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Female Red-winged Blackbird A female red-winged blackbird uses its tail feathers to balance itself, while on the hunt for insects to feed its fledglings,  

The definitive ad blocker for Android. Blokada ad blocker Getting an ad blocker is like getting a firewall, it's complicated. Most blockers have flexible lists that do not completely block advertising. Blokada is an open source project, which means you can be sure that it will always be free, safe to use and without any hidden agenda. When you open the software, we go to advanced settings and activate the updates, start at the beginning, if you have problems when you start, select aggressive start, to protect your children you can select Adguard DNS Family Filter, protects you from many things, not just intrusive advertising. Feedback: Blokada

There’s a line that exists as a border between convenience and privacy. I’m not quite sure how thin that line is (I imagine it varies for each person), but it’s something I’ve had to start thinking about. It seems like every month, there’s a new story about a data breach at a major company. Want to see a disturbing long list of breaches? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_data_breaches ought to sober you up a little bit. Our personal information is a major currency. Companies vacuum up details about our lives from our browser histories, forms we fill out, items we purchase from their stores, sites we visit after visiting theirs, sites we visit where their trackers are embedded, and sometimes, from our phones after just walking into their stores. They want to know what brands we buy, where we look at their merchandise, what paths we use to walk through their stores, whether we comparison shop with other companies. Looking for flights online? Airlines will use the cookies on your browser to see where you’ve been looking and use that information to manipulate the cost of flights...

I talk about how I switched from Backlaze personal to Backblaze B2 with restic and rclone, and draw some comparisons between them. If you use a computer and care about the data stored on it, follow best practice and keep backups: The live data A local backup An offsite backup But there are so many options available for how you manage these. XKCD 1718  Backblaze Personal For the past couple of years I've been using Backblaze as my offsite backup solution. It works really well, and it's saved me a couple of times so in my mind it was worth it. That is until I considered just how much I was spending on it. I had in the order of 100GB being backed up at any one time, and was paying $110 for 2 years. I found Backblaze's cloud storage (B2) calculator, and figured that for this kind of data I should be paying nowhere near as much if I was managing the backups myself. Cloud storage is pretty cheap these days, and unless you have terabytes of data to backup, going DIY is probably cheapest. So I decided to make the switch from Backblaze's managed personal backup to a self-managed backup hosted on Backblaze's B2 cloud storage platform. The following may also be of interest to Linux users, as Backblaze doesn't offer a personal backup system for linux OS...

After exposing 885 MILLION full datasets title insurance records, including bank account numbers and statements, mortgage and tax records, Social Security numbers, wire transaction receipts, and drivers license images, which covers the last 16(!) years, the estate title insurance giant First American Financial Corp issued this statement: “First American has learned of a design defect in an application that made possible unauthorized access to customer data."Translation: We have used a cobbled together web page which had no security audit in any way (because if we had, this would have been checked in the first place, because breaches exactly of this kind are the most common in "the industry" and happened multiple times before on other big sites. If you were logged in to their website, you needed only to manipulate the sequential number in the address bar to get access to any other account. Of course nobody expects to change one number in a 9 digit sequential number to see if there is another record. We are totally surprised! Such things were previously unheard of ... NOT!"At First American, security, privacy and confidentiality are of the highest priority and we are committed to protecting our customers’ information."Translation: Now that we've got caught with it, we try some damage control. (Damage control for the company, because the damage already for the users and and for the customers of the users happened in the past)"The company took immediate action to address the situation and shut down external access to the application...

Text editors are for coders, not for writers. If you are a writer, you need a word processor rather than a text editor. A good minimal terminal-based word processor is Wordgrinder. The difference between a text editor and a word processor is attention to the formatting of paragraphs. In terms of typesetting, a paragraph of human-language text flows, whereas in text editor terms, the paragraph is a single line of text. Elements of code in text editors are mostly a single line too, but the lines are strictly nested (somewhat depending on the coding language) in order to speak to each other hierarchically. Also, coding languages need special explicit markup to indicate the beginning and ending of larger objects, such as curly brackets to mark the beginning and ending of objects across many lines...

Nano Adblocker: A Fork of Ublock . Nano Adblocker is a fork of Ublock Origin, with functions to add custom filters. You have options to BackUp's your privacy settings, such as blocking the filtration of your ip address via WebRTC. We go to work: The first thing is to add the extension Nano Adblocker...

Many people online are trapped inside the Googlenet, trapped by the weighted, personalised and censored list. Mostly they are trapped by using the word "Google" instead of "Search", and from not remembering a time before Google bought its way to the top. In the "before-time" there were many search engines with different pros and cons. Possibly the greatest was AltaVista (1996) - https://wikipedia.org/wiki/AltaVista which also brought us the first online translator "Babel Fish". Bought and buried by the once equally mighty Yahoo, it is now just a bitter sweet memory for ageing nerds around the globe. We used to use powerful software based spiders/crawlers such as Copernic Agent, and curated directories such as DMOZ ODP, which is still going under the new name Curlie. Now we use web search engines which mix submitted results with automated crawling of the web. There are still useful alternative search engines and alternative ways to use Google, though with modern browsers you can often bypass the search engines and install the search feature from most sites you use. Many years ago when Google was still just another search engine Original site in 1998 I used to use a search engine called Dogpile Original site in 1996 I still fetch my results from www.dogpile.com Dogpile is not as useful as it was then because it no longer has much good competition. How does that make sense you may ask. Dogpile is not like regular search engines because it is a meta search engine. This means it searches other search engines and shows the combined results from all, giving you a wider spread and less censorship problems. Today it only searches Google, Bing, Yahoo and Yandex, but this is enough most of the time. Are you getting bad Google results ? You may not be if you seem to be browsing from a different country. Try a proxy or VPN. Too much clutter and noise in the results ? Try using a minus in front of words to make sure it does not show results containing those, -just -like -this. Try "putting your search in quotes", or adding+a+plus+between+words if you want to find exactly that phrase. Try the advanced search options. Perhaps you need more technical or educational search results. You should be using scholar.google.com If you have access to University facilities, you can add your credentials and have it include those results. Do you often need results specific to a set of sites you visit, or that share a theme or common use ? In this case you should use Google Custom Search Engine www.google.com/cse/ You can make multiple collections of custom searches with different sites being indexed in each. This is intended mostly for use on web sites to provide searches on that site, but you can use it with a special link you should bookmark. I will use one of my own custom searches as an example. As I am a fan of and a community moderator for the game Unreal Tournament, I made a custom search including all the UT sites and sites with UT sections that I found most useful. This gives me very concise results and no filler. You may find it useful to have a collection of news sources, art, history, or science and technology sites. If you want to live in a perfect bubble you could add only the news sources you agree with, so your searches always match your view point. Using other search engines is not so painful. You can use Startpage for a private way to search Google. This removes personalisation and so any "bubble" you may have created with your previous searches and activities online. It also offers a handy proxy for times when you are blocked from a site. Bing is a lot better than you think, especially as most people think Google is the internet, so only ask Google to hide or remove results. It also has a similar custom search engine system that you can abuse... err, I mean use www.customsearch.ai DuckDuckGo is a privacy focused search engine and works like Dogpile, by aggregating the results from Bing, Yahoo and Yandex into 1 set of results. Qwant like Startpage and DuckDuckGo are focused on user privacy, but use their own database Yippy is a general search engine, and has a very useful way of grouping your results based on relative categories and topics. Webopedia is an online dictionary and Internet search engine for information technology and computing definitions. Yahoo and Ask Jeeves are still... sites you can visit...

The linux core is responsible for processing data and communicating peripheral controllers, awaiting an order. This kernel has the security layer of user, superuser and root. In recent years I have seen UNIX systems following an insecure architecture that work by default, a clear example is the Linux kernel, which does not implement layers of security in the kernel not to lose performance and be compatible with all hardware. A bit of history: After the Second World War, there were survivors of the old allied forces of the West: France, Poland, England and Usa. They developed a system to track the Nazis, such system is now known as: Echelon. Echelon or the 5 eyes Composed of . All systems with UNIX architectures are scanned with software derived from Zmap, which searches the entire ipv4 and ipv6 address range in real time, facilitating attacks aimed at transnational companies and target countries. TCP architecture or 3-step greeting: 1]. The system establishes a TCP SYN synchronization. 2]. The connection is negotiated with SYN/ACK headers. 3]. The synchronization is confirmed with the sending of ACK packets. This design is insecure by default because it allows intercepting data reception and transmission packets, listening for open ports to determine where to concentrate attacks directed at critical infrastructures. There are also the intelligence agencies GCHQ, which together with the NSA have distributed around the world retransmitting antennas of data to satellites divided between Russia and North America. Internet Colonization and Control Investigating this invisible problem I can finally come to the conclusion, that since the Internet was founded all this was planned by those who implemented at its inception with an academic purpose; ARPANET. Programs like Carnivore, echelon, Xkeyscore, perfect citizen... ad infinitum, are part of a conglomerate of mostly English-speaking governments with military mutual aid agreements against common enemies, among them; Russia, leading developing countries , Middle Eastern countries with oil reserves . Big Data The Cloud, data storage and big data are popularly thought to facilitate instant access to information. These data are processed in different countries of the world according to their data protection laws. But they do not make public the mega-projects of infrastructure with monstrous servers for storing, processing and listening to information, such as this one that operates in Utah: Securing the Linux system If you use an Ubuntu-Linux system, you're in luck. Editing /etc/apt/sources.list sudo nano /etc/apt/sources.list Inside we add: deb http://linux-libre.fsfla.org/pub/linux-libre/freesh/ freesh main Close the terminal with the keys Ctrl+X+Yes+Enter, save and update: sudo apt update We look for the core that fits our needs apt-cache search linux-libre We look the current core uname -a For an architecture of 32'bits and a ram memory of 2GB sudo apt install linux-image-5.1.5-gnu.nonpae linux-headers-5.1.5-gnu.nonpae And Update Grub sudo update-grub Reboot and Happy Hacking. Feedback: Informaniaticos Heise GUTL

Elon Musk's latest "world changing" new invention might well be the first one to really change the world - and fast. Our night sky is at risk. What is Starlink? This blog post is not going to shower Elon Musk in praise, I know people get riled up about that online, so there's a warning about that. Starlink (Official Site) is a low-orbit satellite internet service that has started launching. It is operated by Elon Musk. Now that it has launched, some people are beginning to realise some of the concerns that this kind of system might bring. I may not be the best night photographer, and I don't know all the constellations off by heart, but I love being able to look at stars. Having an unsullied view might not be possible much longer, if the Starlink project keeps going ahead. An astronomer's view First off, I would suggest reading this thread of tweets by a NASA Engineer. It was what prompted me to write this post, and I think gives a good background on the main issues that have cropped up...