October Recap: 🐻 Small Hibernation
Slowing down to prepare for Winter
Hello friends of the Libre Solutions Network
Tough times are ahead for me in the upcoming months. In the short term, I must slow down for a time. I want to prepare to make next year as fantastic as I can. I appreciate your patience hope to reward it many times over!
Cyber Fix is on a hiatus, I would like to bring it back in a different format in the future
I’m emotionally and mentally exhausted from personal ordeals of this year, and need to recharge my drive and creativity.
In the short term, I’ll be working on:
My in-development RSS tool
A major rework of the Libre Solutions Network website
Catching up on important reading
New Posts 📰
Digital Freedom Policy Framework
One of the big challenges in tech politics these days is that government takes almost all its advice from special interest groups and Big Tech. I took the time to propose my own, people-first digital freedom agenda. In my opinion, most of what’s needed is an incentives and mindset shift on behalf of how large institutions carry out policy goals.
The radical part of this proposal is that it suggests that digital autonomy & technological freedom can be in harmony with security and prosperity, rather than at odds with them. By redirecting the focus to how people can mitigate threats in their own lives, everyone can be an active participant in a better digital future.
Covering the Internet Archive Outage
The disruption to the Internet Archive is a very serious concern. Not just for the archive itself, but also for its broader impact in the online information ecosystem. It’s a shame that even among those who do realize the importance of preserving critical information online, many will still take for granted that the Internet Archive is the beginning and the end of that. In my opinion, archiving is its own hard problem. Not very hard to accomplish for small one-off instances. However, the closer one hopes to preserve a large fraction of the web, the much more immense the task becomes.
And it looks like some aspects of the Internet Archive are still not accessible. While being “mostly back online” is itself a big achievement, it’s a good reminder that no single service is impervious to disruption. Even if one’s own archives aren’t going to be as universally trusted as the Internet Archive, it’s still worth ensuring you protect information you find important or valuable.
Developer Q&A: Mitra
For those on the cutting-edge of their cyber-rebellion, running your own Mitra instance is a great place to start. When it comes to protecting free speech online Silverpill and I agree on his point:
The biggest threat is centralization. It occurs on multiple levels, both technical and social, and every time there is a bottleneck, someone tries to use it to censor their opponents. What keeps it at bay are all those people who invest resources in building decentralized networks and circumvention tools, and those who make information about these tools accessible to the general public.
The Fediverse is one of the better tools we have today to truly level the playing field when it comes to online censorship. I greatly appreciate that Mitra is specifically designed to tackle the broader problems of censorship head-on. It’s very rare to find tools that give that level of thought to cyber resilience.
Items of Interest
Security
The Rise of Zero-Day Vulnerabilities: Why Traditional Security Solutions Fall Short
Take a Step Towards Privacy: Understanding Digital Footprints
SEC charges tech companies for downplaying SolarWinds breaches
The web
State & Corporate tyranny
EU’s Commission’s Anti-Encryption Plans On The Ropes (Again) After Rejection By The Dutch Gov’t
Google Will Track Your Location ‘Every 15 Minutes’—‘Even With GPS Disabled’
China Accuses U.S. of Fabricating Volt Typhoon to Hide Its Own Hacking Campaigns
Ad-Blocking Showdown: Google Forces Popular Ad-Blocker Off Chrome
Other things of note
Turn Your Android Phone into a Ham Radio with this Open-Source Project
Linus Torvalds Comments On The Russian Linux Maintainers Being Delisted
Entering Hibernation 🐻
Winter has always been an incredibly challenging time for me. For a variety of reasons, this upcoming Winter may end up being the most difficult yet. In an attempt to be proactive, I’m primarily focusing on my exercise and weight loss. It has been quite demoralizing to struggle to accomplish what I had hoped for this project while still being confined by limits and burdens. For the first time in almost a decade, I’ve begun to properly align myself to make real progress in reversing the damage that I’ve accumulated over time. It’s not easy. It’s is incredibly draining and raises many difficult emotions.
As I wrote before, I’m trying to figure out how to make this project work long-term, and I’m not sure how to make that happen. The original goal for this project was to raise my level of productivity, and it absolutely has done that. But now I’m at the point where it feels like I’m not really making progress. Which to me is its own loss, because I feel responsible for letting down the mission I had hoped to achieve. I don’t have fancy credentials, nor the benefit of a long fruitful career to draw from, and I’m realizing how huge a setback that is.
I don’t blame you at all, reader. I deeply appreciate anyone who has given this project their attention, feedback, and support. I’ve had many excellent conversations and learned a great deal. The truth is I naively over-estimated the opportunity in the particular niche I had hoped to contribute to. I’ve still only begun to learn how to better connect my understanding to what people care about. I’m still recognizing that my goals of figuring out the “long road” are far too abstract for many people to see the value. I very much feel like I vastly underestimated what I was taking on when I started this.
I would like to continue to work at this. Despite the lack of interest, I’m convinced the Libre Solutions Network is a component that can truly make a difference. In many ways, until I am more mobile, I am effectively confined to doing this. I would like to keep working to provide independent commentary, promotion, and research for better technological solutions. This is still the goal, but I need time to recuperate and recover creative and mental energy. As such, I’m hoping to refocus on completing my side project, which will be vital for my future work. The idea is to put the work in to be an example of what I mean. And there are similar projects I have in mind to demonstrate ways to improve other things.
There is so much more in taking all this on, but I fear there is little interest in it. While I can respect those retreating to analog practices, giving up the entire technological landscape seems to be a path to disaster. There are very few focused on independent commentary on tech, far fewer who wish to encourage people to play the long game.
This hibernation will end. My hope is that before the new year, I’ll have (mostly) completed the side project. In the best case scenario, I’ll be recharged to make a last push to make this project not only a success, but sustainable. I don’t see how I can continue beyond 2025 without more support, so I want to do everything I can to make it worthwhile to those who want to help make this kind of material available for others.
Ambitious Plans for 2025
As I wrote, this upcoming year is the make or break year for the Libre Solutions Network. I intend to give it my all.
Primarily, I want to rewrite and expand Reclaiming Territory in Cyberspace to be an all-encompassing walk-through “from transistors to apps”. The purpose of the new series is to walk through technical knowledge from the very fundamentals of computing all the way up to modern software & hardware. I believe this broader context is required knowledge for truly making an impact on our technical future.
The goal is for this series to be able to give anyone a great start in becoming not only a computer wizard, but an effective cyber rebel. I’m very motivated to ensure this is what I deliver before I may be forced to throw in the towel. My major point of contention with the broader “freedom movement” has always been a lack of seriousness when it comes to technological issues, and I believe this resource will be vital for making meaningful progress.
I've been thinking about you, Gabe, and sending wishes for your health and happiness your way. I hope things turn around for you.
I also had a small thought that there may be people like me who aren't technical enough to make use of your good advice on our own, nor rich enough to hire someone to implement something that will never bring income to us (that not being the intent). But if there was something modest, relatively 'off the shelf' for, say, $300 US, we'd like to inch our way towards being a cyber rebel ;-)
Is there any service that would be replicable that you could provide without intensive programming?
Good luck and care for yourself.