtime error with bullshit cryptic message
- python having no data types but pytorch forces you to specify float32
- lets throw away the module name of a function with these simple tricks:
"import torch.nn.functional as F"
"import torch_geometric.transforms as T"
- tensor.detach().cpu().numpy() ???
- class NeuralNetwork(torch.nn.Module):
def __init__(self):
super(NeuralNetwork, self).__init__() ????
- lets call a function that switches on the tracking of math operations on tensors "model.train()" instead of something more indicative of the function actual effect like "model.set_mode_to_train()"
- what the fuck is ".iloc" ?
- solving environment -/- brings back memories when you could make a breakfast while the computer was turning on
- hey lets choose the slowest, most sloppy and inconsistent language ever created for high performance computing task called "data sCieNcE". but.. but. you can use numpy! I DONT GIVE A SHIT about numpy why don't you motherfuckers create a language that is inherently performant instead of calling some convoluted c++ library that requires 10s of dependencies? Why don't you create a package management system that works without me having to try random bullshit for 3 hours???
- lets set as industry standard a jupyter notebook which is not git compatible and have either 2 second latency of tab completion, no tab completion, no documentation on hover or useless documentation on hover, no way to easily redo the changes, no autosave, no error highlighting and possibility to use variable defined in a cell below in the cell above it
- lets use inconsistent variable names like "read_csv" and "isfile"
- lets pass a boolean variable as a string "true"
- lets contribute to tech enabled authoritarianism and create a face recognition and object detection models that china uses to destroy uyghur minority
- lets create a license plate computer vision system that will help government surveillance everyone, guys what a great idea

I don't want to deal with this bullshit language, bullshit ecosystem and bullshit unethical tech anymore.

Fuck you windows!!!
I had to leave town but wanted some surveillance and had no cctv or ip camera set up. So I added my laptop to teamviewer and used its webcam.
Now its not showing up on teamviewer and most likely because WINDOWS SCHEDULED A MAJOR UPDATE
It probably rebooted and went on to boot into ubuntu. Should have fucking run ubuntu in the first place. I am going to be so furious when I get back.

*in case you are wondering, I had to leave in a hurry and didn't go for ubuntu because I had never used the camera in it and wasn't sure if ubuntu had the required drivers *