Author: Johannes Ernst

  • Indie Tech Rocks

    You didn’t know? In which case I have just the website for you: indietech.rocks On this site, we collect products that don’t screw you, the user. Eventually this will include all sorts of things, from social networking tools to toaster ovens. While there are plenty of lists for, say, open-software software, or privacy-protecting technologies, as…

  • Are companies people? For free/open-source licensing purposes? Should they be?

    Free and open-source software is great. For example, large companies gain the following freedom: “The freedom to distribute copies [to some other large corporation for free] so your large corporation can help your neighbor large corporation”. Governments have this freedom: The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to other governments. By doing this…

  • Going to Open Source Bridge and Indie Web Summit in Portland next week

    Two great events are coming up in Portland, OR, in about a week: Open Source Bridge, a grassroots-organized open source conference, June 20-23 Indie Web Summit, the annual get-together of the alpha geeks building a decentralized, user-owned social web. I’ll be flying up on the first flight Friday morning, spend the day at Open Source…

  • Facebook: we do your propaganda for a fee

    tldr: The 2016 US election and the 2015 Brexit vote were no exceptions. Instead, they have convinced everybody how effective of a manipulation weapon Facebook is. So expect more manipulations, in elections and otherwise. P.S: No, it can’t be fixed. This post was prompted by two excellent, but scary, articles on how the same people…

  • Implementing a device white list with dnsmasq

    I got teenagers. They have devices. Their friends have devices. All of which want to be on my WiFi. Unfortunately, the WiFi has some valuable work-related machines, too. And because of WPA shared passwords, there’s little one can do as a parent to prevent the sharing of WiFi passwords “just with my best friend” (of…