Pi-hole

Pi-hole is a network wide adblocker service for Linux systems. It works as a DNS blackhole, that is, it blocks resolving DNS queries for certain addresses. So, it is able to block ads by refusing to resolve the address from which an ad must be loaded! Contrary to what the name might suggest, Pi-hole can run on almost any Linux box on almost any platform, not just a Raspberry-Pi computer. More information about Pi-hole can be found at their official website.

Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them

Last summer, I decided to thrust upon my parents’ house the greatness of being a smart home. I gifted them a tasmota enabled bulb I bought from Athom, and an old laptop to act as a home server. The idea was simple : start with just a single smart device at home, and see if I can expand into the complete experience without my folks complaining too much. As a bonus, we realised the solar inverter installed at home also provides telemetry, which I promptly integrated into the smart home setup.

Welcome

Welcome to my blog, in its third iteration!

This time, everything is nice and static. We use Hugo in the background.

With time, I will port over old posts with the right timestamps, and media. I also intend to eventually incorporate some social features like Likes and Comments. As for subscribe, we are RSS ready, and will probably not do email subscriptions anymore.

Why hugo, you ask? Have a look at the time it takes for hugo to generate nearly a hundred HTML pages:

Passwhat?

Passwords are a thing of the past. Passphrases are are the new thing. But what are passphrases?

A passphrase is a long password, typically 15 or more letters, which are just many words which make sense to you, in an arrangement which is memorable to you. There is no need to concoct short strings of gibberish, which are easy to forget, and may not even be that difficult for a computer to crack!

This post is inspired by WhatsApp’s updated Terms of Service on 4th Jaunary 2020

tl;dr

Facebook acquired WhatsApp in 2014 claiming that the acquisition is out of ambitions leading to the the improvement of the whole web, and promising that WhatsApp will continue to function independently of Facebook and will never share user data with Facebook. (A lie). In 2017, Acton quit Facebook citing disputes over privacy and monetization of WhatsApp. He went on to create Signal, a direct competitor to WhatsApp. (Red flag). In 2018, Koum announced his exit from Facebook over disputes over Facebook’s attempts to weaken the encryption employed by WhatsApp. (Red flag). Facebook is now operating WhatsApp in a direction completely divorced from the principles WhatsApp was founded on, simply exploiting the mindshare people have for the brand WhatsApp.