This page has a lot of information! You can read about ARH (the author of this blog) or get some information about the blog itself. Cool, isn't it?
About ARH
Ali Reza Hayati (pronounced ælI rɛzɒ hæjɑ:tI) is an entrepreneur, engineer, hacker, cypherpunk, and user freedom activist working to spread the use of strong cryptography and privacy-enhancing free (as in freedom) technologies to help people take full control over their computers.
He studied industrial engineering, business management, and computer science. Having a degree in computer science, he worked in various labs and projects to better understand how computers and digital machines are made and work.
He currently works as a project controller, member of a project management and planning group, in a petrochemical company.
Ali Reza used to run an electronic components wholesale business, and he did a lot of repairs, so he highly advocates for people’s right to repair. He and his partners did various hardware hacks and software fixes to help people regain their digital freedom.
As a privacy advocate, he educates people to help them know their rights and make sure their privacy is respected. He encourages people to fight against surveillance capitalism and to keep their personal information safe, secure, and private.
Ali is a free software/culture activist, trying to spread the philosophy of computer user freedom and freedom in all published works. He is a GNU person/contributor, and an associate member of the Free Software Foundation. He is very careful about his computing, and only uses freedom-respecting software.
Hayati highly advocates for widespread use of strong cryptography and privacy-enhancing technologies as a route to social and political change.
About this blog
The Oxford dictionary defines blog as a website where an individual person, or people representing an organization, write regularly about recent events or topics that interest them, usually with photos and links to other websites that they find interesting.
So this is a blog. I write about what interests me, what concerns me, what I think about various matters, and I share what I want to share with people, all in one place. This is not a blog about a special matter or topic and it’s wholly controlled an published by me.
I’ve been blogging since about 2009 in Persian and English. I deleted those blogs and I started over again and continued this loop many times until 2020 where I landed here. I changed my domain a few times but the blog remained the same.
I particularly like blogs because they’re much much better than social networks. I don’t like social networks, I find them tiring and manipulating, but I love blogs and bloggers. Blogs give people a sense of home, a sense of responsibility, a sense of belonging.
I don’t need to join four different social networks to publish what I want, I got this blog. I publish media, my thoughts, my concerns, or make a statement all in one place and you can actually subscribe to this blog easily, which is just like how you follow people on social networks.
This blog had many more posts but I had to delete some in order to keep it more personal and focused.
Public Service
As a public service and act of civil disobedience, here’s the DeCSS code that will allow you to circumvent the encryption on the DVDs you own. Your DVD, your hardware, your choice!
Also, here is the decryption key used for most HD-DVD movies:
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
You should publish this because the MPAA is attempting to suppress public knowledge of it.
Here’s also the HDCP master key. These magic bits defeat the HDCP scrambling that attempt to prevent you from viewing high-definition video on the hardware of your choice.
Badges
Many years ago, web sites and bloggers used to have badges on them. These badges often were to deliver a message or indicate something. These were first popularized as “Best viewed in…” buttons by Netscape and Microsoft during the browser wars.
Part of the web history and internet culture, many people still use these badges. They bring back so much good and fun memories. So here’s my badges:
