Assorted Nerdery

I saw recently that Paypal would start blocking VPN and SmartDNS services. Their rationale is that VPN services can be used for copyright infringement.

They are correct in that VPN services can be used for copyright infringement – they can be used to shield your IP address from others and to make it appear that your traffic is coming from some other location. However, this isn’t the only use of a VPN service. I use a VPN service to shield my traffic from being intercepted and modified by my local Internet providers.

Back in December, Ed Felten and the White House asked for public comment on the EFF’s pro-cryptography petition. This is the letter that I had sent. I urge you to file a comment.

Dr. Felten and President Obama,

I strongly urge you to support the unfettered deployment of strong encryption without compromise or backdoors.

The fact of the matter is that people have a right to be secure in their persons, papers and effects. The UN Declaration of Human Rights, to which the United States is a signatory specifies in Article 12 that “No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation.” In today’s world, strong encryption is a necessary component to prevent arbitrary interference with our privacy and communications – by both state and commercial actors.

I recently came into possession of a nice new Vizio Smart TV. It’s pretty nice - 1080p, Netflix, etc. As part of the process for connecting the television to the internet, they made you agree to a number of different license agreements and privacy policies. In a fit of UX mastery, they did not show the privacy and license agreements on the television, instead instructing you to type a long URL into your web browser and reading the policies there. Nevertheless, they insisted upon your agreement before connecting to the Internet.

In my previous post on this topic, I tried to detail the way that I fetch and send email using my laptop using a combination of mbsync and systemd. This has been working extremely well – it runs in the background and does the right thing when I am connected to the Internet. The only issue with this setup is that I’ll occasionally need to clear a lockfile out of the .msmtp-queue directory. This is quite rare, however.