This week, I deleted all my tweets on Twitter and posted a signpost to my new Mastodon account at https://infosec.exchange/@L0G1S, might delete the whole thing next week, we’ll see.
I’ve noticed from others within the infosec.exchange instance that there are some various growing pains for some when moving from Twitter to a federated community and I wanted to speak about why that is. Moving from a centralized community to a federated instance of something requires a shift into a new mindset of how you approach online communities in general.
This guide was adapted from Jonathan Bossenger’s guide here. He spins up in SQLite and then migrates to Postgres where I kept running into problems, so here I trim it down a little more to go right into Postgres. Also Arul Muhammad’s guide here can be of use if you run into any issues. Also, all the other matrix guides normally reside here. Mathew Hodson(co-founder of matrix), has a video guide here that does everything including jitsi.
Since around the beginning of COVID, I’m found myself in the unique position where I have a foot in a number of different chat circles and discord servers and group chats on varying services. While at the same time I’m on the journey to deactivate and end my usage of Facebook only to pop back in a few months later. I’ve been moving my conversations around from various places, and then to eventually signal, which I still like, but I found it limiting besides generally 1 to 1 chat.
The more and more I have chewed on this issue on this the more and more I am convinced this is the correct decision for myself. I caught myself scrolling my newsfeed for about 15 minutes today and I was trying to keep track of things on my feed and asked if this was something I needed to see. Heavy emphasis on need. After that 15 minutes I didn’t see a single update from either friend updates or news that was worth my time.
In the spirit of my last blog post, I’m in the process of writing a guide on how to properly quit Facebook and try and replace the services it provides for you with other more privacy centric solutions, while at the same time not letting perfection be the enemy of doing any good. So to start, I wanted to download all my data first, The main thing I knew I wanted to ensure I had was a copy of my videos or stories, everything can be deleted without the bat of an eye.
TikTok is in the news, Trump is going to ban it and a couple other Chinese apps as well. The Department of Defense and various military branches have banned it from government phones and have strongly discouraged its use on personal devices. The reasoning according the the Department of Defense was, “the app’s popularity with Western users including armed forces personnel, and its ability to convey location, image and biometric data to its Chinese parent company, which is legally unable to refuse to share data to the Chinese government”
About 2 months ago, I was leaving a restaurant in LA after dinner when I noticed that my cell phone had no signal, so I restarted the phone (which normally fixed it) and was greeted with the following text message. I immediately knew someone was either in the process of breaking or have already broken into one of my accounts, so I quickly sprinted across the parking lot, jumped in my jeep, dialed T-Mobile, and slammed on the gas.
With COVID-19 keeping everyone inside for the last few weeks, I’ve been getting a lot of questions from friends about VPNs from and if they are worth the investment. My answer has always been the same, “Oh shit, well, umm I will try and write a blog about it.”
Because it’s never that simple, it’s never a yes or no scenario. Everything comes down to the nuances of your specific use case and threat model.
