About 5 months ago I moved away from Whatsapp (owned by Facebook) to Signal and today I moved away from Facebook itself. It has been on my to do list for a while already. Watching Zondag met Lubach this week gave me the final push to put my Facebook account removal at the top of my to do list. Arjen Lubach even created a Facebook event (quite funny) called "Bye Bye Facebook", which was scheduled for yesterday evening at 20.00. He stuck to his word and removed his own account. What made it funnier was that his event was not very easy to find using the search function, which usually works fine.

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About 2 weeks ago the developers behind the cryptocurrency Monero (Bitcoin 2.0) released an update of their software. When the blockchain reached block 1546000 a few days ago, the updated software release became mandatory to use. Please update your Monero software as soon as possible. Updates can be acquired from their website.

Use Monero - picture from themonera.art

Morgen is het zover, stemmen voor de gemeenteraad EN voor het referendum over de Wiv, ook wel beter bekend als de sleepwet. Bij deze wil ik iedereen vragen om (als je toch al gaat stemmen) ook jouw stem uit te brengen in verband met het referendum. Mocht je mijn mening willen weten, stem tegen.

Kort door de bocht: de wet is te vaag, het oordeel van de toezichthouder moet bindend zijn, de bewaartermijn is te lang, de diensten kunnen (te) makkelijk persoonsgegevens doorspelen naar het buitenlandse diensten en de gegevens van veel onschuldige burgers worden meegesleept terwijl dat niet nodig is.

De Wet op de inlichtingen- en veiligheidsdiensten 2017 is een dermate 'hot topic' geweest (dankzij SleepWet.nl), dat we ons democratisch recht mogen gebruiken voor het stemmen in het referendum. Laten we dat dan ook doen, om aan te geven dat de huidige wet (die per 1 januari 2018 van kracht is geworden) niet deugd. Goede informatie wordt gegeven op Een Betere Wet.nl (mogelijk gemaakt door Bits of Freedom) en de bijbehorende video-opname wordt mede mogelijk gemaakt door Amnesty International.

Wil je een liever een vlot overzicht (met humor), dan kan ik je Zondag met Lubach aanraden. In deze eerste video (op YouTube) en daarna zelfs tweede video, geeft hij een goede kijk op de nieuwe wet.

Deze brochure van de Referendum Commissie kwam ik ook tegen en wou ik jullie niet onthouden:

Tuesday the 14th of November 2017 was the day that Mozilla released their newest (and fastest) release of Firefox until now: Firefox 57, Quantum. Reading the "marketing" text about more speed, less memory usage and a more beautiful browser, I was skeptical. After a quick download off their archive servers, I was very pleasantly surprised.

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Finally I switched solely to Signal Private Messenger today. Signal has an Android and iPhone app and even a Desktop version (for Linux, Mac and Windows) and they work well. They also feature voice and video chat, so basically I'm not missing any features. It is also Open Source and even Bits Of Freedom is positive about it.

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My girlfriends phone broke this week and I gave her my spare (old) Samsung Galaxy S4, which I had replaced due to glitches (like not seeing the SIM card regularly). But it worked most of the time and a simple reboot would fix the issue. At the end of the next day she told me that her mobile internet was not working and I was surprised. I did not modify anything, so the Telfort configuration must have come from the network. On their website you are able to find the correct settings, but you have to follow a terribly inefficient, phone specific wizard and are guided step-by-step (e.g. user friendly) to correctly configure the settings. The settings basically boil down to:

APN: internet
MCC: 204
MNC: 12
Accesspoint type: default,supl

Then I simply saved and enabled this and all was well again.

For those who are interested, a proxy server (with port) was configured and encryption was enabled.