Surveillance Capitalism on L0G.is

Spinning up a Matrix Homeserver in Ubuntu 20.04 in 15min*

Tue, 16 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Decentralizing Social Media and E2EE Communication with Matrix

Sun, 14 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +0000

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. While at the same time I have interest in moving to a decentralized approach to chat and feeds. I originally looked at matrix a while ago an passed on it, but upon circling back. Once I discovered bots that can be utilized in matrix to create custom feeds of whatever the room creator wanted from Reddit to YouTube to RSS or even Twitter feeds, I realized that matrix could replace all the various sites I would doom scroll through algorithmically and be fed curated crap rather than controlling what exactly I want to see. One app to rule them all, or at least until RSS gets killed off even more.

Quitting Facebook

Thu, 20 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0000

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. Yet throwing the sink out of the window will leave us with a gap that we have a responsibility to replace.

What’s In My Facebook Data?

Sun, 16 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0000

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. However, being curious to see the full extent of the text data. When I peeked inside, i immediately knew it required its own post.

Facebook Has Already Done What They’re Worried TikTok Will Do

Tue, 11 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0000

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”