Simple solutions

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I’ve experienced this a lot. Sometimes the most complicated problems we face in life, ones that mostly we created for ourselves, have the simplest solutions to fix. Sometimes we just don’t see it. Sometimes it’s so obvious we just can’t believe the problem we thought was so big, is just a small little inconvenience we can fix with littlest effort.

I was thinking about this huge problem I had in my digital life for some time and talking to a friend about it and it then hit me. Do this small effortless fix and everything will get back to normal. No need to bother myself or anyone else. This actually happened a lot and some of them were so trivial that I don’t even believe if the actual problem was that ridiculous.

Sometimes we just got to take a deep breath and just not to think about it.

Google hits privacy rights again

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I value my privacy and I do whatever I can to protect it. One of the tools I use to protect it is uBlock Origin. I haven’t noticed this until today, partly because I usually don’t follow news, and somehow I wasn’t shocked at all. Google is forcing users to stop using uBlock Origin and other privacy tools.

Apparently, Google is phasing out Manifest V2 in favor of Manifest v3 on its web browser, Chrome, and as a result, extensions using Manifest V2 stop working. Google is excusing this action by claiming the Manifest V3 enhances security and privacy of the users, which we know is false since Google’s tracking of users and violation of their privacy is what makes them money, and benefit is the only ting that drives them forward.

Chrome, and its parent project Chromium, are Google’s arms to impose its control and force on the web. They are what Google uses to force its “standards” on to web and control how users are able to browse it. Sadly, they have been successful so far, as Chrome (and Chromium-based browsers) are leading in usage share reports.

Extensions such as uBlock Origin are essential for people like me, who value their online privacy and are unable to tolerate the web today. I remember not having a tracker-blocker for an hour last year when I was setting up a new browser on a new computer I was going crazy.

Well, this doesn’t currently affect me as I never use Chromium-based browsers. Even ones such as Brave who advertise themselves as privacy-respecting are no good for me as I believe no matter how good they are, they eventually are empowering Google. I use Firefox-based browsers to, as little as my part is, fight back against monopoly-empowering web browsers.

You could switch to Firefox as well. It’s backed by nonprofit Mozilla Foundation and doesn’t miss a feature you’d get on other web browser. It’s also respectful to your freedom, published under a free (as in freedom) license.

I know Mozilla have not been acting so well recently but currently it’s the only choice we have Also, what we should do is not to boycott Mozilla, but forcing them to act in favor of the community, specially when it comes to choosing between what they offer and what Google has.

Web is already going to hell but it’s not too late. We still can take it back, and we should do whatever we can to take back control, for the sake of freedom, security, and privacy.

Privacy has never been more important

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As technology is advancing every day, specially today, in the age of so-called artificial intelligence, privacy becomes more and more important. Today, everything we do and everywhere we go is recorded somewhere. There’s a track of our daily life somewhere in the hands of someone who is not supposed to know about it.

Sadly, technology is aiding this more and more and governments and powerful organizations depend on it to put control on our actions. Whatever we do, whatever we say, whatever opinion we have, every single detail of our lives are recorded. But happily, we’re not totally powerless.

Our freedom depends on our privacy. Privacy safeguards our fundamental rights. The ability to express our thoughts and feeling is crucial for our freedom. As a Middle Easterner, I get to gain a deeper understanding of this. Middle East is a special place. It’s where tyrannical governments do whatever they can to take away people’s freedoms and the way they do it is by taking away people’s privacy. More and more surveillance everyday and putting every single person under constant watch makes governments powerful enough to take control of what people can and can’t do.

Jamal Khashoggi was brutally murdered in Saudi embassy in Turkey in 2018, simply because his journalism and activism wasn’t in favor of the Saudi government. Saudi isn’t losing anything over this. Nobody actually cares about this anymore. They actually got to host the World Cup in 2034. What it left as a precedent is that now more activist fear for their lives. If the government can assassinate a well-know journalist in its embassy in a foreign country, then they can make you disappear in a blink of an eye.

Privacy makes us bulletproof against these threats. I know it’s hard to disappear from the radar completely but there are steps to make it harder for the Big Brother. By using tools that enhance our privacy rights, we can effectively mitigate their attempts to impose surveillance on us.

I understand that it may be hard at our first steps but it worths the effort. We may not be able to pay cash for everything, or never carry our phones, or never give away any piece of personal information to someone, even if we try, mistakes will happen, but least is we gave it a try.

Ditching Gmail for a more privacy-focused alternatives, using web browsers and browser plugins that are designed to limit the data we share, using privacy-enhanced messengers and more importantly, encrypting whatever data we have is a start.

Doing so is not so hard. There are multiple good sources on the internet, and there are services and sites that guide people to start with taking their privacy more seriously. PrivacyGuides is one source I like.

We’re advancing. Every piece of technology we use today is somehow taking away our privacy and mining our personal information for the benefit of massive corporations and tyrannical spying governments. It’s so easy for them. Every piece of data we give these AI bots today are going to feed this surveillance machine, designed and launched to take away our freedom. There will be a day that none of us can speak freely because none of us will have enough privacy against regimes that rule us. This is of course preventable if we take serious steps towards more privacy.

We all have data we need to protect. It’s not about what kind of watch you wear, or what dog breed you think is the cutest, it’s about building a complete profile of you that will determine if you’re a threat to the ruling power. It’s not about what you post on Twitter today, it’s about what you’re going to shout in a protest against people who oppress you.

Let’s take a step forward and guarantee our freedom, and a safer place for our children.

More privacy and secrecy

Aside

I’ve recently been more concerned with my privacy, specially regarding my email addresses. It may be because of huge amount of spam I’ve been receiving recently but anyway I got a little more paranoid and became more concerned about this.

So I revoked my previous PGP key and created new ones for each email separately, which I would be sharing with people on demand. I also no longer answer emails with my private emails, keeping them each for a specified purpose for myself.

Now I have to handle multiple emails which may become somehow difficult but for now, I’m satisfied with my practice. I’ll try to limit my online presence even more and delete more unused accounts, as much as possible. I also should have a different approach on how I sign up everywhere so I also will use email aliasing services to prevent sites getting my actual email.

Oh, and opinions and ideas are always welcome.

Outside the Wall

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Simone’s post “Outside the Wall” is inspiring. I’ve done it some time ago and I still revisit my password manager from time to time to check if there’s anything left I can delete. I first started this when I decided to limit my presence on social networks and service sites.

We should start such trend. Let’s de-bloat our online/digital life and post about it on our indie personal blogs to inspire others. We don’t need all this online presence and we need to take back our control on our digital life and freedom.

Of course, if you really need to use one of the silo accounts, I understand but we are mostly becoming addicted and slaves to these giant services and networks. Let’s take back our rights, freedom, privacy, and life. We spend so much time maintaining our presence on these networks and it needs to stop.

Let’s do this.

Internet is making people impatient

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About a week ago, on my day off from work, I was in a car with a friend and we were stuck in traffic when something interesting happened.

When we hit the traffic, my friend instantly took out his phone and opened Instagram to watch some videos. It was interesting because we weren’t even fully stopped when he pulled out his phone from his pocket and he did that while still driving.

I was worried about our safety at that time but what concerned me more later was that is social media, specially short and random material like those on Instagram, making us impatient? I was interested in that and tried to watch my friends more carefully. Most of them had YouTube and Instagram installed on their phones and I realized how much people are addicted to these materials.

And I tried to further my semi-investigation by trying to show them a longer video, about 20 minutes long, and surprisingly they got impatient about 8 minutes in. They also have problem watching movies, I realized. Can’t put away their phones without constantly checking their notifications, messaging people, or even checking short videos. WHILE WATCHING THE MOVIE!

This semi-experiment made me concerned because I like to watch these random short videos sometimes. Of course I don’t have Instagram or any other social network on my devices so I think I’m less affected but it still made me worried.

So now I try to watch less of these videos, read more books and articles, and watch movies without checking my phone. I try to avoid opening YouTube links, avoid random short meaningless material, and even write more to take my mind off things.

It’s really worrying how toxic these social networks can be. Aside from the material we see on them, the impact they have on our brain is stressing.

Woke culture has gone too far

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Two days ago president Trump signed an executive order to ban trans people from competing in women’s sports. I’ve read that he mentioned Imane Khelif as an example of one who was assigned the male gender at birth competing in women’s sports, which is wrong and she was always a woman, but nevertheless this was a good order. (Edit: I stand corrected. I’ve read that new lab reports show Khalif is biologically male. I don’t know which report is correct, whether Imane Khalif is male or female, but if Khalif is male, competing in women’s sports is wrong and an injustice to women.)

I never liked Trump. I never liked his personality, I never liked how he talks, I never liked how he acts, and I believe he is corrupting everything he touches. I believe he is not suitable and qualified to run the president’s office but I gotta admit, he is hell of a man for doing what he’s doing.

Woke culture has gone too far and someone needs to stop it. As much as I hate Trump’s personality, he’s doing a good job on this matter. We need some order. No man should be able to compete in women’s sports. There shouldn’t be 100 genders to “choose” from. There’s a man and a woman and if this is how biology works, then this should be what we use to separate genders.

There shouldn’t be sexual material, in any way, in schools. No man with giant implanted breasts to teach underage kids, no drag queens telling stories and possibly confusing children. No life-changing choices for kids under 18 such as gender-affirming surgeries. If someone is not qualified to drive a car or drink alcohol, that person is not qualified to choose to cut his penis off or go through excessive hormone therapy which in many cases have irreversible effects.

I have no problem if someone wants to call himself a woman. I have no right to choose what a person does in his/her private and I have no interest in telling consenting adults to what to do with each other, but when it comes to public, and when it’s going to effect everyone’s lives, it’s not up to debate.

There can be 100 genders and I respect you if you choose any of them but if it’s sports, there’s only two sexes which have fundamental differences with each other. When it comes to public toilets, there’s only two sexes and each one only has right to enter one.

It’s not up to debate that only one sex can get pregnant. I shouldn’t be crucified if I call someone a man when that man was born with XY chromosomes, has male appearance, and was assigned the male sex at birth but he chose to be a woman after 30 years. I respect that man’s choice, I even will try to call him “She/Her” if he wants me to but that doesn’t change anything for me.

I’ve seen drag races in streets where some people are dressed as sexually revealing as possible and there are children watching. Children should be banned from these shows and their parents should be tried and punished for bringing them there.

Right-wingers are crazy as hell, I know, but the left is not helping. I understand how ridiculous is the Florida’s Don’t Say Gay law, but should we really make everything gay to fight it? Should we really put gay characters in every movie? I completely understand that they are a minority with a history of being excessively oppressed but I don’t think making everything gay everywhere is the solution to normalize them.

And I’m not a bigot. I don’t hate anyone and I respect everybody, but sometimes the ones on the opposite side make some good points and one of these good points is that the woke culture has gone too far. The cancel culture has gone too far. Not everyone is racist, not everyone is a bigot, not everyone is a sexual predator, not every feeling is valid, and we got to stop caring about everyone and start to put some sense in our lives.

I’m tired of respecting everyone’s feelings. I’m sorry if you’re hurt, I’m sorry if you’re angry, I’m sorry if you feel something I may never understand but you got to understand, I’m not the problem here. I didn’t invent you, I didn’t create your problems, and I certainly didn’t do some weird magic to make you queer, I respect whatever you are and I try to get better at interacting with you but if you have a penis, please get the hell out of my daughter’s bathroom and no matter how woke you are, no matter how much you assure me that you feel as a woman inside and your gender is different from your sex, man I can’t risk it.

If you’re not born as a woman, I think I have the right to know and choose if I still want to have a romantic relationship with you or not. It’s not that I think something is wrong with you, it’s just that I think I have the right to know what and who I’m dealing with.

The woke culture has gone too far. Too far that it made me accept and actually like one of Trump’s executive orders. I don’t know how many people agree with me, I don’t know how many people think the same, but I think there are a lot of them and Trump being re-elected into office just proves that.

I hate racial injustice, believe me, as a brown person who was regularly be called a sand-nigger on social networks I completely understand the pain but do we really need to bold the matter in every scene and episode of our movies?

I hate a sexist person. I hate a sexual predators, man or woman, but should we really believe every accusation against people? Should we cancel people based on people’s claims? And should I really be canceled because I listened to some music or watched a movie from someone who is believed to be a predator? I mean should we really disregard everything 100s of people did to make that movie only because one person did some evil stuff?

And why stop on these matters? How come woke culture cares about what Greta Thunberg says (I love her btw, since he roasted that Andrew Tate son of a bitch), but doesn’t care about thousands of sweat shops in East Asia that work for Tech Giants? How come nobody cares about Apple or Google’s evil policies regarding privacy, people’s rights and digital/non-digital freedoms, and many evil things they do regarding human decency?

How come nobody of these woke people care about how Nike or Adidas shoes they’re wearing are produced by children, literally children, in countries such as Vietnam, India, and China?

The way to win people over changes this. culture want is not what is currently happening. It’s but slowly and carefully explaining the reason behind what it’s trying to achieve to people and let them actually decide if they agree or not. Maybe there’s still chance to do good.

The past is gone

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You can return to the past, but the past is empty. Your old school is still operating, but your friends and classmates are no longer there. Your childhood home is still standing, but your family is gone, and when you walk down the alley, your neighbors and childhood playmates are no longer around.

The cafe you used to love still exists, but your favorite barista, who knew your order, has moved on. The streets remain the same, but the faces do not. The buildings are still the same, but the energy and feeling you once got from them have changed.

The past is a place, but the present is where life flows. It’s sad but you got to move on. I try to think about the past with a smile. I try to remember my memories and enjoy the good feeling I got in that second, instead of feeling down for not being able to enjoy that exact moment.