Column : Why I still run my own servers.
Apr 04IT is changing, dramatically so. With the advent of total ubiquity on smartphones and tablets among the general population, the rise of the connected fridge and the smart scale that loves to tweet how fat you are .. the “classic computer paradigm” is slowly changing. Our devices are becoming dumber and dumber and both our data and our services are slowly but surely evaporating into the cloud.
And still I insist on running some of those servers and services myself. “Why ? “ you ask with raised eyebrows as you randomly upload a selfie to an unknown service from an unknown company. As the file travels towards its mistic location where it will be stored forever, it sheds unwanted complication like “your intellectual property” and any notion of privacy. It’s a cloud service … so it should always work for free, always .. So why run your own server ?
Because its FUN.
For one : Tinkering with computers and running your own servers and services is FUN. It stems from the day that computers were built to tinker with and where a combination of a piece of software, a network connection, a spare computer and 3 pots of dark coffee would get you your very first self-hosted webserver. Tinkering around with software and systems and making that very first “connection” to your very own server .. is just plain FUN.
The chance to learn and understand WHY things work.
The beauty about setting up and running your own servers is that you get a very enlightening insight into how and why things work. It is something you probably never think about when you “check in’ as mayor of the porta-potty around the corder where you work. What data is envolved, how does it get there, who keeps track of it, how does it show up on my mobile device .. what magic oomph loom pa’s need to hold hands and sing koomba-yah in order for all of it to work. You can rest assured that the wonders of trail and error when setting up your own service will teach you a great many deal about why things work. (By showing you over and over how things DON”T work.)
The notion of control.
Every single time Facebook changes its UI, the internet moans under the weight of millions voicing their complaints on how they want “The old Facebook” back. What many people continue to forget is that, when it comes to “free cloud services” .. you aren’t their client , you are their product. They make money by bouncing adds of your screen or selling your personal information and interactions to some very very clever marketeers. If the “free cloud service” is no longer profitable they can either start to charge you money or go out of business altogether. When they decide its time to bring in a feature that would make Bonzi Buddy* appear as your best friend (* check your internet cultural history you noobies) , you have ZERO control.
The right to privacy.
Privacy is a buzzword these days so lets not pretend that the files you store on dropbox contain the secret plans for an orbital death ray satellite. I’m not worried about government snoops sniffing my files, as long as they have due cause to do so. I’m more worried about these so-called ‘free services” selling my data (and my content) to whoever they want to. It might be in their “EULA’s”, but nobody reads those anyway.
So I love to run my self hosted version of Dropbox using the Bittorrent protocol. Its fun to set up, there are no data limits, nobody is snooping my files (that I know of) and I am in total and complete control of what is going on.
Ok , I have to admit, if the tech goes POOP .. it goes POOP and I am the one to fix it. There is not tech support , there is no hotline to call ( Well , there is , but since you will be calling yourself you will get a busy tone) It does mean that you might have to spend many an hour repairing an unforeseen issue. But think of it this way .. every sigh of frustration is a pebble on the road of knowledge (mostly knowledge on how NOT to do things).
Thus I embrace the possibility of running my own servers; not because i HAVE to.. but because I still can.
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Column : Privacy is a statement.
Feb 07“Privacy is dead” It’s one of those boilerplate expressions you hear whenever there is a discussion about the NSA sniffing bits along some transatlantic cable, or a scandal about a flash light application that shares all your contacts with a Chinese scammer. Perhaps people are right. Keeping your data to yourself is becoming harder and harder to do. Marketeers, Governments, applications, devices, .. they all seem to be out to track and trace our every move and share whatever we do with the world.
Google knows all about my emails, Facebook knows everything about my life. My Cellphone is playing little snitch to some Canadian marketing agency in their plan to help push targeted advertising my way. Why should I bother with privacy ?
“Why should we bother” Well : you can ask yourself that question. The only way to remain untraced these days is to crawl into a cave in the centre of the woods and never come out.
But when I look at most people around me … they seem to be doing the opposite. Not only don’t they have a problem with their privacy being invaded .. they seem to rationalize the very invasion of their privacy into something trivial.
“ They can watch me , I have nothing to hide” .
If that were to be true .. why bother wearing clothes to work in the morning. Let’s rip off the curtains in the bedroom so everybody can see your “lateral aerobics” on Sunday afternoon.
Lets take away all the doors of the restrooms so we can poop and talk face to face at the same time .. You said you don’t have anything to hide .. right ?
You see, that is where the “nothing to hide’ statement” breaks down. Our personal privacy makes us who we are. Whether you are pooping out the longest turd in history OR shooting heroine up your arm .. you will close the door of the toilet stall nevertheless.
You don’t have intimate conversations with your wife from opposite sides of the football-pitch… You don’t scratch your lady parts in front of your boss when they are itchy ?
How about shouting out what you make a year to your co-workers ? No ? See .. you DO have things to hide. Personal things. And that personal privacy defines you as a person, as an individual .. and not a member of a mindless herd.
‘I’m not doing anything wrong’ is another slippery slope. Because “Right” or “Wrong” are relative to whatever situation you are in. Take the family that googled “Fertiliser” and “pressure cooker” on a Sunday afternoon. They had a swat team break down their door and arrest them on suspicion of trying to blow stuff up. Did they do anything wrong ?
Try doing a paper on Fundamentalism, cancel your life insurance and book a one way plane ticket to the US. You will end up with a lot of questions to answer at best OR a cavity search before you leave the airport. Why ? You’re not doing anything wrong. But the lubed up glove of the border patrol officer sure makes you wonder if something might be ‘up’.
“What can they do with that info anyway” You would be amazed how you can puzzle the most trivial of data together into one giant revealing blob of information about your interests, your habits, your life. And if you are lucky , the picture they paint will be correct. What they DO with that picture is completely out of your hands .. But suppose they get it WRONG ? What if taking that information out of perspective, or crunching the data wrong will depict you as somebody chronically addicted to gambling. What if your future boss thinks you are an unreliable alcoholic because he saw those 5 public pictures of you at this embarrassing party. If the information they collect gets misrepresented, distorted or manipulated it can mean a whole lot of trouble. And the more information that’s out there , the higher the odds of that happening.
“I don’t care if they are watching”. Maybe you don’t. But that depends on WHO is watching ? You might not have a problem having your internet traffic logged by the government who want to “keep you safe”. But what about that dingy kid in the corner of the internet café who is sniffing the local wifi network for dirty pics and juicy urls ? What about that stalky sys-administrator at work who is going through your logs to find out what flowers you like. ( It’s Valentines day soon , creeps need to get laid too) Are you sure you want to be this “open” with them ? Are you sure you don’t want to keep some stuff away from nosy snoopers ?
So take care of your privacy. Don’t fall into the trap of thinking that it is JUST the government that is trying to watch you. For every NSA agent looking at your personal data … there are 10 marketeers trying to analyse your habits and e 20 more script kiddies, hackers, key loggers and mallware bots trying to get their hands on your information. You might want to disclose everything to the authorities .. But that doesn’t mean you have to do it to everybody else.
So lets make privacy a statement. I protect my information, my communications and my data NOT because I’m doing anything wrong .. but because I’m NOT doing anything wrong. I’m exercising my basic right of being my own private free individual. I’m not a felon, not a convict. My bedroom does not get searched every two weeks by guards . I’m not in jail. I am free , free to choose NOT to disclose my personal information to ANYONE who queries it.
So protect your right to your privacy as a basic right of being a free individual. Wear your encryption skills like a medal of your techno-skills. Be smart and challenge every request for your personal data. Go tell Runkeeper to sod off when it wants to see all your friend info on Facebook. Ditch applications/websites that needlessly want to log or track you. Share what YOU want to share. Your personal privacy is not only a basic part of your personal freedom .. its a statement : The statement that YOU are FREE.
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Column : I’m not a Gamer, I’m just retro.
Jan 31I’m not a gamer. There, I said it. Contrary to the beliefs of many that geeks tend to spend hours and hours online playing all kinds of cool games .. I form the exception to that very rule. Whenever you watch episodes of the Big Bang Theory or some other big media production that tries to depict “What a geek is” to the average digital mouth breather, it always encompasses images of Computers, Terminal windows and hours of Console gaming. I am horribly bad at the latter.
I am just not a “Console” Gamer. My gaming career (can you call it that ?) did start on “Console Gaming”. That is, if you can call the Atari 2600, its 8bit graphics and its indestructible controllers a “console”. Compared to todays Xbox 360 consoles that try to do everything but wash your dishes, the Atari was horribly yet brilliantly simple. Plop in casette, play game. We never had to worry about remembering our “live-id”, logging in, an internet connection, checking if our TV screen was DRM compatible for HDMI output and so forth. The only thing you DID have to remember was to finish up in time for your dad to watch the news. (Because you played this baby on the family tv, remember ?) The controller was horribly simple : A stick to move, buttons to fire/jump… that was it. If I ever thought this console would have prepared me for gaming in the 21st century .. I was dead wrong. I never stood a chance.
So after spending my digital adolescence on PC gaming using the powers of a noisy Cherry keyboard and a Logitech mouse, I stopped gaming for a couple of years. Getting a Mac meant that I had lots of new things to keep me occupied like producing music, video’s and podcasts. There weren’t a lot of games on the Mac in the beginning, and I never realy cared about that. But as for filling as it was to create a podcast, there was still this nagging sense of urgency that somewhere, somehow, I felt the need to let off some steam by blowing up a random zombie with a big gun.
So instead of installing games on my computer (I despised the hassle) , I decided to “just get a console” for my gaming needs. I was going to get BACK into GAMING.
I tried valiantly to throw myself back into the land of the modern gamer and got me an Xbox 360. The cultural shock could not have been any harsher then when I dipped my very first toes into a level of Halo. But before we get into the horrible embarrassing story of me being fragged by a six year old, lets back up to my initial encounter with the Xbox. When I got the unit out of its box and hooked it up to our TV, I somehow KNEW it was going to be a little more complex then my Atari 2600. It needed an internet connection : I expected that. It needed to run its updates : I expected that too (It IS a Microsoft product) It required me to set up an account : Ok, lets do that. But when I started asking me questions like : What kind of hair do you want to choose for my Avatar and “would you like to buy more accessories online” I was starting to feel a little out of my depth. Was this the state of gaming today ? No ” slide in the cartridge, flip switch, kill space invaders ” but a tedious process of digital bureaucracy and pointless avatar-pimping ? Come on !
I waded through the process, only to be appalled by the fact that I needed to pay EXTRA to play my game online. A game that I had already purchased. Baffled by the paywall between me and what seems to be a very “basic” need to ‘play with others’, I chose to go for “single player mode” first.
Halo. I had seen kids play this and was amazed at how good the game looked, how versatile it was, how detailed and entertaining it looked.. This was going to be fun right ? Wrong ! It turned out that the modern day gaming industry had slid yet another insolvable Rubics cube between me and my game : The controller. Forget the simplicity of the Classic Atari controller. This thing had more buttons then I had fingers. It had knobs, dials, buttons, switches whose purpose was completely lost on me. What WAS this ?
Add a giant Tv, a high speed game with tons of bad guys, sounds, flashing lights and a 300 button controller … and I was lost. I spent most of my time in Halo as organic paste on the wall before I switched to call of duty. Here, I was even worse. In the heat of the fight I forgot what button was up or down (or fire) and ended up giving the bad guy my rations. (He did not appreciate the gesture). I thought a racing game would be better but ended up plowing fields with my very expensive Ferrari in Need for Speed. I just wasn’t any good at it.
The controller and all its buttons had me baffled. The fast pace and high details of the game overloading my sensory pallet. My lethal gaming skills were reduced to a puddle of goo in the land of modern console gaming : I sucked at it.. Big time.
So after spraining a muscle while playing ‘The Michael Jackson experience’ ( I thought the Kinect controller would be ‘a big help’ in all this) I decided to sell my Xbox. Its now on the Belgian version of Craigslist. Not because its not awesome (because it is) not because its too hard (its not) but because the generational gap between me and the modern day console gamers is too big for me to breach.
I’m a classic gamer. Meet me in the online world of Counter Strike, of Quake 3, of Wolfenstein or some other first person shooter .. and I am lethal. Armed with a clunky keyboard and a sensitive mouse, I will seek you out and I will be the soul progenitor of your continues respawns. I’m not old .. I’m just Retro.
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Column : “In the realm of the techno troglodytes”
Jul 29
If there is a place in the universe farthest away from the pinnacle of socio-technological evolution, then it must be the town I live in. As proud as it may be to hold the title ‘Belgiums oldest city’, its inhabitants tend to hold on to ancient times (technologically) instead of rolling around on Segways, while steering their quad-copters form their cellphones. I would not dare to go as far as to call this a digital ‘backwater’ town … but instead let the anecdote speak for itself.
This week marked a dark chapter in this towns history as the last DVD rental ‘entertainment store’ went out of business. This behemoth of ancient times has finally fallen under the crushing weight of pay-per-view services offered by Belgium’s 2 major ISP’s. Perhaps bit-torrent also had something to do with it but … in this town that impact must have been pretty moderate. As we walked by the empty storefront I watched in amazement as a car pulled up and out hopped a 30 something soccer-mom, cradling a collection of dvd’s in her hands. She walked up to the store (That was now completely and utterly empty) and started rattling the door. She looked around in confusion and peered through the windows trying to see any kind of movement. Since I’m horrible at observing people unnoticed, the caught me staring at her. “Its Closed !” she pointed out. Before I aptly wanted to congratulate her at pointing out the painfully obvious she stuck out her precious DVD collection. “I have to return these !” she said helplessly, (as if I was going to be her knight in shining armor ). “Well, you are in luck, I said” The store closed up this weekend, so you can get to keep those dvd’s. What I expected to get was a response like “Damn ! Lucky me then .. too bad about the store”, followed by an unlikely but possible Obama Style fist bump from a curvy mom of three .. but that didn’t happen. Instead there was this look of utter desperation as she babbled “Then where am I gonna rent my dvd’s ?”. Now this is a valid question you might pose to any Noob or lamen .. but asking ME where to ‘Rent DVD’s’ is like asking a professor in theoretical quantum particle theory how you can “milk your own cow”. Was she kidding ? My suggestions of “Renting stuff online” ( I didn’t even get started on ‘downloading’) did not give her any solace either. And the fact that one of the DVD’s she had in her hands was a copy of the FIRST ‘Bridget Jones diary’ made me realize this person was not very culturaly savvy either. The kind of person who still thinks ’50 shades’ is to be considered hardcore porn. Fact of the matter is : This person was a techno troglodyte. Somebody for whome the fast moving pace of our digital age is something that does not quite come up on their radar. I saw her grabbing her phone (A cheap flip phone) and contacting the troglodyte main cave to report in that their oracle of visual entertainment had just gone dark. The non-productive conversation with the mouth-breathing consort did not bring any solutions either so .. for a split second I saw her think about “just leaving the dvd’s at the door”. Then a splinter of common sense (or social awkwardness) resulted in her tossing the dvd’s back in the car, shrugging at me .. and driving back to the land where people still buy books on paper, record shows on VHS, buy a full cd because they like one single track, read porn from magazines and rent DVD’s in store.
Oh bless you digital troglodytes, for whom the painfully persistent pace of progress still seems to be nothing more then a slow trod. For you are the last hope of the record shops, the TV-repair men, the stores that sell you a mega expensive cover for your smartphone because you don’t know about this thing called ebay. I tip my hat to you as you actually believe the stuff about your mobile phone plan the guy in the store is trying to tell you. I cringe as you click the banner on some random webpage that says your computer is infected and you need to fix it NOW. I bid you a safe journey as you go shopping for your new computer in a place that also sells washing machines. And yes, I sometimes even want to pummel your face with a blueberry muffin as you ask me if I can “Make phone calls” with my iPad, you still are adorable. Adorable .. techno troglodytes… So as I twist and turn in bed, thoughts of the NSA sniffing the internet keeping me awake. As I ponder the question what will happen to the internet if the DNS servers ever go down due to a massive DOS attack. As I spend hours comparing specs about the new intel CPU’s for my next gadget … I wonder about the simple life in your cave .. perhaps old school isn’t that bad after all. DO you have Wifi over there ? Probably not yet.
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kw601 : Storytime “Norms”
Apr 28We kick off season 6 of the Knightwise.com podcast with a classic episode of “Storytime” where we take you down a good old fashioned rant about the “Average Hick” of the cyberspace community : “The Norms” If they are not buying the latest gear for no reason, they might be out trolling your Facebook feed. These 2 short stories will probably sound very familiar for any advanced geek. Add some cool music to the mix and welcome to season six of the Knightwise.com podcast.
Shownotes.
- Intro
- Music : Nordlight
- Pictures of the bookstore in Maastricht
- Story : Not the latest thing.
- Music : Carbon based Lifeforms
- Story : Welcome to wherever you are.
- Outtro.
