Author Archives: Ali Reza Hayati

About Ali Reza Hayati

Hacker, cypherpunk, and user freedom activist.

The effect of condition

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Entrepreneurship is like one of those carnival games where you throw darts or something.

Middle class kids can afford one throw. Most miss. A few hit the target and get a small prize. A very few hit the center bullseye and get a bigger prize. Rags to riches! The American Dream lives on.

Rich kids can afford many throws. If they want to, they can try over and over and over again until they hit something and feel good about themselves. Some keep going until they hit the center bullseye, then they give speeches or write blog posts about “meritocracy” and the salutary effects of hard work.

Poor kids aren’t visiting the carnival. They’re the ones working it.

The above is a comment on a Hacker News post. An screenshot of this lives on my computer and I think about it once in a while.

Internet has been down for the past week here and many people were suffering in various ways. Even many email services were hard to access. We use VPNs to connect to different online services and every VPN works on specific ISPs so we have to change VPNs based on what operator or ISP we’re using.

I, for example, have promised people that I do certain work and failed to hold my promise. This of course just one example. I know a lot of people who missed their deadlines and their reputation was hurt, and they have suffered financially and in many other ways.

Now imagine a young person in his twenties trying to start a business providing products. Born in a poor family and living in a country with no free Internet, no free flow of information, and certain limitations on accessibility of resources which are imposed by government.

This person was born into this. He had no saying in the situation he was born into. He didn’t choose his country or family or even the time of his birth. However, the conditions he was born in has serious effects on his life.

He probably has to commit a lifelong effort to just stay alive. He probably will never meet his goals and will never even be able to dream about success the way a Swiss boy or a French girl dreams or thinks.

Success is not purely the result of hard work. It’s based on many things and one very important one of them is the condition people are born in and have to live with. The reality of life is that nothing is guaranteed because of your motivation, hard work, genius, or skills, and your condition and your situation in life is one of the most impacting aspects.

Captain, it’s Wednesday

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I’ve been watching West Wing for past weeks and I just finished it. It was amazing. It’s one of those shows for me that I feel I’m actually living among the characters. One of those shows that if I see the character on the street, I won’t recall them by their real name but by their character name.

For example, Chandler (from friends) is not Matthew Perry for me. I know his real name but he’s always Chandler for me. Same goes for Sheldon (Jim Parsons), Mike Ross (Patrick J. Adams), and Will McAvoy (Jeff Daniels). They’re always their characters for me. I know it may sound bad or rude but it’s just like that. RIP John Spencer is Leo, Martin Sheen is Jed, Bradley Whitford is Josh, Rob Lowe is Sam, Allison Janney is C.J., but, but, Dule Hill is Alex Williams from Suits.

Speaking of other shows, I first watched The Newsroom, and then went to watch West Wing. American political drama started for me with The Newsroom. I loved what Aaron Sorkin did on that show and I got interested to watch West Wing too.

I don’t have a lot of time in the day. Between working and studying, there’s not much time left to do anything beside eating and getting some rest. That’s why I usually binge-watch series. I download them on my phone and computer and watch them before I go to sleep. I wake up early so I have to manage how many episodes I watch so I can get few hours of rest.

It’s been tiring these past few months. Heavy pressure and complications in my life made time run very slower than usual. I think all people experience this. It doesn’t need you to be a scientist to be sure that time is relative. Sometimes I think to myself, was Einstein going through a personal difficulty when he came up with the theory of relative time?

From Iran Protests to economic disaster we’re experiencing right now, everything seems to be falling to hell. IRR was already the least valuable currency in the world but it’s even getting worse right now. Seems that politicians are not tired of messing with people. Sometimes I wish I was living in the West Wing virtual world with Jed Bartlet as my president. He seemed to really care about people.

I’m not the strapping young Muslim socialist I used to be (Obama said it). I got softened. I now more align with Bernie rather than Obama. I used to align with Norman Thomas and before that, Abbie Hoffman. I was wondering if the system does this to people. Making them tired and turning them to what itself likes. Creating drama after drama, difficulties and complex problems, out-of-touch disasters in life, etc. etc. to make you tired of even trying to change anything.

Here’s my conspiracy theory. There’s a group of people, 100 of them, that decide about disasters in third-world countries to protect ones in advanced ones. 100 for disasters, 100 to control the economy, 100 for war and peace stuff, and 100 for advertising these matters correctly for themselves. I might just throw another 100 just in case there’s a need for another group. So 500 people, hard-working people, that control the world. They ought to be very hard-working. It’s no easy job to make world the shit it is like today, pardon my French.

It’s been 20 years since I first thought to myself when this hell will end and we feel peace and prosperity. Even with relative time it should have been passed already. It’s taking too long to end. Even with the feeling that everything is going fast in world, it’s taking too long. I’m getting tired and I’m young, relatively. I know people who’ve been tired for 60 years now.

I feel like the captain in book of “The Crab with the Golden Claws.” Captain asked TinTin “what a week, huh?” and Tin Tin replies with somehow a shock: “Captain, it’s Wednesday”. I can feel the disappointment in the captain.

I’m NOT changing my license!

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I was reading Zen Habits and it made me thinking about changing my blog’s license to public domain and I was going to do it. But I thought about it and I thought about it hard and I realized then I might change the license of any code or program I wrote to public domain as well, and it felt wrong.

I’m a free software person. I care about software freedom and that’s why I advocate for GNU GPL family of licenses. GNU GPL license makes sure that you have freedom to do anything with your copy but you have to keep it free. If I truly advocate for freedom, I think I wouldn’t want my piece of software to become proprietary. And I thought the same argument goes for other forms of published work.

I want people to be able to do whatever they want with my published works, and I sometimes don’t even care if they give me credit, but the difference my Creative Commons license makes is that it requires people to keep the work under the same license. They can do whatever they want, even profit from it financially, but they don’t have the right to limit other people from freedoms they were given to.

The GNU GPL family of licenses do the same. If you publish your code or program under the GPL, the users will be entitled to the four essential freedoms but they won’t be able to make the software proprietary. If you license your work under BSDs or Expat, you’ll give the user right to prevent other people from benefiting of the same rights you gave the user.

I care about freedom. Free culture is as important to me as free software but also as much as I advocate for copyleft in software, I advocate for it in other forms of publications. I believe the right to freedom in any matter should not be put in hands of someone else thus someone should not be able to restrict other people from the freedoms they are are benefiting from.

If I was given the freedom to walk in a beach, I shouldn’t be able to build walls and restrict others from enjoying the beach. I was given the freedom to speak, then I shouldn’t be able to restrict other people from speaking. That’s how copyleft works. You’re enjoying your freedoms thus you can’t limit others. You can share what you have if you want only if you spread the freedom you were given.

The purpose of AI

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About a year ago when we talked about artificial intelligence and machine learning, what we meant was a machine getting used to some routines or somehow understanding an algorithm and order of matters happening so it can respond in a certain way. That may sound complicated but in comparison to what we are experience right now, it’s quite simple.

What we have right now is marvelous and very much advanced. Of course it will improve day to day and maybe another year from now what we currently have may seem even stupid but we got to compare it to what we had before to see how much progress we made.

However, the real purpose of AI and the path we’re going is not exactly what I believe we had in mind when we first started working on it. We built artificial intelligence to make our lives easier so we can be able to focus on what truly matters to us as human race. I believe when we started the machines and when we first started to replace part of the labor and work with automatons what we had in mind was to finally replace humans with machines not in what we enjoyed doing but in what we believed is exploiting our essence.

Today, with all the improved codes and computers running AI, we are forgetting what we had in mind when we first started. We are now experimenting with artificial intelligence that writes essays and articles for us. We are experimenting to hand over what we were pleased to do to a robot. Writing an article had a purpose of sharing ideas and teaching people of a point of view. Now we are training robots to prove points for us, like if we’re in a war.

We are not all internet trolls who are fighting and trying to win an argument at all costs. We are people of reason and intellectual who have good will and intentions in our souls and bodies, so we don’t need a robot to write an article on our behalf and prove, in any way, that our point is valid. What is the point of that article if it prevents us from thinking?

We are now experimenting robots and so-called intelligence that is creating art for us. Art used to be an escape for us humans. It was a form of creation that made us feel needed, made us feel empowered, it gives us a way to invent a new reality for ourselves in which everything’s placed according our will and ideas. And the satisfaction was not from the result or what others would see, it was from the work we put in it and every detail that we thought about and cared deeply with passion to create a thing with our bare hands.

Now there’s a robot that will learn from what others have created and you just tell it to create a portrait of unicorn with purple scary eyes and it will give it to you in few seconds. Where is the fun? Where is the satisfaction? Who is the real artist here? Is it you? Is it the robot? Is it the creator of the robot? Or is it the actual creators of portraits that the machine learnt from them?

Machines supposed to write our emails and clean our houses and run our factories and bring us food so we can focus on art and philosophy and everything else we enjoyed. We are going to the wrong end on the wrong road. We weren’t supposed to create machines that mass produce art so we can focus on labor, it was quite opposite.

I believe it is wrong and it should be prohibited. We all have seen movies like Matrix that machines finally enslave the human race and forced us to do the labor but what we’re doing now is to do it voluntarily. We were frightened that machines some day can think for themselves and purge us all or force us to give up on what we truly loved and now we are happily training them to do what we love and replace us where we love to be and force us to where we always hated.

This article could be produced with an AI. I just needed to write a question that “how modern AI will act like Matrix and replace us from creators of art and put us to labor instead?” and it would most probably write the same arguments. It’s nice because then I could argue that even the machines know it but happily machines don’t think.

They don’t think so they should not be put in a position to decide for an important matter. Happily, we’re not there yet but we have started to put them in an important place to think instead of us and replace us in where I consider one of the most important aspects of humanity which is art.

Instead of developing intelligence to create art, we should use this intelligence to better our farming and food producing and solve human crises like hunger, education reform, environmental issues, and freedom-related matters.

I believe that is the true purpose of AI and that is what we need to do.

Aim for freedom tech

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While people are still publishing their end-of-the-year lists and new year resolutions, and while people are still debating about whether social networks should provide a safe space or a complete free speech environment, many people around the world are struggling to connect to internet.

The situation in Iran is terrible right now. Internet is heavily censored and people are facing shutdowns on a daily basis. Almost all popular messengers, including WhatsApp, Telegram, and Signal are blocked and there are reports of instances of federated messengers, such as XMPP and Matrix, being blocked as well.

Almost all popular social networks such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and many instances of Mastodon are blocked and people can’t use them freely. Even if they can use them, their posts may be used as evidence of criminal activity, labeled as “action against national security” or “combat against God” or even “insulting the supreme leader.”

The free VPNs and anti-censorship tools are blocked as well, ironically. No popular VPN is working as intended and people rely on paid domestic VPN providers which on many cases are very dangerous. They either give away users’ data to authorities or are designed as spyware. This leaves people vulnerable to a lot of harm simply for trying to connect to free internet and get free flow of information.

The goal of every developer focused (or even not focused) on human rights should be providing and developing tech that can help people access free internet and information. Anti-censorship tools and new tech that can send and receive data.

One example of this effort is the awesome project of Toosheh. They are a satellite filecasting technology deployed in Iran and the Middle East that use common satellite equipment to deliver digital content without relying on access to the Internet. I have no idea how many people receive information and needed stuff from this project but this is a very useful and helping project.

In recent days, I’ve heard WhatsApp is deploying a feature that lets people connect to the messenger using proxies. This probably is the same effort done by Telegram and Signal. Many people in Iran are using MTProto proxies to be able to connect to Telegram and communicate with each other. Telegram is the second (if not first) most used messenger in Iran. Similar proxy feature was added to Signal but I doubt that many people use it. WhatsApp providing proxies will be very much appreciated by the public as many people rely on WhatsApp to communicate with each other.

As much as I advocate for free (libre) technology and software, in this situation, connecting people is far more important to not only me but everybody who is concerned with the situation we are facing in the country.

If you’re a software/hardware person or a techie, you surely can help developing tools to help people not only in Iran, but every other place or people needing tools to access basic available daily stuff such as a social network or a communication tool or even reading an article and getting information. You can contact your friends discussing the needs and required tools to get started. The simplest act can be running Snowflake extensions and help people connecting to free internet using Tor.

As I said, this is not just a matter of Iran. There are many reports of internet shutdowns or heavy censorship in India, China, countries of Middle East, Cuba, Venezuela, Brazil, and many others. So, please, if you can do something about it, many people will appreciate your efforts.

Don’t think positive!

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Sometimes I just want to punch people in the face when they ask me to think positive. Stay positive they say. What a brilliant idea.

I’m not angry though. I just chose to use those words to express how stupid it is to tell people stay positive and how frustrated I get when I hear that.

Yet sometimes you should be angry. Sometimes you need to compel people to be afraid of you and your potential. It’s not good to always be positive.

It’s like someone holding your head under the water and they guy next to you tells you think positive. I’m pretty sure even the one holding your head will punch that person.

I guess sometimes it’s because they don’t understand the difference between being positive and being hopeful. In worst situations you don’t need to be positive, you need to be hopeful. It’s hope that will move you forward, not positivity.

You can be fearful yet filled with hope. Fear is normal. It’s a defense mechanism for us to so our best to get the results we need, in stressful and less-likely-to-win conditions. We should learn to use it properly for better of ourselves.

Being positive is for idiots. It makes us weak while those who are not positive, are doubtful and handle their fears and anger, do much better and actually accomplish something.

I’m not a positive person. It doesn’t mean that I’m unpleasant to be around or I’m not likable or evil, it just means I just don’t give up trying. I don’t bow down to the situation I am in and I don’t accept the idiocy that everything is going to be better just by staying positive.

I actually work to reach what I want. I do what I need to do and for that I get what I want. I learned to manage my fears, turn my anger to energy and force, control my stress and turn it to focus and strength, and finally handle them the best I can to reach my destination.

I don’t want to be positive. I want to be accomplished.

You are worthy

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Watching Marvel Cinematic Universe movies, I know all those saviors needed one thing to become a hero and that was being worthy of helping people and selflessness. What made those people recognized as heroes is that they put aside their differences and accepted their weaknesses yet became whole as a team, became strong, and defeated most impossible enemies.

I love Marvel movies because they make me feel hopeful. They teach us something that maybe other movies can’t even mention and that’s how a simplest act can make an impact complex and big enough to save the entire world.

Most of the times I hear people worrying about not being enough to do something or not being worthy of acting in defense of people, I just remember how some normal human beings with just one or two special talents could save the world in our favorite movies.

It’s true that those are just movies but the lesson we learn from those movies are real. I believe millions of people fighting against a common enemy are far more stronger than a team of 10 people with robots or magic.

These fighters for freedom are worthy. Worthy of lifting Thor’s hammer, worthy of becoming an Avenger, and worthy of becoming the leaders of war for freedom.

I remember someone telling me a wonderful story about our true value: a while back someone gave a watch to me. He handed me a wristwatch. I opened the box and it was a beautiful watch. It wasn’t super fancy but it was attractive. I brought it to home and put it in my desk drawer.

Couple of months later I opened the drawer to take something out and I saw the watch sitting there. I looked at it again and I thought it costs a few hundred bucks but for some reason I did a web search for its price and when I did I nearly passed out. The exact watch came out, it was worth over 10 thousand dollars.

It was from a very famous prestigious watchmaker. I’ve seen a lot of other watches that cost several hundred dollars but because of the manufacturer this watch was extremely valuable. You could put it side by side of other watches and you wouldn’t see much difference. Looked average, ordinary, copied. On the surface it looked the same.

But what gave it its value was who made it. Sometimes we don’t realize who we are because we see other people just like us. We may look average, ordinary, like nothing stands out but there’s something about us that makes us extremely valuable.

We’re not a copy, or a knockoff, we are original. We can’t get any more prestigious than what we are now. Nothing is more valuable than what we are.

Never think of yourself as worthless or incapable. You are capable of holding an entire chain together and doing the impossible. Simplest act from you can affect the whole system, the whole universe, and result in doing the absolute impossible.

You are not a single person, you are what the chain needs to remain intact. You, alone, can’t do anything but you are what the chain needs to remain intact. You may be the first part of the chain or the last one, either way, you are doing greatest work you can.

Never think of yourself as worthless or not valued. Never think that you are alone or you can’t do anything because you feel lonely in your situation. Think about how you inspire others or how you can start something amazing enough to change everything.

How does Fediverse work?

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As Elon Musk took over Twitter, people are migrating to alternative social networks. One of them being Mastodon, it is a decentralized social network based on a protocol named ActivityPub. This protocol is what Fediverse is built upon.

But we don’t want to talk about the technical stuff behind the Fediverse. What we want to talk about is simply how Fediverse and/or Mastodon work. Mastodon is just a part of Fediverse, not all of it. Fediverse is a word built by mixing the two words of federation and universe.

The Fediverse is a network of connected different social platforms making it possible for users to communicate with each other. For example, they can follow each other or send posts to each other or simply share whatever they want without being forced to sign up on a single centralized social network, or a web site, app, whatsoever.

Mastodon, Pleroma, GNU Social, and Pixelfed are some of these different social networks all connected to each other using the protocol they are built upon. Each of those social networks have many instances or servers. So they are federated with each other and each of those federations are also federated to other federations.

If it’s too complicated for you, imagine earth. We have multiple countries, all having relationships with each other, and within every country, there are many cities which are also connected with each other. Now every city also can connect to another city whether it’s inside the country or outside.

Continue reading →

The need for decentralized domain name system is much felt

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It’s been a while since I have started thinking, or worrying, about my email security. And since few days ago my PGP key was compromised, I’ve been changing my passwords and emails on sites I’ve been on and I’ve been wondering if my email is secure and stable enough.

The thing about current email system is it’s easy to take control of it. Many email providers are resided inside the United States or where US government has jurisdiction over. Even if they don’t reside where US government has power, they probably use a domain name which is controlled by American companies.

We know that if the domain name ends in .com or .net, or many other TLDs, it’s seizable by the US government. It means my website can be seized by US government easily. They don’t even have to communicate with my domain provider, they can simply talk to Verisign (the technical company controlling.com domains) and seize the domain. Same goes for my email provider, Riseup, which has a .net domain.

The stability of the domain names is another problem. Imagine all maintainers, or at least those who control the domain name, get arrested over request for data of a user, and they remain in jail for enough time for the domain to get expired. Why would happen then? You can imagine.

I used to use my own domain for my email address. The thing that worried me, and made me change it, was that there’s a chance that I get arrested over my political activism and my domain will be left with no renewal and I eventually will lose it. Or my domain can be seized by cops and they can redirect my mails.

My domain is my identity online. If anything happens to it, I can lose my identity. Whatever I publish on my site is believed to be from me. What I say or publish is exactly like me myself standing somewhere in the city and shouting them to listening people. What happens if a oppressive regime takes control of my domain or site? They can say anything to anyone and pretend it’s me saying them.

People who read me supposedly trust me. One who takes over my domain can misuse their trust in my name.

It wasn’t a long ago since US government seized some Iranian-owned domains accusing them of spreading misinformation. This power over web, which is basically impossible to be on without having a domain, is dangerous.

A decentralized domain system, something like what we have with Tor Onion domain services is much needed. An onion address is generated by the site owner using Tor network. It is also only available on the Tor network, nowhere else. So you should configure your system to run Tor or use Tor Browser.

At the time, Riseup’s Tor address is “vww6ybal4bd7szmgncyruucpgfkqahzddi37ktceo3ah7ngmcopnpyyd.onion”. See how it’s different from the normal riseup.net we use? The domain extension of it is “.onion”, which is different from normal “.com” or “.net”, etc. It is automatically generated by the Tor Onion service running on the server Riseup is operating.

The benefit of onion addresses is that it’s truly decentralized and no entity, not even those behind the Tor software and services, control it. It’s directly from the operators of the specific web site you’re visiting and since you can only visit the web site while you’re running Tor browser or are configured to run Tor network on your system, all data sent and received from that web site is encrypted and anonymous. Using it correctly will make you completely anonymous and tracker-free, the way the web should be.

Also, the decentralized domain system by Tor gives people opportunity to have chance of free speech online, what we’re missing for a long time. It is made possible by special privacy practices done by Tor developers, making it possible to have privacy and security online.

However, it will cost you to run a Tor network and not all server and hosting providers will let you run a Tor network on your space. Many will shut you down if they find out about it and others who don’t are very cautious about what can happen to them (who can blame them?), often easily giving your personal data to authorities when requested (or not?),

I admire the work done by Tor. I think they’ve planted a seed and developed what is the foundation of what we need as a decentralized domain name system. However, it is not enough. A decentralized domain name system should be accessible for everybody. We need something like what we currently have with normal TLDs, but decentralized.

People should be able to simply run their own domain without worrying about any inconsistencies. Without worrying about a provider banning their account for saying what the provider wasn’t pleased to hear. People should be able to have their own domain, and a safe space on web, without worrying about a government being able to seize it.

I don’t know how it can be developed or even what aspects it may have. I’m not sure about technical details of it, and I don’t know how it can affect the web we have today. All I know is that it’s so necessary for the sake of all of us.

Everybody is a genius

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Everybody is a genius in their own way but it’s the injustices imposed on people that make it look different.

Let’s create an imaginary jungle. We have a lot of different animals in the jungle. We have monkeys, we have tigers, elephants, lions, fishes, penguins, etc.

All those animals have unique abilities and all of them are genius in their own way. The problem is that we want to enforce equality in a wrong way. If we measure the genius of animals but asking for one exam, say climbing a tree, then we’re giving advantage to monkeys and imposing injustice on fishes.

The fish can’t breathe in the air. The tiger may be able to climb a tree but not as good as the monkey. The elephants are dumbest in this measure because they can breathe in the air but can’t even jump.

This injustice makes them unequal.

I believe the only way we can have equality is to treat everybody with justice. All animals are equal in the way we treat them and that is with justice. If we measure how genius is a fish by its ability to swim, and measure how genius is a monkey by its ability to climb a tree, and measure tigers by their ability to run, then we can have a jungle of genius animals with everyone in their designated role and responsibility.

Our societies are very much like jungles. We measure everybody with the same test and we get the same results for it every time. People have their differences and these differences doesn’t make them dumb or incapable, but makes them unique and special in various matters. The situation people grow in has a lot of impact on them and the way they behave is very much affected from it.

When we constantly do a wrong test on wrong people, they will live a life believing they’re stupid. We know people have different set of skills and we know they behave differently in a same situation. Yet, instead of taking advantage of their skills to get the best complex of results, we try to force them behave and react as we desire. This will fail.

A lot of genius people have been wasted. Many artists are victim of not having a chance to glow and dying without ever finding out their true potential. Many athletes were placed in wrong positions and were eventually ruined. Many engineers failed to do what they truly capable of because of wrong tests and measurements imposed on them in schools or colleges.

Diversity is beautiful. It’s empowering. It gives societies ability to benefit from different and unique set of skills different people have. However, you can’t benefit from these skills and abilities if you try to make everyone and everything look the same. It ruins everything and turns into a disaster.

Iran is a beautiful example of diversity working well. We have Fars people, Turks, Lurs, Kurds, and Arabs living together with no problem. Every one of those people have unique culture, unique physique, unique set of moral values, and unique environment which makes them capable of accomplishing unique tasks. The result of integrating those people had made an amazing society of which everyone is benefited and satisfied.

People benefit from what they can’t have themselves on their own and are satisfied by tasks accomplished by ones who have capabilities. It’s because we expected and understood what those unique cultures and people have and integrated them into a working society. We don’t change them, we don’t colonize them, we don’t divide them, we integrate them into our diverse and capable society. It has been working for more than 3,000 years and it’s still working.

Today, there are protests in the country started by death of a Kurd girl, Mahsa Amini, who was reportedly killed by morality police. Fars people, Lurs, Turks, Arabs, Baluchs, and everybody else are protesting among their Kurd brothers and sisters in solidarity. They see themselves as one nation, one people, and one society not with differences, but with unique characteristics.