Creating your own custom CA
As the constant security warnings displayed by my browser when accessing my local infrastructure annoyed me already for a long time I decided to look into the task of creating my own custom CA (“certificate authority”). There is not a lot of “local infrastructure” to be honest, basically my router and NAS drive. Anyway, I tend to access those via https and thus generating a warning by my browser telling me this site has no valid certificate. Of course, devices like this run with self-signed certificates, unknown to any browser.
Read more...
Keyoxide
Recently this post about Keyoxide came up in my Mastodon timeline and of course made me curious. Turns out Keyoxide is a little like Keybase: based on GPG you can claim an identitiy and have to add a prove then. At first it might be a little confusing because in Keyoxide you cannot just sign up for profile but in fact it’s pretty straight forward and simple - I really like this approach!
Read more...
Snowflake
Countries which heavily censor internet access usually have a non-democratic and oppressive government - and thus very likely no free press (s. currently Iran or Russia for example). Sometimes the only way to receive or post information about what is actually happening in those countries is by circumventing the censorship by using VPNs or tools like “Snowflake”.
Read more...
UnifiedPush and ntfy
Running an Android phone without Google’s proprietary Play Services - which drain your phone’s battery like mad - comes with the downside of not being able to receive push notifications. As I’m running CalyxOS with microG enabled basically all apps from Play Store (via Aurora Store) still will receive push notifications. However, if I have the choice I always opt for installing apps via F-Droid and those apps have all proprietary code removed and thus the dependency on Play Services.
Read more...
Installation of Prosody XMPP server
Choosing “the” right messenger is not an easy task as you (or at least I do) want to pick one with a good balance of usability on the one side and security/privacy on the other. And of course your friends and family need to agree on it as well - otherwise it’s a pretty lonesome experience… ;-)
Read more...