[SILENT - 1.6s]

when you have that one friend who hits you up

because they got doxxed out of a data breach

from a masturbation application.

First time.

Welcome to the fucking show.

Welcome to the fucking show.

I think all of our egos get put in check every time there's a data breach.

Alright, what are we drinking tonight?

Oh, this is what I was drinking the other night too.

I grabbed the same bottle, the Four Roses, this is actually the small batch, I was drinking

the single barrel the other night, I'm just going to go pour a glass of that, how's everyone

doing?

I'm waiting for you to answer, I know you're listening to the podcast, but let's just pretend

we're in the same room having a conversation.

That's what I like to think of this podcast, and all of the interactions, it's just one

big conversation.

You're not entitled to anything else

I got 10 years of this under my belt.

Your art is an art that I don't feel any more.

So how's it going, everyone?

This is Simon for the Clothes Network Privacy Podcast.

Today, recording January 30th, 2026.

And I'm glad you're here.

I don't know where else you'd be, but I'm glad you're here.

So this episode, is this episode 51?

This is 51.

You know, you'd think I'd have that figured out by now.

I've been doing a lot of infrastructure changes.

Well, yeah, I've been doing some infrastructure changes.

Not a lot, but some.

One of those is moving the podcast feed over to Yellow Ball FM,

which is ran by our good friend, Josh,

who runs the Side of Burritos website, YouTube channel,

does a lot of Graphene OS content.

And he started about a year and a half ago, I think.

Um...

a podcast hosting service that's privacy respecting and I'm one of those types of people that likes

to support other people's projects and what they're doing. So I moved my feeds over to

Yellow Ball and I had a small hiccup with the podcast episodes. I think it was like around,

I think I did the switch over somewhere around episode 46 or 7. And so I think in some feeds it

double posted. It seems to be working fine now, but if anyone noticed that in the last five or six

episodes, this is episode 51. So this would have been like four, yeah, I think around four or five

episodes ago. If you noticed two podcasts pop up in your feed, I apologize. There might have been a

little bit of a duplication of that one episode, but we should be all straightened out.

out and i really like it it uh it has some really cool features allows me to see some of my

distribution channels my analytics breakdown uh which i was also getting from anchor see when i

first started the podcast i was using anchor.fm which was its own hosting service and then they

got purchased by spotify not a big fan of that so i was happy to move to something that a was

privacy respecting and b was supporting someone that i know and help grow uh their business and

their their project uh this yellow ball so if you're actually in the podcasting space this is

not a commercial this is definitely not a uh sponsorship this is just me uh promoting a buddy

of mine's uh service and i i really like it and i pay for it so you know it's i'm a customer um

and definitely check out yellow ball uh yellow ball.fm uh so it has a cool feature in there

where i can actually just really easily embed podcast

episodes or uh an entire library of them so i'm working the reason i was talking about

infrastructure was because i'm i'm kind of looking at moving the website to something different right

now so if you go to closed network.io that's the main website kind of the hub for all of the links

and access to everything matrix chat rooms all that fun stuff patreon support and everything like

that if um yeah if you go there that's the main hub so i want to keep that as the main hub and

it's also links to our forum uh yes we have a forum that's actually where the show notes get posted

for every episode trying to streamline so i'm thinking about moving over to ghost cms um i know

there's some other ones and people will probably be like oh why don't you use this or that uh ghost

ghost is very fast i can self-host it it's open source and just just like wordpress i use wordpress

now but i kind of just don't like wordpress a whole lot it's very bloaty and to get a lot of the

functionality

i need a lot of plugins and those plugins oftentimes uh get out of date really fast and

it's just a lot of babysitting so just looking at changing things but i'm also open to ideas

or recommendations i want something that's not that much to manage uh really and i've been

thinking about also so i think about self-hosting it or just pay for the ghost service so it's just

with them i know that's not very sovereign of me to do that but um uh i don't know we'll see i i'm

evaluating some stuff i'm open to ideas you know shoot me an email shoot me shoot me an austro note

shoot me an x tweet do we still say tweet twitter x everyone still says twitter and i i do have a

twitter account so uh yeah episode 51 snoop on them as they snoop on us is the name of this episode and

actually i have an article that i didn't even put in here yet uh that i found oh no it isn't here it

isn't here so i'm going to talk uh about a few things uh on this episode one is some things i've

been learning

myself when it comes to off-grid decentralized decentralized communications so that would be

reticulum mesh tastic mesh tastic and mesh core i have not i've only had i've only had two drinks

tonight that's it the whole night so pardon my tongue tongue twisters uh so i'm going to talk

a little bit about that my experience what they are how you can get started with that if that's

something that you might be interested in i'm also going to talk about microsoft's flubbing again

uh of of setting bit locker encryption sending bit locker encryption keys what bit locker is why

encryption is important i'm going to touch on some of the stuff going on the uk with uh the online

safety act mandating preemptive scanning digital communications as well as single click um

uh mounted covert multi-stage attack against copilot which i thought was kind of amazing

um some shenanigans verizon's up to i'm also going to talk a little bit about washington house bill

2321 regarding 3d printers that's more united states focused as well

well as florida the state of florida implementing an app store accountability act which would

basically um deputize big tech big tech companies to verify user ideas and i kind of talk about age

verification and user id or uh identification age identification as well because this is

it seems to be coming no matter what and it seems that also potentially in the uk vpn bands

might be uh the next thing that comes down so before we get into it i just want to give a quick

shout out and thank you to uh people who financially support the podcast because we don't take any

sponsorships we don't do any advertising this is 100 value for value and oftentimes um you know you

listen to you know different youtube channels and podcasts and it's brought to you by this vpn or

some whatever service and i'm not uh into this and into doing this for making money from average

advertisers um i'll gladly accept money from listeners for those that want to contribute

and that does go pay for a lot of stuff there's there's cloud service stuff there's servers

there's hardware we run our own mastodon server uh there's you know there's different types of

things that we use the the funds for it's not a lot of funds but it it is um it does amount

and uh i i do appreciate it and i want to give a thank you to those people because we're getting

more and i'm i'm very very grateful i'm actually very humbled that people find value enough in what

i do to uh send me value back so i'm just taking a quick moment to thank those people so uh michael

bates uh david a new one inferno potato which is a hilarious name i love that tk um as well as vo

a fairly new one as well as uh inferno potato uh richard g uh mr milk mustache which is always

funny to say uh hutch uh triple b

came in on the buy me a coffee bought me like a lot of coffee sent me like 30 bucks this month

that was super awesome super kind and thank you very much and um that came with a comment asking

to yes keep talking about self-hosting and becoming our own data centers and all that

and i will get a little bit into some other stuff around that as well as lightning boosters uh bond

always always coming through bond is just uh always contributing through through podcasting

2.0 that would be bitcoin sent over the lightning network um at sn at x which is a new one firefly

go wartime wartime it's been around a long time donating an unknown and an anonymous donor so

thank you thank you very much and also uh to the people who helped me out a lot on behind the scenes

which be unintelligent 7 and mattis max uh helping me administer servers keep things updated

keep the riffraff out sometimes and keep people in check doesn't happen all the time sometimes we got

keep the riffraff out sometimes and keep the riffraff out sometimes and keep it up and keep it up and keep it up and keep it up and keep it up and keep it up and keep it up and keep it up and keep it up and keep it up and keep it up and keep it up and keep it up and keep it up and keep it up and keep it up and keep it up and keep it up and keep it up and keep it up and keep it up and keep it up and keep it up and keep it up and keep it up and keep it up and keep it up and keep it up and keep it up and keep it up and keep it up and keep it up and keep it up and keep it up and keep it up and keep it up and keep it up and keep it up and keep it up and keep it up and keep it up and keep it up and keep it up and keep it up and keep it up and keep it up and keep it up and keep it up and keep it up and keep it up and keep it up and keep it up

Thank you.

to kind of moderate things and make sure uh you know we're not getting too crazy in the chat rooms

so we do have a couple different chat rooms that you can join uh they're both hosted right now

through matrix so you can connect with a matrix client the links to the rooms are on the website

closednetwork.io and currently right now in the main troll room closed network podcast troll room

the chat room we have 421 people that's insane that's that's really cool and we've had just

really good conversations this week in there we also have an off topic channel which is where we

dump all the memes uh there's also a signal group chat and a simple x group chat they're smaller

they're kind of more uh more intimate if you will and we've had some great conversations there this

week as well so sometimes those chats can be a little slow or quiet just people living their

lives doing things or oftentimes around the globe different uh time zones whatnot but you know

there's there's just some really good uh sharing of knowledge the kind of knowledge

that I wouldn't put out on the podcast.

You know, like where to get legally downloaded books

and movies and TV shows and things of that nature.

So if those things are of interest to you

or are you looking to connect with other people

who, you know, just want to talk about

kind of their setup, you know,

whether it's their phone, their computers,

their network, different applications,

open source software they might be using,

free and open source mobile apps,

how to get those,

how do we configure things?

Well, that's where all the juice is in those chats.

So I definitely welcome you to join

if that's your cup of tea.

If you want access to the Signal group chat,

just shoot me an email,

simon at closednetwork.io

and I'll vet you, see if you're a fed or not.

And maybe you'll get the link, you know, maybe.

And then we also have, like I said,

that SimpleX group chat.

I'm not a big, huge long-term like proponent

of SimpleX.

Like we've...

started it maybe like a year or two ago maybe i guess it's hard to keep track of time everything

goes by so fast but i think it's probably been about a couple years so there's still some people

in there we're still active like i didn't kill the room or anything i just i took pause and pushing

for simple x to be my signal replacement with the crypto coin thing and the uh proposed changes

where if someone wanted to report some content within a in a group chat then then simple x could

deploy bots to the group chat and start scanning it it's just some weird stuff that doesn't seem

up my alley even though signal is centralized right um there's no no one getting into the chat room who

isn't invited with a group link unless someone adds them or there's a a link group link made

available like no one's getting in that room so say what you will about signal i know there's a lot

of signal haters out there um but i'm i'm you know it's still the

it's still the goat in my opinion i mean it is the goaded you know just like vpns

you know people ask me uh what vpns i use oh should i use proton vpn i mean you can i think

vp i think proton's probably okay but mulvat is goaded man like why are you messing around

they they they don't there's no email address tied to the account you just generate an account

number you can mail cash you can pay with monero which is what i do and bob's your uncle they've

been hit twice twice you can go look you can go go go go search it up they've been hit by the feds

twice i call them feds law enforcement twice to get the logs and there are no logs there are no logs

uh so do you you know do you trust third parties not really i don't trust them but i mean i you

know if i have i have to put them in a trust circle like the outer layer of outer barrier uh mulvad

signal those are kind of those are kind of my go-to's for a lot of this stuff

you

Yes. Do we use other tools? Sure. But these are kind of the popular questions that come up. What

do you guys use? And here's the other thing too. Signal's easy to onboard. And you don't have to

share your phone number with everybody. Did you know that? Yes. You will verify your phone number.

I have a couple signal accounts. One of them is for friends and family. I've got another one,

which is for here. I've got actually two others, which I run in profiles, separate profiles on my

Graphene OS, Android device. Those are tied to VoIP numbers that are not tied to me in any way,

shape or form. So, I mean, if you're worried about the phone number thing, just go fire up a VoIP

number. There's a, you know, j.mp. There's all sorts of services out there. If you want to join the

chat, we can tell you where, you know, some good recommendations, but you know, it's, it's signal

is not, you know, until, until, until I can host something myself, I know. And I know some people,

I know people are in the, who are in the chat room are screaming at me going, Simon, why?

want you to set up your own xmpp server absolutely 100 that that's that's og do that but for the

everyday person though signal chat is like whatsapp although whatsapp is it seems i don't know

there's a lot of shitty stuff going on with whatsapp right now do you see that the nso group

this isn't even in my show notes this is just off the top of my head but the nso group is actually

you know what let me let me pull it up but the nso group filing a lawsuit against what's against

whatsapp for data leakage let's see lawsuits nso group see if i can find it real quick let me just

yeah nso group was let's see no this is not the right one this just happened like recently let

me just let me just see if i can let me see if i can find this real quick and we just do this live

we just do this live let's see yes

you

This is a week ago.

A new lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in San Francisco alleges that Meta, the parent

owner or parent company of WhatsApp, has systematic access to users' private messages despite

claiming into an encryption.

The case brought by an international group of plaintiffs from Australia, Brazil, India,

Mexico, South Africa, argues that Meta stores, analyzes, and accesses virtually all WhatsApp

communications, contradicting its public assurance that only users can read their messages.

So I don't know the validity of this, and there definitely seems to be some different

contexts going around, but apparently there's a whistleblower back in September of 2025 that

detailed systematic security failures and raised concerns about WhatsApp.

And the thing is, it's not open source.

We have to trust it.

I mean, we can trust that they use the same protocol, same encryption protocol that Signal

does.

But, you know, there's a lot of things.

things that happen before and after encryption, you know, like for instance, um, and a lot of

newer iPhones and Android devices by default, they have all these AI tools running out of the

on by default. So if you, if you go out and buy an iPhone, like right now and you set it up and

you log in with an iCloud account or whether even if you don't, but I mean, by default,

Apple intelligence is running and it has like a little agent that's literally there's an,

there's a setting for Apple intelligence per app, every single app that's installed on the phone

and it's on. So, you know, and, and encrypted and encryption, the word encryption gets thrown around

a lot, but it's not always, doesn't always mean that it's protecting you. Maybe the, the, the

information when it's being sent in transit is encrypted, but unless like true end to end

encryption means that only the center and the receiver can read the information and have access

to it.

So, you know, if a device is scanning the messages on your phone, well, it kind of defeats the purpose of end-to-end encryption.

So it's really important to have these conversations with your friends that have Signal and WhatsApp and everyone thinks that they're secure and private.

You really may not be.

It really may just be, you know, that kind of placebo feeling, but you're not really sure if your conversations will remain that way.

And, you know, it's just something to keep in mind.

And so trusting non-open source apps, or at least apps that haven't really been, can be vetted and audited, these closed source applications to rely on that, just using the, you know, relying on the trust me bro privacy policy that Meta has from Zuckerberg, it's risky.

It's very risky.

So I was actually out to dip with.

uh some nerd friends of mine we call ourselves the nerd group and we were talking about

encryption and we're talking about applications and stuff and i was like you know like we could

just all use pgp and it's kind of a pain right but you could so technically you know you should

look into it uh if you're just bored and have some spare time then you could just look at you

know using pgp which is pretty good privacy uh encryption yourself meaning that you can encrypt

just about anything you want and send it to anyone you want as long as they have your public key

then they'll be able to decrypt the message so uh there's some there's some really cool tools out

there that make what's the one i used to use all the time um oh gosh the name just completely escaped

me um but hold on a second i'm gonna look it up now um best open source pgp app it's like a name

like cleopatra

i think is that it cleopatra does that ring a bell let me actually look that up cleopatra pgp

other that i'm just brain farting oh it is it is it is cleopatra okay it's a k-l-e-o-p-a-t-r-a

and you can download this is a free open source application you can send them donations if you

want um if you if you like using your software but uh basically you know you can download and

install this application you could generate a key pair and anyone that you give your public

key to can can you can and you have their public key you can send messages back and forth which

means you could write your message in cleopatra right encrypt it copy copy the the you know googly

gark googly gark googly gark googly gark the googly code and paste it to them on anything it could be

facebook messenger it could be s well i don't know if sms would work i mean i don't know how many

characters of character limit but i mean you could literally paste it into anything no one can read

it

and they can decrypt the message. Now, is that practical? No, not necessarily. And, you know,

but I'm just saying, if you want to be, if you want to do it yourself, it's good to learn these

things. Now, services like ProtonMail do this on your behalf. They'll actually check the Keybase

server to see if the person you're sending an email to has registered a public key. And it also,

too, it checks to see if it's a contact in your list you've emailed before. And then obviously,

if it's another Proton email user, then it encrypts it by default. So that's kind of cool.

And I, you know, but I like kind of like learning, like peeling the layers back and learning a little

bit more and trying to get a little bit deeper into the nuts and bolts of how things work.

So if you have the time and you have the desire, it's something cool to play with. And you learn

something new. You kind of see how these things work. Is it a little antiquated? Yeah. Is it,

you know, is it really hard? No, not necessarily. Is it as easy as you?

signal? No. And this is, this is why a lot of people use signal or, you know, alternative, uh,

session three, whatever. So anyways, um, I kind of want to get into a little bit about this

hardware stuff. And when I say hardware talking about radios, like actual FM little radio

transmitters that have basically really, uh, they run around, around the 900 megahertz frequency.

I think 915 is a mesh tastic, but these are open source applications. Uh, I've been currently

using mesh tastic for a while. I have a solar node up on my roof of my house. I have one that I keep

with me kind of like on my desk. And then I have another one that I take with me sometimes when I'm

out and about, uh, and my vehicle. And then I have another, uh, another one and I use these rock

glenn radios. And I also

have a uh what is it the haltech haltech gosh you know why does my brain just stop working in the

evening hours um uh the v3 i think it's uh again we're gonna do it we're gonna do it live yeah it's

the yes it is the haltech v3 and they just released the version 4 of the esp32 laura chip

and these are basically just like little computer boards you can buy these things for like 18 to 20

bucks and install software to it like you can install mesh tastic or you can install install

like the r node for reticulum or you can install mesh core now mesh core is pretty cool i like it

there's just not a lot of mesh core users in my area so um maybe that will expand if you're the

type of person that likes to kind of tinker with stuff um there's a lot of benefits to exploring

this topic and that is because it is a hundred

percent decentralized it's encrypted and it's like kind of i don't know it's just very primitive

it's very cool it's very fun and no one can turn it off so even if like even not to even just to

avoid like you know surveillance and all this other stuff just you know the weather knocks out

power or or uh internet if you live somewhere where you rely on like say wi-fi calling and

your internet goes down like your phone's down your internet's down you have no way to communicate

but if you had you know a couple of nodes set up you had one up on a hill and uh you know you'd be

able to kind of get messages out you'd be able to check weather wind speed you know you can get all

sorts of interesting information from different nodes around you and you know kind of works just

like a mesh so nodes will relay messages on mesh tastic they'll relay messages and those are called

hops and you can kind of have this really neat decentralized

mesh network where it's paired typically there's different types of ways you can you can communicate

some of them are all like keyboard and screen on device but most people myself included just buy

some of these little nodes and like i said they range from about i would say on the cheap end is

about 20 to 30 us on the high end around 100 to 200 if you want like all-in-one things and stuff

like that but it's you know you buy it once and it's yours you compare it to over bluetooth to your

phone and you can like text people through the app direct message you can hang out in the long long

and fast uh channel you know kind of like a group chat you can create your own chats and it's just

really neat and i kind of look at like learning this stuff is like a entry a lower entry into

understanding how radios work without having to go down the full-blown ham radio stuff which is

something i i plan to do my brother and i have talked about it over the years to get her

technician licenses to use ham radios i think there's a lot of value in that

but this is like something that anyone can do you can buy some for your family uh buy some radios

for your family and you could set up like a node up on your roof a high point that could maybe

relay and these things do work in like line of sight so typically probably within one to two

mile range three mile range uh some you know if you have a powerful enough antenna you can get

some really good distance off this but the key is the thing is it can bounce off other nodes to get

to you so it's not like you have to have direct line of sight to like say your house you just have

to have enough radios in between so yeah we've been kind of messing around with setting these things

up and we've talked to each other and and um i'm now kind of looking at different geographies on the

map and there's like coverage maps you can look at and see where we might hey do we know someone that

lives over there do you think that'd be cool if we threw a node up on the roof we could do

a node with a little solar panel

on it. You know, you usually can build these things for about 60 bucks, 70 bucks. If you do

it yourself, if you just want to buy one is just, just plug and play, you know, turn it on and set

it up and, and, and turn, you know, kind of thing. They're usually about a hundred bucks.

So there is some investment here, but it's kind of like inexpensive. If you think about you're

building out this like infrastructure of communication for yourself, that's not reliant

on cell service, wifi, any of that stuff. And no one can turn it off. Like there is no off button.

Uh, so, uh, mesh core is, like I said, something newer I'm playing with. It's kind of in the

same lines, just a different, you know, messaging app. And, uh, it's, it's a little bit, um, it's

a little bit new to me. And then reticulum, um, is actually pretty cool. So reticulum is

like a whole network stack of its own. So think like rewriting TCP IP. And so it can, it's much

more robust reticulum is. And it.

can work over just like about anything so it's designed to be incredibly resilient private and

has communication over unreliable or sometimes you know constrained links so it's protocol

agnostic meaning it can run over like laura radio packet radio wi-fi serial links even the internet

without depending on like any central not like central infrastructure but the cool thing is is

you can like host stuff you could have like a website on there you could run a server it has

its own like name service kind of thing and i um a friend of mine gave a presentation on it a couple

weeks ago and i'm gonna have him on the podcast if he's down i meant to ask him tonight when he's

available um so we can kind of dive deeper into it he's he's a big bsd guy he's a really smart really

cool guy and i would love to have him on to kind of deep dive into reticulum if that's something that

you think you'd like to hear like let me know

let me know in the chat hit me on twitter send me an email um because the more feedback i get from

like where to go with things or what kind of guests you like and what kind of conversations

you like to hear that the more i can kind of cater that um and so like i had zach on a couple

episodes ago talking about you know encryption and and just you know the kind of like the cypherpunk

history and things that how it's evolved over time how much it kind of hasn't evolved at the

same time and i really enjoy like i'm not an expert in these fields like you really have to be

committed to these things and so like i want to try to bring those people on uh so that we can kind of

like all learn together because like i said i'm i'm i'm a noob in this space i am working on setting

up my own my own nodes and matter of fact tonight i actually i don't know if i'll have time tonight

i might do it tomorrow but i was going to set up my reticulum node and i have some code or whatever

that my buddy sent me to like put in there to get on the right side

you

i don't know like it's it's cool and i'm really excited to learn how these things might be

applicable to my life and you know and other people as well so um but why does it matter so

it prioritizes like reticulum specifically i kind of wrote some notes here so it prioritizes

privacy encryption and survivability those are three of the pillar uh matter moments for reticulum

and to me like all those are keywords my ears perk up like say again say less let's go uh routes

messages automatically even as nodes come and go it's designed for low bandwidth and high latency

environments so it can work even like kind of like in really crappy conditions they're ideal for long

range off-grid comms uh where uptime isn't always guaranteed so think of reticulum as kind of like

the tcp ip of the off-grid world so it doesn't necessarily need an acknowledgement that the

packet's gone through it has its own way for moving messages no matter how rough the terrain gets so um

Anyway, MeshTastic, you know, I kind of covered that a little bit, but it's more of like just like a user friendly open source messaging system. So you're not going to send like apps or, you know, images or videos or things like that. It's just purely text based, but it's kind of like the easy, just friendly on board way into this inexpensive lower radio world.

So it can, you know, do GPS sharing. It can send telemetry across long distances, often miles, like I said, without any kind of service in between. It's just a really low barrier to entry, MeshTastic is. So it's cheap hardware, simple apps, and it uses LoRa. You know, it's got a massive community adoption. MeshTastic has been around for a while, quite a long time, and it is big.

I mean, just in my area, the coverage map from here all the way through my state, it's insane the amount of nodes that are online and the amount of chatter that's in the channels and stuff like that. So pretty cool. And then MeshCore is kind of.

more of a lightweight mesh networking framework so it's more focused on being like efficient

routing and autonomy uh and it kind of i don't know like i i i like it i just don't have there's

not many people around me using it it's optimized for low overhead and it's you know flexible and

kind of experimental like mesh deployments and kind of has this like self-healing decentralized

routing to it and i think it's useful in certain scenarios especially like power bandwidth you

know where compute is limited it could be maybe a little bit more robust than say mesh tastic but

again um it's in it's consumer friendly so anyways um why does this matter because no isps no central

authority no towers every node contributes to the network uh survivability essentially so um yeah so

that's kind of been my experience with with these technologies and these devices over the last few

months well i'd say it's probably like i don't know six i'd say

six, eight months I've been kind of messing around with this stuff. And I think I might

have mentioned it here or there in some of the episodes, but I kind of wanted to kind

of dive in just a little bit and kind of these three different technologies that I'm

experimenting with does require some hardware. But once you have the hardware, even if you

have like one radio, you can like reflash it. You can flash it with MeshTastic. You

can reflash it with MeshCore and try it out for a while. You can reflash it with Reticulum.

So you can kind of, and Reticulum you can install on just about damn near anything.

Like anything. So the buddy of mine who gave the presentation, I don't want to say his

name cause I don't want to dox him if you don't want me to. He, he actually bought some old

Google home. What are they like? Those Google wifi, like white cylindrical pucks that I guess,

you know, there's no, they're out of date for firmware and stuff like that. And he picked

them up. I think he said he picked them up at a thrift store or secondhand, something

like that. Like dirt cheap, like a couple bucks.

accepting, that's just kind of a big worrisse.

But how do I keep doing this?

per unit, uh, installed like open WRT. And now he's got them configured with reticulum. And he

just put a note up on his house today with power over ethernet and sent his photos and stuff in

the group chat. I'm like, dude, this is really cool. He lives pretty close to me. He's like

within two miles of me. So he and I are kind of like, all right, let's try to get these things

up so we can at least talk to each other. And then we can start trying to talk to other people.

And yeah, it's, uh, like I said, I am fresh on reticulum. I get conceptually how it works.

I'm definitely not qualified to talk about it. I'm only talking about what I, what I do know,

which is very little. So, uh, anyways, yeah, if you're kind of into that and that curiosity

piques your interest, I would definitely recommend checking them out and you can buy these things

online. You can buy them on Amazon. You can, I bought my, a couple of my radios from a website

and I don't know if it's available internationally. Um, I think it,

might be it's called um rockland uh so uh i don't see if it's oh yeah so they have uh oh yeah these

guys are in australia austria belgium canada czech republic denmark ecuador france germany

ireland israel japan netherlands new zealand norway pakistan south africa spain i mean at

least they support all of these um and they all of their currencies and languages so it looks to

be fairly international i mean they're a huge site and they have uh they sell a lot of different types

of equipment so i have some of theirs called rack and then they have like lily go low mesh at la vox

i did buy one of their pre-made solar solutions because i just wanted it to work they have like

little two packs of radios for like 76 dollars it's like really flat one i mean they got some cool

stuff they got some cool stuff you can also just buy the the boards so you can buy the boards for

as little as like 29 from them

26 dollars actually at 23 97 they have all like pieces so you can buy uh just uh the wireless

stick if you want you can kind of build stuff yourself 3d print your own case you can kind of

nerd out on this stuff so you can get into this for about 25 you would need a little battery pack

for probably a few bucks off like ebay or amazon or something like that but uh the biggest the

biggest thing the biggest note here is if you do go down this road don't turn the damn thing on

until you plug an antenna into it because it can ruin the board if it tries to transmit with no uh

no antenna i guess it's i guess it's no bueno so that's like the one rule like don't do that

otherwise have a good time so anyway yeah that's um that's kind of my uh um spiel on my

mesh and meshtastic and reticulum stuff going on i'm gonna talk a little bit about microsoft for a

second so microsoft has been kind of like digging their own grave for a while and i don't know if

you saw yesterday their stock price just dropped like i don't know like pretty pretty head

uh because you know the shenanigans with their investment investments and expected returns you

know were heavily reliant on open ai there's a lot of shenanigan stuff going on with open ai

investments it looks like they're getting another 60 billion in investment from like soft bank and

some other investments it's just total vapor to me i don't understand i mean how how companies

can be valued so high with so little revenue and how they expect how they project the scale of that

revenue without anyone really using it matter of fact one of the largest user bases of open ai's

chat gpt will be moving to google gemini because apple's now you know kind of confirm that they're

going to be moving to google's gemini for their ai assistant on ios devices well at least in the

united states i'd say probably 60 70 percent of people who use smartphones uh use ios devices they

use iphones

So if that huge customer base automatically is going to be switched over from ChatGPT to Google Gemini, what is that?

I mean, if I was an investor, I'd be shorting the piss out of this right now.

So, you know, and just kind of piling on top of the microslop news, they gave FBI a set of BitLocker encryption keys to unlock suspects' laptops.

This is coming from a TechCrunch article I'll have in the show notes if you want to check it out.

So Microsoft provided the FBI with the recovery keys to unlock encrypted data on the hard drive of three laptops as part of a federal investigation.

This is according to a Forbes report on Friday.

So many modern Windows computers rely fully on full disk encryption called BitLocker, which is enabled by default.

This type of technology should prevent anyone except the device owner from accessing the data if the computer is locked and powered off.

But by default, BitLocker recovery keys are uploaded to Microsoft.

cloud allowing microsoft and by extension law enforcement access them and use them to decrypt

drives and that are using bitlocker so as with this case reported with with forbes so this case

involves several people suspected of fraud related to the pandemic unemployment assistance program

in guam and the u.s uh island in the pacific and then they had some local news pacific daily news

covered the case last year reporting that a warrant had been served microsoft in relation to the

suspect's hard drives um and in october the fbi requested the warrant six months after seizing

these laptops and they were encrypted with bitlocker so bitlocker is by is the default

encryption that microsoft uses now when you're setting up bitlocker when you're setting up your

computer you can it's not very forthcoming but you can actually save your keys without saving them to

the cloud but by default

you

Microsoft tries to push everything you do with it with the new computer to the cloud and I'm sure

if you've ever set up a new Windows laptop what does it try to do it tries to get you to log in

with your Microsoft account it wants to set up like OneDrive it wants to set up Copilot and all

this other all this crap well also to what it's holding in the cloud which is someone else's

computer Microsoft in this sense it's holding the keys to decrypt your hard drive so that is

that is really bad it's just bad in different ways because Microsoft also has a tendency to get hacked

and also have bad actors within their in their infrastructure and just thinking about like

long term what that means like your you know like could someone hack your laptop with this key no

not necessarily but anyone that got could get physical access to the laptop law enforcement

or whatever could compel

them to give them the keys to unlock that versus if you're running like even mac os uh uh doesn't

doesn't store those keys and if they do they're stored in a way to my knowledge um you know

encrypted that would have to be unlocked by the icloud account which apple can't do i mean i'm

not saying this and knowing i'm just the way we understand it especially if you're running advanced

data protection is they've tried to set it up so that they can't do that if anybody remembers back

in 2016 the san bernino shooting in california they uh got the iphone and they were trying to

force apple to unlock it they're like dude we can't you know there's no way for us to do that

we can't even brute force it um without that pin is the private key that to unlock that phone they're

like well can you roll a new os and push the update that would backdoor it and they're like no we can't

do that so i mean i'm not i'm not uh promoting apple i'm just saying they tend to have a better

track record than microsoft does

you

in this context. But ultimately, you know, if you're installing Linux on your computer,

you can install Lux, L-U-K-S or Lux, depending upon how you're enunciated. I call it Lux. So,

but I use Lux on my computer. I do, you know, again, this is something too, that's probably

more applicable for a laptop because that laptop is going with you and could just, you know,

the probability of it being lost or stolen is much higher if it's a computer traveling with you and

your travels versus a computer in your home that's stationary on a desk or something like that. So,

you know, it's just, it's just like, do we want to stop criminals and things like that? Yes.

But do we also not want our, our technology to be used against us, especially in a manner that

is out of our control? Meaning, you know, you're, you're trusting this third party that has very,

we all have trust issues with, with something that's very important.

the keys to unlock your your hard drive so i i found this interesting and i just feel like it's

just another case to not rely on trusting on big tech companies because it just you don't know

it's it's an unknown and why trust something like your personal data and everything that you have

on your computer to something like that um you know it doesn't even have to be like oh you're

not doing anything bad you're not a target of the government it could just be bad opsec maybe you

left the laptop that person knows somebody at microsoft maybe they have a friend that works

at microsoft i'm just saying that typically with a device if it's lost you want to have the peace

of mind going well it sucks that i lost my laptop it sucks that i lost my phone but without my key

or my pin or my password right to decrypt it like at least my data is safe meaning they could take

the hard drive out of your laptop and mount it to

you know a linux computer or mac or windows or something and and and plug it in and they can't

read the data off of it they can't get to anything i mean they can format it and use it as a drive

but i mean they can't like get to your files it's useless to them as far as data goes so

that you know that peace of mind is something that i really kind of hold dear when i am because

i travel a lot i was just traveling two weeks ago i was uh traveling for a conference and i travel

with two laptops right two laptops uh two phones you know so i got a lot and so they're even higher

probability for me to maybe misplace or forget something or have something jacked off you know

me or you know i don't know mugged or whatever take my backpack from me if that were to happen

it would suck but at least i would sleep at night knowing like hey well at least they're not going

to get into my data uh because everything's encrypted um and even better you know like

like i i i've been trying to build my my digital back end

you

so that I am my own cloud for everything. So I could go buy into a Best Buy, or hopefully Best

Buy has one, right? I go into Best Buy and buy a brand, you know, a new pixel. I could flash

Graphene OS on there. I could set up my profile real quick. I can install NextCloud. I could

install Image. I could install DavEx. I could be like my email clients. I could be mostly probably

like 80 or 90% within a few hours, right? Because I host my own backend. And I don't rely on third

party companies. I don't trust Apple with my syncing. I don't trust Google with that kind

of stuff. I am the AWS in my life. That's kind of my thing for like the last year. And this

year, I'm even going more ham. So I want to get into this quick UK mandate. And UK, what

is going on over there, man? You guys are like, dude, just stop. Stop. Oh, why is my link

not working? What's going on? Oh, did I copy and paste? Did I not copy and paste this link?

I usually have my browser open with all the tabs, with all the links, and I accidentally

closed it when I was babbling on earlier about MeshTastic.

So UK, this is coming from Reclaim the Net, really cool website, by the way, good source

for information, really like it.

So check it out, Reclaim the Net, it's reclaimthenet.org.

So UK expands, this is an article from January 8th, so it's a little old, a few weeks old,

UK expands Online Safety Act to mandate preemptive scanning of digital communications, right?

So a major expansion of the UK's Online Safety Act, the OSA, has taken effect legally obliging,

I like the way that's phrased, legally obliging digital platforms to deploy surveillance-style

systems that scan, detect, and block user content before it can be seen.

So the government's new Online Safety Act Priority Offenses Amendment regulations of 2025, which

came into force on January 8th, 2026, designates cyber flashing and encouraging or assisting

serious self-harm.

as priority offenses categorizes that trigger the strictest compliance duties under the OSA,

the Online Safety Act. So this marks a decisive move toward preemptive censorship. So services

that allow user interaction, including like messaging apps, forums, search engines, now they

have to monitor their communications at scale to ensure like this prohibited content, which is

loosely defined, is automatically filtered or suppressed before the user even comes in contact

with it, or they say encountered it. To meet the law's demands, companies are expected to rely

heavily on automated scanning systems, COFCOF AI, content detection algorithms, and artificial

intelligence, there it is, models trained to evaluate the legality of text, images, and videos

in real time. This is mind-boggling. The UK Department for Science, Innovation, and Technology unveiled

the changes.

through a promotional video showing a smartphone scanning airdropped photos

and warning the user that unwanted nude had been detected.

So the visual, they have a little video too.

And basically it's showing this like overlay of this unwanted nude detected.

It's kind of hilarious actually.

It looks very like bit mappy, very Microsoft paint, but whatever.

It's just a proof of concept, I guess.

So the visual captures the law.

The law's core requirement for platforms must implement this continuous background surveillance

to identify and block flagged content, effectively converting private communication spaces into

like these monitored environments.

Because again, like the model they even have here is an iPhone using iMessage, which allegedly

is supposed to be end-to-end encrypted.

So now it doesn't matter, right?

This is kind of going back to like what I said before.

This is AI, this is a law forcing the use of having technology, in this case AI or algorithms

to...

detect the content

before it

even gets to the screen.

What happened to the days when you would get like

something like that and you'd be like, what the hell?

You know, you just block, block. They can't send it to you

again. Nope. Nope.

They have to nanny state the shit out of this. So

it says it is official. Press

release. DSIT said the new

rules compel firms to take proactive

steps to prevent the vile content

before you, and don't get me wrong, dude.

I mean, like sending nudes is

kind of like unsolicited news, kind of

you know, it's a shitty thing to do, but like

dude, humans are humans. Humans are going to

human. You know what I'm saying? So just

you know, be careful who you give your number to.

Like don't talk and don't accept airdrop

from everyone. Contacts only.

I mean, there are settings, there are features that

stop this stuff, but yet here we need

more laws and more tech.

So technology secretary Liz Kendall

stated, we've cracked down on perpetrators

of this vile crime.

Now we're turning up the heat on tech

firms. Platforms are now required.

I'm going into my like, you know.

agent voice platforms are now required by law to detect and prevent this material the internet must

be a space where women and girls feel safe respected and able to thrive i mean i don't

disagree with that but i don't it shouldn't come at the cost of everyone's phone being

completely surveilled scan on everything they're sending because that's that's what we're talking

about we also have no insight to where this meta information or the actual content is being stored

it's got to be cached somewhere right to be scanned so how long is that being stored is it associated

with the user phone number cloud accounts you know what what what what how is this built so

platforms that fail to comply face severe penalties including fines of up to 10 percent of global

turnover or 18 million dollars whichever is greater and potential service blocking in the uk

damn safeguarding uh minister jesse phillips said for too long cyber flashing has been just another

degrading abuse women and girls are expected to endure we are changing this i'm not saying this

never happens right people but does it happen it's scale like this and why are these girls i mean

so i mean is this happening like 20 times a day like how if you have your phone if you have an

iphone and you have airdrop turned off or you have it on for contacts only and you can set up your

phone and by the way parents parents should be parenting parents should be setting up their kids

phones with parental uh provisions on it right if you're a parent and you have a kid with an iphone

i think you have what is it called screen time or whatever and you can manage everything from there

down to like who can text what they can do what apps they can use what time of day they can use them and

all this kind of stuff and i know i'm not familiar with um stock android i haven't ran stock android

in years so the only android i know is graphene os but i know android google has like very good

uh

parental management over the devices. I've said it before, right? There's already been so much

time and money invested into protecting kids through the technology if the parents just

parent, if they set the devices up and actually manage it. So this is basically the government

saying we're taking over, we're going to step in, and we're going to trample the rights of

everybody. We're going to scan everything on every device by every person, and we're going to force

the platforms to comply with us, just like they did with Apple, right? They forced Apple

to turn off advanced data protection and, you know, those end-to-end encrypted services so they

could scan. They want to be able to scan everything. They originally tried a backdoor. They wanted to

scan it for like everyone on planet Earth, and Apple said, go pound sand. But this is, I mean,

it doesn't get any more egregious than that. I mean, that's, and this article goes,

on you know in more detail but you know i'm just kind of like when i came across this i'm thinking

myself like this is insane and now on top of that uh you know uk wants to also ban the use of virtual

private networks vpns because vpn usage has gone up insane because now they know the government

wants to scan everything and block where you can go and who you can talk to and all these kind of

things so there's an article actually four days ago on the hungarian conservative that says the

united kingdom's house of lords voted in favor by 207 to 159 margin of amendment to the children's

well-being and everything is about the kids you notice that all every single one of these things

about the kids well-being and schools bill last week amendment 92 of the bill calls for requiring

secretary of state to take action to promote and protect children's well-being and to further

support child protective measures in the online safety act by prohibiting the provision to children

in the united kingdom of vpn services which can facilitate evasion

of osa age gating processes osa is the online safety act so the osa the online safety act

has become like this hub of of legislation that everything else now ties to is like its main

reason for existing so they're kind of like okay now let's do ban kids from social media let's do

this you know on device scanning and uh we're going to try to you know detect all these nudes

that hit their phone no one has ever texted me unsolicited nude i don't think ever in my whole

life now i mean i'm married and stuff i'm just saying i i travel all the time on airplanes i've

never seen anyone on the plane like oh my god who sent me this airdrop you know dick pic i've never

seen this and i travel a lot and i did you know maybe just doesn't happen in america maybe uk is

just a hot spot for airdropping dick pics i'm not really sure what's going on there but i just i

don't i just don't believe it i don't think i mean i'm not saying it never happens i'm just is it is

is it an epidemic is it an epidemic i've never seen anyone talk about this on

social media. I've never seen anyone talking about on the news, but like, it's like, I feel

like these are just like these made up reasons and that they're not substantiated by any

documentation studies of, you know, always, we, we, we surveyed, you know, 3000 kids across these,

you know, eight schools. And, you know, this percentage of girls had received this kind of

illicit or lewd material, unsolicited, unprovoked, you know, X amount of times,

like in a year, I haven't seen any of that kind of stuff, nothing. And, but the thing of it isn't

why, you know, people say, Simon, we know you live in the U S why do you give it? Why do you give a

shit? Because everything trickles to every other Westernized country. Because once they see it work

someplace else in UK, Australia, New Zealand, India, you know, anywhere, then they're like, Oh, we just

do the same thing. Well, we'll just do the same thing. EU countries are looking at this stuff going,

yeah, we'll just do the same thing. We'll do what they're doing. France, look at France right now,

going through a lot of the same stuff. And here in the U S yeah, nothing's happened really like this

at the,

federal level, but now almost half the states in the United States have age verification to visit

adult websites. I'm going to take a sip of my bourbon. Hang with me. So, you know, it's like,

it trickles in everywhere. And once one country sees it working, the other one's like, oh,

cool. Let's do that. Right. It's like, it's like an F1 team. See like, oh, they made a small minor

modification to their, the front fairing or something. Well, we should do that too. You

know, it's like, you're always looking for an edge. You're always looking for a way to, to, to, to push

your agenda a little bit further. And this is it. This is, this is how they're doing it. It's all

through legislation and forcing users by way of tech companies to adhere and bend to, to the log.

So yeah, like that's this kind of crazy. And I'm going to kind of skip ahead to this

Florida app store accountability act. I mean, just the names of.

these things makes it sound like what wtf question mark right so florida's app store accountability

act would deputize deputize big tech to verify user ids for app access if anything to verify

ids i guess maybe apple or google could probably do it best uh if you had to just because they

probably already have everyone's ids because you're buying stuff from the app stores like

so they know your name they know your billing address they have a credit card information you

know what i'm saying like i'm not i'm not saying like oh let's all verify our ids with tech companies

but you know i don't know as opposed to some third some third rate shitty third party company that the

you know government hires so in florida senator elect um alexis cattle yud cattle yud has introduced a

proposal that could quietly reshape how millions of americans experience the digital world so the app

store accountability act sb 1722 presented as a safeguard for children

children

you

fuck as children again it's always the children it's always in the first two or three sentences

every freaking time right safeguard for children would require every app again like we're the

parents the parents can lock down the app stores i know i've helped my my my mom and my my brother

and sister and my uncle over the years with devices and setting up these parental controls

it exists why do we need this anyway so they want uh to safeguard children would require every app

marketplace so this affects every app marketplace air quotes f droid people i did to identify users

by age category verify the data through commercially available methods and air quotes commercially

available methods yeah because like those exist everywhere we have tons of great ones and secure

recurring parental consent when an app's policies

change so i guess if an app policy changed with an update and then maybe they collect more or less

information they'd have to re-verify with the parent why not just why not just have the parent

do this from the beginning i don't know the legislation is ambitious if enacted it would

take effect in july 2027 with enforcement beginning the following year so we're looking at

2028 kind of a thing each violation could carry penalties of up to 7 500 along with injunctions

and attorney fees on its surface this is a regulatory measure aimed in strengthening

parental oversight and protecting minors from online harms yet it hits up against a larger

philosophical and rights struggle for much of modern political thought the relationship between

authority and liberty has revolved around who decides what constitutes protection so florida's

proposal situates that question in the hands of private corporations the bill effectively deputizes

big tech companies app store operators such as apple and google as arbiters of digital identity

compelling them to verify user

ages and manage parental permissions across every platform.

So millions of Floridians could be required to submit identifying details of

official documents simply to access or update apps like your Gmail app,

Google Maps, like WTF question mark.

This process while justified as a measure of security reintroduces the age

old tension between the protective role of the state and the autonomy of the

citizen. So by making identity verification,

the gateway to digital access,

the law risks creating an infrastructure in which surveillance becomes a

condition of participation.

It's a, it's a,

it's a move from voluntary oversight to systematic authentication,

merging the roles of government and corporation in a single mechanism of

control. So, and this, this article goes on and on and on quite a bit.

I'm not going to read the whole thing.

I just kind of wanted to get through that first third section because.

it puts the onerous back on the app store operators. So, okay, what defines an app store?

Like, FDroid is an app store. FDroid is an app store that a lot of us use who are on Android

OSs, especially Graphene OS, to get apps. I install a lot of my apps via another application

called Obtainium, which allows me to directly download the mobile apps that I want on my

device. Signal is a great example, directly from GitHub. And the cool thing about that is I prefer

that method myself using Obtainium because FDroid re-signs all of the applications in its store,

meaning that when you're downloading an app, it's checking the key verification with FDroid

signature, but not the developer. So, you're trusting that FDroid is not compromised in

any way, whereas I'm downloading through Obtainium directly through GitHub. If the developer

Developer signature change, Obtainium tells me and says, oh, there's an error with this app

installing it because the app signature changed. And I can kind of look into this and go, huh,

now I can go investigate what's going on. Check out the GitHub page,

read the release notes, did developers change? What's going on here? So it's harder to spoof an

app. I'm looking at my phone. Where's my phone? I don't know where it's at at the moment.

But, you know, I hate it when I'm like, oh, let me look at this and it's like not here. I don't

know where the hell I left my phone. Oh, it's over on the couch. That's where it's at. It doesn't

really matter. I mean, I probably have, I would say, 70 to 80 percent of my apps either installed

through the, you know, Graphene OS App Store, Accrescent, or Obtainium. And then I have a

handful installed through the App Store and a Sandbox profile, like my banking apps, Southwest,

Delta, things like that, that I can't get, obviously, through any other App Store.

So, yeah, this kind of, you know, and again, right, this passes in Florida, which is a fairly, like, conservative state.

And this boggles my mind because most of the shitty legislation I've seen come out in the last year are all by Republicans.

And Republicans in the United States are supposed to be the ones of less government, less oversight, less regulation.

But all this tech legislation that basically is an overreach into our personal lives is coming from largely Republican legislators.

So, you know, and not to try to be political, I'm just calling it for what it is.

Like, this is kind of like what?

Matter of fact, some of the outspoken legislators against digital overreach and pro-privacy are Democrats in the United States.

So, I don't know.

I mean, it's just kind of like, it's just odd, man.

It's an odd time.

It's an odd time to be alive.

So, yeah, you know, just some things to keep an eye on.

And as you know, I'm not going to talk about all of this stuff every single episode.

Like the updates, I try to do an update like once every couple months as things progress or pass.

In episode 50, I did cover a little bit more detail in laws that were going into a place around the world covering like USA, Australia, France, Malaysia, Italy, and India.

So you should go back to episode 50 and check out the show notes.

I actually created a table of all of those dates and statuses as well as likely methods, risk flags, and the sources for where to go, you know, look this stuff up.

And, yeah, check that out.

The show notes have all of that in there.

like I said. So it's, it's just so much. I mean, like I could podcast every day and just talk

about that. I don't want to, it's not really what I would do, but I'm just saying that so much is

coming out on a daily or weekly basis that you could literally just have a topic based podcast

on just all of these proposals of laws and mandates and pushing on big tech to be every,

everyone's, you know, nanny, their mommy and daddy. So I'm not down with it. Uh, so as I've said

earlier, you know, being my own data center, being my own tech over the last couple of years of doing

this podcast, I've kind of talked about more about self-hosting in the light of hobby and taking back

some digital sovereignty. And now in the, you know, 2026, I'm kind of like, dude, there's no other

option. Like this is the only option I have is to

house all of my data and be my own data center

and rely on open source applications to to live my life to do the things i need to do in my life

make phone calls make texts and emails you know the normal stuff download memes

i have a uh i have a what do you call it um getting my brains turned off what is it called

when you have a guilty pleasure guilty pleasure though i don't really feel guilty about it i mean

maybe i do sometimes but i i i get sucked into these different algorithms on instagram

and i wanted to be able to download some of these videos to share these memes with certain

friends and certain group chats uh you know which are basically kind of like you know if the chat if

the chat leaks like we're all going to jail kind of a thing and i wanted to be able to download these

things easily so my son and i figured out how to set up our own cobalt tools because we were using

white cobalt tools i think it's called

it's an app and we were using their server but i was like man i don't want to use somebody else's

server to download this stuff i mean they're letting us use their api you know to do that

and it's free and that's cool but i wanted to and you can also use seal there's an open source app

called seal which will do things like um youtube videos you can download directly to your phone

but we actually set something up for that too we set up me tube but we set that cobalt uh server

cobalt tools so now if there's like an instagram reel i want to save i can just click the share

icon share it right to cobalt tools it automatically just goes right to my uh my server and downloads

it's it this all happens in like i'm not joking like four seconds i can download a whole video

and now i can drop it into a signal chat or something because i don't want to send them a link

to instagram that's lame i want to send them the actual meme it'll download images if there's like

multiple images like sliding you know right to left uh it'll download them all it's cool it's it's

great and then me tube uh is this another great app i think i mentioned it on the

one here's the one here's the one here's the one here's the one here's the one here's the one here's the one here's the one here's the one here's the one here's the one here's the one here's the one here's the one here's the one here's the one here's the one here's the one here's the one here's the one here's the one here's the one here's the one here's the one here's the one here's the one here's the one here's the one here's the one here's the one here's the one here's the one here's the one here's the one here's the one here's the one here's the one here's the one here's the one here's the one here's the one here's the one here's the one here's the one here's the one here's the one here's the one here's the one here's the one here's the one here's the one here's the one here's the one here's the one here's the one

I don't know.

last episode it's just a little self-hosted service that you can run that allows you to

download like any youtube video you want soundcloud tracks and stuff like that so pretty pretty cool

stuff right um so not only do i you know when i want to download something whatever i want to be

able to do it myself i want to process it myself i want to store it myself uh i'm currently going

deep deep deep deep i just moved our plex server over from a standalone server running in docker

over to plex and i'm loving it um moving i'm trying to basically move everything into play i'm not

sorry plex proxmox proxmox server trying to move everything into proxmox because then i can have

the backup server back it up and then do a backup server off site and have that like kind of three

two one backup methodology but man i love it i love love love it they can run vms i can run lxcs i've

got you know uh a lot a lot going on and i can go deeper into that i'm probably going to do

just one episode a covering

you

proxmox and my self-hosted home lab because that way if you're not interested you can just be like

cool i'm not gonna listen to that episode totally fine no problem um totally get it but if for the

ones i do i think that might be kind of cool and what i'd like to do is i actually put a poll up

in the matrix chat two days ago asking about i had i want to experiment with doing a like probably

like some kind of group chat voice chat with uh people from the group chats and maybe do it on

signal or something i'm not totally sure yet i just said signal just because it's easy uh but

and then have that as an episode and just kind of have like a general hangout chat questions and

answers because that's what happens all day and often all night and in the chats is people just

saying like hey you know what um what router should i buy my i'm running an asus i'm running a netgear

it's kind of aging out i'm going to replace it i want to replace it with

something that will kind of scale with my privacy journey what do you guys recommend you know so it

might be like something like open wrt or open sense or pf sense you know whatever and we'll

talk about you know like why and how to set up vlans and how to set up you know your firewall

configuration to be able to do things that kind of like isolate and segment running like an ad

guard home server for your dns encrypt all your dns connections out to like quad nine or whoever

you want so that your isp can't like monitor every website that you go to right they can't monitor

your content if it's encrypted but they can see all the demand lookups they're they're the phone book

for every domain that your your home internet is looking up um that's that's like a great way right

off the rip and then you can also do dns blocking you can block trackers you can block ads you can

block sites you can turn on parental controls for blocking like adult content there's a lot of

cool you can block social media sites and you could do it at the network level then you can also set up

other

there are vlans that don't have some of that stuff blocked right so maybe streaming services and

things i mean so you can get really kind of really customized with this stuff and it's getting easier

than ever before because the tools are just so good and so much of it is able to be configured

right through the web browser you know the web browser configs are are fantastic so um and i've

talked quite a lot in different episodes of even just basic self-hosting like using uh umbral os

u-m-b-r-e-l umbral almost like umbro whoever played soccer i played soccer growing up

umbro was like a big clothing brand like adidas and that kind of thing i was an adidas kid i wore

adidas but there was kids on my team that would wear umbro umbro yeah and i always thought it was a

funny name like sup umbro sup bro um but umbral reminds me of that so anyway just anecdotal story

it's kind of stupid but

But, you know, that's a great way to get started with Umbral or Casa OS, C-A-S-A-O-S.

Casa OS is so easy.

You can just install Ubuntu, Ubuntu server on an old laptop, especially if that laptop

can't run Windows 11.

What the hell else are you going to do with it anyway?

Experiment.

You can install Pop! OS and have a desktop.

You can install Casa OS there.

You could run Ubuntu server.

You could run Ubuntu desktop.

I say Ubuntu because it's easier to manage services on than some of the other servers

out there, Linux distributions out there, if you've never really done any of this before,

right?

So you can install Casa OS and then it's just like a web browser and you say install app,

install Plex, install AdGuard Home, whatever.

And then you can just point to, you know, to all these different services to your browser.

Uh, you can, you can access them for free setting up, you know, different, uh, different,

different services like, um, tail scale.

Tail scale is great.

So if you want to access.

those tools remotely while you're not at home you can if you want to get fancy you could set

up an external reverse proxy you could set up cloudflare tunnels i know a lot of people don't

like cloudflare i'm not a cloudflare fan either but you know they work well they are reliable

um and so i'm just saying like you kind of start somewhere where you say i want to host my photos

okay set up an image server i m m i c h download the app you can put it on your iphone put it on

your engine it doesn't have you know and you just connect to it locally and it just backs up all

your photos it's awesome and now you're hosting it yourself so i i just you know i'm excited about

this stuff i want um i want i want these things to seem very approachable if you're listening to

any of this stuff and you're like i don't know man sounds kind of intimidating i'm not really super

like computer savvy get someone who is like someone in your family a friend someone's someone's a nerd

right and you're and when i say nerd i'm not talking like doesn't get laid i'm talking about no shit

right likes to get their hands dirty with tech um and break

yeah

like

things right and kind of experiment with things they're they're eager they like to dive into stuff

and start you know seeing how it works that's when i so so when i say nerds i don't mean like

the like you know from the freaking movies and stuff uh snorting and laughing i'm talking like

people who nerd out on on these different things and are not um intimidated to like set up a linux

server or a desktop and just kind of experiment it's not hard it really isn't anyone can do it

um i am not super intelligent i'm really not i'm persistent i am a persistent son of a son of a

bee uh you know when i you know the kids are listening but i'm not super highly intelligent

i mean i'm a pretty smart guy but i know people who are way smarter than me and that's how i kind

of like you know like i go like oh gosh i wish i was as smart as that person so if i can do it

you can do it and yeah there there are some things that are kind of a little more challenging a little

bit more hard um but that that's you know that's just part of like learning

So you just pick, you pick something, you pick an objective and what you're trying to accomplish.

Maybe it's just setting up a little next cloud server.

Maybe it's a little network attached storage on your home network where you can just kind

of keep a backup of your files and stuff.

And so you're not relying on iCloud.

You're not relying on OneDrive or Dropbox or any of these other, you know, third parties

that are most definitely scanning all your shit.

And you're like, Hey, I'm actually storing this stuff myself now.

Cool.

How do I back it up?

And how do I test that backup?

Cool.

Now, how do I scale this to be able to do other things?

You know, that's kind of how, kind of how it starts.

But of course, like join the chat, hit us up.

And I would like to maybe do a podcast with listeners, with people in the chat to talk

about these things and just test it out.

If it sucks, well, maybe not do it again.

If it's awesome, maybe we'll just do it on a regular basis.

I'm not really sure.

I don't really have all the answers yet.

That's why we're just kind of experiment.

This whole thing has just been one big kind of giant journey of experimentation for me.

And

And the whole point of doing the podcast was just to share that journey and share because I didn't

know anyone that was like kind of into this stuff in real life. Like I always felt like I was kind

of like, am I a freak dude? Am I like seriously a tinfoil hat wearer person that doesn't know how

to just be normal and put my head down in the sand and be like, everything's cool. It's cool.

Like everything's fine here because I just felt really wouldn't say alone. I just felt alone in

that context. And I just thought, well, you know, if I did a podcast, maybe I'd be able

to kind of, and I kind of started writing some articles or put a forum together and kind of

created some chat rooms. Like maybe it could just, you know, I always joke, like I did the

podcast and make friends more than anything. And, and what great friends I have made and

in here, matter of fact, like I'm like looking at text messages that some ordinary guy is

sending me right now, sending me a screenshot. Oh, because he just became a patron dude.

Dude.

didn't have to do that you're an awesome dude see what i'm saying see what i'm saying um people are

amazing so you know that that that's the whole motivation behind all of this is is just one big

experiment between the website the chat rooms the the forums the experimentation of of working with

technology working with open source and supporting the developers supporting the projects that

actually are making it easy for us and enabling us to be able to have a third option and i feel like

so much in life is like you get option a or b red or blue apple or google this or that microsoft or mac

you know blah blah blah and it's just like no i i want the third option i want a fourth option i want

a fifth option i don't want to just accept one of the two and picking the lesser of the evil but they

all suck and just be fine with it uh it's just in every service out there you know my latest my latest

uh

uh project which i did last week is over last weekend audio bookshelf are you an audio book

person i i i have been i i used to use audible and i hated that i had to pay this like subscription

and sometimes the books were not available and so i used this app called libation my son actually

found another app that was better i'll have to ask him about it i'll talk about it on another

episode when we cover this stuff but um you know it allows you to log into audible and download

your books and uh there's a lot of free books out there too and there's also places to get other

like air quote free books anyway so you can load up um audio bookshelf i just set up a little proxmox

server there's a just go google uh or brave search or start page search or whatever search you want

to call it uh for um audio bookshelf and you can install the service you can install the app there's

a proxmox helper script for those that are running proxmox easily creates the linux container for you

and then you start uploading books to the web interface

you

and then you just download the app on your phone

and, dude, you have your own Audible.

How freaking cool is that?

And you know what?

It's your server.

It's your client app.

It's yours in the sense that you're running it.

No one else is hosting anything.

No one knows what you're listening to.

No one knows how often you listen to it to try to sell you ads.

It's just all more pure.

It's like listening to vinyl.

You're the only one in the room that's listening to it,

and no one else knows that you're listening to it unless they're there.

And that's how I feel like self-hosting is.

It kind of brings me back to like if I take a CD out of a case

or if I take a – I'm getting into vinyl, so I have some records.

I don't have very many.

I just had a birthday recently and Christmas,

so I got some vinyl records.

I got Kid Cudi.

I got Beastie Boys.

I got the Daft Punk Tron soundtrack.

I got some cool albums, right?

So when I pull these out of the sleeve and I drop it in onto the turntable

and I turn it on, I drop the needle on me,

there's this like connection, this analog connection.

And I'm not saying the audio –

video bookshelf is the exact same but it kind of brings a similar vibe where it's like if I want to

listen to the history of Islam or if I want to listen to World War II if I want to listen to

Mein Kampf I don't give a shit what it is because I like to listen and read a lot of different

things it doesn't mean anything about me it just means I like to I like to be informed I like to

read well no one knows what I'm listening to right if I just want to listen to some John Grisham

no one knows if some my wife likes James Patterson Alex Cross right it's like you have that

sovereignty just like putting a vinyl record on a turntable turning it on and you're the only one

well whoever's in the room listens to it no one else knows no one knows there's no stream there's

no stream like you're the stream you are the stream so that's kind of you know none of this I talked

about by the way you know the whole reason why I titled the snoop on him as a snoop on us is I

totally overlooked one particular article one particular thing that I want to talk about

before I end this episode there's other stuff I didn't get to it'll be in the show

notes scroll through take a look at what you want check it out but i i labeled it that because the

snoop on them is a snoop on this is actually uh kind of a homage reference to the movie hackers

which came out like oh man like 95 6 something like that um yeah back then back in the 90s which

the 1900s back in the 1900s um anyway hacker movie came out called hackers and there was a

they were wiretapping uh the fbi and they were like snoop on them as they snoop on us because

another thing i just picked up for nine dollars on ebay was a verizon hotspot and i forget the model

it's on a shelf somewhere but the eff has a cool project called ray hunter that you can install

the software onto these little hotspots like and you you have a sim card in it it doesn't have to

be active like they don't have it could just be a sim card doesn't matter just having a sim card in

there makes it uh work better

you

for detecting if it's basically an MZ catcher, a stingray detector. So detect the detectors.

There's a video for how to detect MZ catchers by the EFF. This is called a ray hunter. It's

actually a setup guide. So I'm going to have that YouTube video in the show notes. If you

are one of those people that likes to go to protests or you're an activist and you're involved

in going to events or conventions or I don't know, stuff like that, it wouldn't be a bad

idea to consider getting one of these. Like I said, the whole thing you can get for $10

to $15 US. The different device models and stuff are on the guide on the YouTube video.

And I bought mine. I got it for $9 on eBay. And then you install the software and then you

turn it on and it has an indicator to let you know if it, and it's not a hundred percent

accurate.

And it logs the packets so you can inspect them later.

You can also upload them to the EFF.

But it basically checks to see if there is an EMSI catcher where you are.

And for those that don't know, an EMSI catcher is basically a man-in-the-middle attack on mobile devices

where it pretends to be the cell phone tower so that you connect to it,

and then it passes on that connection and captures as much data about your device as possible.

Your IMEI, your subscriber, your EMSI is a combination of your subscriber ID and your IMEI.

It's a unique identifier to your device.

And I don't know what all information I know.

It can be a lot.

It can be very little depending upon the signal strength, the type of signal it is, like 4G, 5G, LTE.

Apparently these things work better on 2G, but most phones by default disable 2G.

So it looks like they're trying to adapt.

Law enforcement is trying to adapt to that.

But anyways, that was the whole point.

That was the whole point of the title.

So I feel like that's coming at the very end.

of the episode and you listen to this far, I really appreciate you. Listen to me ramble and

go on and on about all the joys of, uh, of home labbing and, and taking back ownership for,

for your life. And this is another big takeaway. If you're listening, still listening this far

is try to connect with people locally. You know, if you get into this mesh tastic stuff,

if you're into technology, if you live in any kind of, uh, population of 50,000, a hundred

thousand or more, you know, kind of a town or city, if you live in a bigger city, there's definitely

going to be more groups and options available to you, uh, to connect with people who are passionate

about these same things. Because though you may not be a technology person, you can go attend these

things and tell people that you want to learn and you can connect with people and they can help you

get some of this stuff set up. Um, there are also people out there that you can pay to, to do.

it of course but you know ideally you you know like to work within a community framework uh

building a trusted you know circle of friends that you can bounce ideas off of hey i was thinking

about maybe setting up my own email server oh that's a terrible idea here's why like oh okay

you know like just having those conversations around how to do these accomplish these things

that you might want to do in your life even if you don't necessarily have the skill sets to do it now

might be some people out there who do uh even if you don't have anyone in your you know family

that's a nerd you go find a nerd you know find a nerd in a local nerd group there's different on

information security groups there's uh there's people in the bitcoin space cryptocurrency space

i usually just you know look you know bitcoin because they're big into like self-hosting nodes

and miners and digital sovereignty and hosting their own wallet servers and things of that nature

a lot of these things have like a lot of like intersect with other people that are kind of

seeking out the same thing mesh tastic ham radio people oftentimes fall into the same

same kind of category that they're looking to kind of you know deep dive into stuff themselves

and also too it's just really good for like morale and you know like tonight we didn't you know we

just uh we try to do a dinner like once every every couple weeks they you know uh it's kind

of ad hoc hey where are we going for nerd dinner tonight tonight we went to a pho place i'm not a

big pho fan is that how you say it pho i know it's pho but it's pho like the noodle soup stuff

i don't know i'm not a big fan i'll go just don't love it uh just not you know rather have mexican

and margaritas if you know what i mean but still great time and good good uh to like kind of like

touch grass or whatever just to interface with humans rather than always talking online in chat

rooms so yeah that's pretty much it y'all uh i'm gonna i'm gonna hang it up here on this episode 51

i've got um some stuff stubbed out that i'm working on for february trying to get uh at least one

you

At least one guest, maybe two, but I'm going to try to at least get the one on next month for the reticulum stuff.

Probably going to do an episode just focused on self-hosting maybe and see if my son wants to come on for that

because he's the one that does a lot of stuff on our infrastructure here.

So, yeah.

Cool.

I think that's it.

I hope you're all doing well.

I hope you have a great, great start to the month.

It's been a wild month, at least in the United States.

We've got a lot of protesting and different things going on with ICE and immigration

and just a lot of bizarro stuff going on, man.

So, you know, we're trying to, like, purchase slash hijack Greenland, apparently.

You know, I guess those shipping lanes are quite tasty to the administration.

So, just, you know, weird shenanigans going on.

Not to get political because I think it's stupid, but...

Anyway, I'll see y'all in the chat.

Please don't play no games with me.