On this day, twelve years ago, Mr. Evan Prodromou published his first post on Identi.ca. Although that project now belongs to history, Fediverse lives on and by year 2020 it has become an incredibly creative, colorful and cozy place, with the potential to attract even more good people.
Let’s talk about the fediverse.
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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 –
Omar Khayyam
How oft hereafter will she wax and wane;
How oft hereafter rising look for us
Through this same Garden – and for one in vain!
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.
Continue readingI 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.
Most of the times when I talk about privacy, people think I’m talking about the reasons of being anonymous. However, what I talk about is the right of being anonymous. There’s a difference between being anonymous and having the right of it.
Let me give you an example real quick. The difference between between being anonymous completely and having the right of being anonymous is talking about free speech and having the right to speak freely.
Continue readingWhenever a person asks me for a Riseup invitation, I ask them a simple question: “why?” If their answer is “privacy”, I’ll tell them that their privacy practices are more important than the service they use. It doesn’t mean that it’s good to use Gmail, it means that if they don’t meet the basic requirements of respect for their privacy, safe tools will not help them.
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It’s needless to say that Big Tech are tracking everything you do. They know what you like, what you dislike, what you need in life, where you come from, where are you going, and many other details. They probably know about you more than you yourself. One of the biggest parts of GMAFIA, is the G, Google.
Google is one of the biggest parts of our lifes. People are depending on Google more than anything. They use Google Search to find stuff, GMail for their email service, they use Googlized Android OS, Google Maps for navigation, Google Drive for cloud storage, and other privacy-violating stuff. This is wrong.
Continue readingIt’s not a long time that I’ve been using Nextcloud. Before that, I had to host everything locally on encrypted drives. Google Drive (and apps) were available all the time but I didn’t want to use them because not swimming at all is much better than swimming in pool full of shit.
The situation remained the same until I found out about Nextcloud. Nextcloud is a complete solution for people like me who are careful about the software they use and how their privacy is affected.
Continue readingAlmost all of our Android phones come with a modified Android OS that uses Google services. As you (probably) know, Google is not much of a privacy-respecting company to trust. I personally suggest deGoogled operating systems such as /e/ or LineageOS but if you can’t replace your Android phone OS with such operating systems, you can at least start using free software apps on your phone and get rid of Google.
F-Droid is a community-maintained software repository for Android, similar to the Google Play store. The main repository, hosted by the project, contains only free libre software apps. Applications can be browsed and installed from the F-Droid website or client app without the need to register for an account.
I believe the best app store for free software Android apps is F-Droid. You can download its APK file from their site. F-Droid supports many languages so if you want your app store in your language, you probably won’t have any problems.
You also don’t need to worry if the app you want isn’t on F-Droid. You can always find a free libre alternative app. For example, instead of GMail, you can use K-9 Mail (website – F-Droid) which are compatible with OpenKeychain (website – F-Droid) for encrypting your messages. Even if you don’t want K-9 Mail, you can have many other libre alternatives. There’s a libre software app for every need.
There’s even clients for Facebook Messenger if you still don’t want to leave it. i really suggest you to start using privacy-focused services but if you don’t want to, you still have libre clients to use with F-Droid.
I’ve been watching Solar Opposites series and the second episode (season 1) mentions privacy in funny ways. You should watch it.