My first job in IT was at a small company, “A,” that researched telephone data for a very large company, “B.” You see, company “B” was a huge multinational conglomerate with offices all over the world. This meant they had several telephony providers that charged them not only for actual phone usage but also for the phone ports in the PBX.

That meant I spent days each week researching which phone ports were actually used by calling the phone numbers with little or no usage. It was boring and tedious, to say the least, but at least I got to listen to some awesome podcasts when podcasts first started becoming popular.

My backup laptop is a Teclast F5. It has an 11.6″ touchscreen display, a Celeron N4100 CPU, 8GB of RAM, and a soldered 128GB SSD (not NVMe). I’ve owned it since at least 2018, though it’s not my daily driver. For everyday use, I rely on a newer ASUS laptop with an i9 CPU, 32GB of RAM, and 2TB of disk space. However, despite the superior specs, I often face issues with video and other drivers, particularly on Linux, and occasionally even on Windows. In contrast, the Teclast F5 just works.

Torsocks acts as a network wrapper around linux applications. This allows them to work on the Tor network where that might not normally be possible. If the application that you are working with already has functionality that allows it to take advantage of a SOCKS5 proxy, then you can use Tor’s built in proxy to do that. However if the application doesn’t have that functionality, you can try to use Torsocks instead.

For those who may not know, email is not owned by any one company. There are no copyrights or patents associated with email itself. It’s an open standard that evolves over time through RFCs. While individuals and companies are free to develop software—whether open or closed source—using this standard, the core of email remains unchanged.

My Suggestion: Make Metadata-Minimized Email the New Standard Currently, email consists of headers and a body. Even if the body is encrypted, the headers are not. These headers contain a significant amount of data that can be harvested, even if the message content remains unknown. This makes email inherently less private than other forms of electronic communication, and it’s one of its greatest vulnerabilities.

This post originally came from a reply that I made to a question that was asked on the r/tor subreddit.

So, you want to run the tor service on in Linux but not just with the Tor Browser. Let’s assume that you’re running a Debian-based Linux distro.

sudo apt update && sudo apt install tor torsocks
sudo systemctl enable --now tor

This will install the tor service and run it as a server as the “tor” user. Any program that you run that can use a SOCKS5 proxy can take advantage of this service by connecting to localhost:9050.

Yesterday, I was watching some old episodes of The Computer Chronicles. I noticed that the earlier seasons had a lot more levity during the roundtable discussions, with a stronger focus on business and industry topics. This contrasts with the later seasons, which shifted almost entirely to personal computing.

My guess is that sometime in the late ’80s, the producers realized that viewers were more interested in what they could actually buy and use themselves, rather than what was happening in boardrooms and high-tech labs.

I also watched the special episode dedicated to Gary Kildall. It was exceptionally well done, and Gary came across as a genuinely awesome person. RIP Gary.

As one of my favorite philosophers like to say, let’s begin by defining our terms?

What is Seamonkey?

From Wikipedia:

SeaMonkey is a free and open-source Internet suite. It is the continuation of the former Mozilla Application Suite, based on the same source code,[6] which itself grew out of Netscape Communicator and formed the base of Netscape 6 and Netscape 7.

SeaMonkey was created in 2005 after the Mozilla Foundation decided to focus on the standalone projects Firefox and Thunderbird. The development of SeaMonkey is community-driven, in contrast to the Mozilla Application Suite, which until its last released version (1.7.13) was governed by the Mozilla Foundation. The new project-leading group is called the SeaMonkey Council

I decided to change this website yet again to a simple Hugo generated site for a few reasons.

1. It is more secure. There’s no login and password like with Wordpress that can be hacked. The only way into the site is with my SSH key.
2. It is simple. I hate cookies warnings and I hate it when web developers include cookies when they are not needed. Consider this to me by privacy statement. This website doesn’t have any cookies therefore there is nothing for me to use or sell.
3. I like the idea of being able to edit my site with a CLI text editor. I am writing this with Vim.

However, Hugo is a pain in the butt to work with at times. I would genuinely have more flexibity to make pages using plain html, but that would also be a to write and it would be ugly.