Author Archives: Ali Reza Hayati

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About Ali Reza Hayati

Entrepreneur, engineer, hacker, cypherpunk.

Coronavirus (COVID-19) and privacy (part 3)

I’ve been informed that there’s many apps in various app stores to track people during coronavirus pandemic. Right now (May 24), there’s more than 5.3 million cases of coronavirus and near 350 thousand people are dead.

I believe many of them were also tracked, not only by these apps, but by Google and Apple too. Apple and Google are helping governments to track people‘s location status. This tracking technology release is an obvious violation of privacy.

People are convinced that these technologies and tracking is helping them but disadvantages of it is far more than its benefits. While people can be informed of the dangers in various ways that are not violation of privacy, these corporations are collecting personal information, obviously not to help people but for their own benefits.

People should be able to be safe without their basic rights being violated. Privacy is one these basic rights. Nobody should be forced to destroy its privacy. No matter what are the reasons.

Stop filtering domain names for email messages

One of my problems with services that require invitation or entering your email address in any way is that some of these services filter acceptable domain names. Some of them only accept emails from Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo (plus AOL) and that’s a problem for people like me who don’t use these email services for privacy reasons.

I opened an email account on ProtonMail but some of those services didn’t even accept ProtonMail, one of the most famous secure email services. Service providers should stop filtering domain names and email providers.

Free Software, Free Society

Make free software special again

“Necessity is the mother of invention” is probably the best way to start a business. If your product is new to people, you need to make a sense of need for it. I believe in that sentence, however, I believe when we say need, we shouldn’t only think about the need for product.

People have different needs. For example, many people like to be famous, many people like to be rich, many people want political power, etc.

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Myths about VPNs

A lot of VPN services advertise their service talking about things that are not true. Or, at least, has been given more importance than it should be. For a lot of people, VPN is useless and they only buy it because they have been targeted with false advertisement.

Here’s why you shouldn’t, or probably should, buy a VPN.

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Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.

Karl Marx

Please provide RSS feeds

I, personally, don’t read blogs that don’t provide RSS feeds. I think RSS is not still out of date and well, it’s still the best standard for subscribing to blogs.

RSS feeds make following a blog much easier. You just subscribe to a feed and it’s done. You open your favorite RSS reader and read your favorite blogs.

Please add a RSS feed to your blog. One of the reasons that social networks are popular now is that they provide a way of subscribing to people or topics. You can make your blog popular by providing such ability and that ability is for sure RSS.

I personally use Nextcloud News as my RSS reader but there’s a lot of popular and great tools. Mozilla Thunderbird, for example, is one of the bests I think.

Omar Khayyam

Omar Khayyam’s commemoration day

In Iranian Jalali calendar, today, Ordibehesht 28, is Omar Khayyam’s commemoration day. Omar Khayyam was a Persian mathematician, astronomer, philosopher, and poet.

Khayyam was born in Nishabur, in northeastern Iran in May 18, 1048. As a mathematician, he is most notable for his work on the classification and solution of cubic equations, where he provided geometric solutions by the intersection of conics. Khayyam also contributed to the understanding of the parallel axiom. As an astronomer, he designed the Jalali calendar, a solar calendar with a very precise 33-year intercalation cycle.

Khayyam is one of the best known Persian poets in world where a lot of English readers are also attracted to his poems. His poetry became widely known to the English-reading world in a translation by Edward FitzGerald, which enjoyed great success in the Orientalism of the fin de siècle.

Yon rising Moon that looks for us again –
How oft hereafter will she wax and wane;
How oft hereafter rising look for us
Through this same Garden – and for one in vain!

Omar Khayyam
Sample PDF pages

Free software alternatives for PDF

Humans tried their best to get rid of papers. We can do almost anything we did with papers, with our computers.

It’s uncommon for me to buy a printed book now. Since I started forcing myself to only buy digital books, I happen to read more digital books.

Having digital books is much better. Not only you can carry it everywhere with yourself, you can also help the nature. Nearly 4 billion trees worldwide are cut down each year for paper, representing about 35 percent of all harvested trees.

One of the best ways to read books, or any other type of document you read, is to have PDFs of them. PDFs are so useful now. PDF books, PDF articles, PDF statements, PDF presentations, etc. are now a big part of our lives.

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Domain change notice

I changed my main domain to alirezahayati.com. Previous domain now redirects to the new one. If you gave a link to this site or saved a note, please fix the URL change.