Slides from the talk I gave to Santa Barbara High School students: <https://obr4aowrgxgkhn4hjnff.oasis.sandstorm.io/index.html>

Great point made in this Hacker News comment (https://github.com/miguelespinoza/react-goku#architecture): > Corporations will abuse your personal integrity whenever they get a chance, while abiding the law. Corporations will cry like babies when their publicly available data (their livelyhood) gets scraped. They will take you to court.

"Mankind's Greatest Achievement" by Nikola Tesla: > When a child is born its sense-organs are brought in contact with the outer world. The waves of sound, heat, and light beat upon its feeble body, its sensitive nerve fibers quiver, the muscles contract and relax in obedience:

Don't buy/rent servers from wable.com (https://wable.com/). Why? Several reasons: 1. The way they set up automatic backups is clearly a scheme to nickel and dime you for costs you neither want nor need. 2. They claim that they sent out an email notifying customers

A friend of mine asked how I "would respond to people who say that [voting 3rd party] makes you politically irrelevant." I do have a response to this, and it is thus. Here is the strategy we must pursue. If people actually feel represented by the two-party system,

A Trump presidency would be a disaster. Obviously. But I am disturbed by how many people I talk to on the left (where I am) who simply do not understand how awful Hillary Clinton would be, nor how much destruction she has brought upon the world even with far less

Black Lives Matter activists are under surveillance from various parts of the government. Excerpt from an ACLU petition (https://action.aclu.org/secure/stop-surveillance-of-blm-activists) to stop said surveillance: > By trolling Facebook, Twitter, and Vine, the federal government has mapped and collected info on #BlackLivesMatter protests and activists around the

Good things that have happened in the world: 2016.05.19: Marxist economist Richard Wolff made this amazing video about how class works (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=euH3pAuLuko) in the US. 2016.04.25: A court has ruled that police need a warrant (http://motherboard.vice.com/read/

I just signed up for ProtonMail (https://protonmail.com/) to try it out. Here are my first impressions. [EDIT: I was pretty harsh in this review, but I now enjoy using ProtonMail and do so regularly! See the bottom of this post for an update from July 2016.] The Good

On March 13, 2016 I gave a talk and workshop in Santa Barbara, called "They're Watching You: Anti-surveillance Workshop for Activists and Journalists", hosted by Bonfire Cafe, a leftist cafe and book store. From the Event 1. Talk audio + synchronized slides: https://www.youtube.com/watch?

Hi! I'm Steve Phillips: techno-activist, computer programmer, and philosopher. I love ambitious people, democratizing forces, and revolutionary projects. One of my most impressive accomplishments listed here is my 2015 talk at DEF CON, "the world's largest underground hacker conference". My talk was on encryption

From https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2016/02/12/how-the-united-states-built-a-welfare-state-for-the-wealthy/ -- > The United States government spends more on social welfare programs per capita than most European countries once we include both traditional public spending and tax subsidies. But contrary to European welfare states, benefits are not concentrated

Why is surveillance dangerous? From this Amnesty International blog post (http://blog.amnestyusa.org/uncategorized/unlawful-surveillance-threatens-our-activism-heres-how-we-can-fight-back/): > Amnesty reports on human rights violations worldwide. Our researches rely on confidential sources – witnesses and victims of human rights violations who put themselves at risk by sharing their stories. Our worst fear is

How to learn Go Great resources: https://tour.golang.org http://dave.cheney.net/resources-for-new-go-programmers https://learnxinyminutes.com/docs/go/ https://gobyexample.com/ Concurrency example: https://gist.github.com/elimisteve/4442820 Meta resource (which points to more great resources, including some of the above) -- http://harrymoreno.com/2016/06/

Recommended Encryption Tools Here's a PDF of recommended privacy/encryption tools that I update as new tools come out (last updated: December 2017) -- https://tryingtobeawesome.com/files/tools.pdf Messaging and Communications Text Messaging: use Signal (iPhone/iOS version (https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/signal-private-messenger/id874139669)

> "Every man is guilty of all the good he did not do." --Voltaire You should demand high moral standards of yourself. > In theory, the reason we’re so nice to soldiers, that we have customs around honoring and thanking them, is that they’re supposed to

The encrypted messaging platform, Telegram, is terrible security-wise, despite advertising itself as being secure; don't use it. Use Signal instead (for iPhone/iOS (https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/signal-private-messenger/id874139669) and Android (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.thoughtcrime.securesms).) Why Telegram should not

This will certainly become an eclectic list, but here's a list of patterns/moves/ideas that can be applied to various situations. (And yes, that sounds as abstract as I want it to be.) 1. When storing many pieces of data, and this data may be appended to,

Important insights and comedic brilliance from Barrett Brown: > Lately I’ve been getting garbled reports of hoverboards, as well as some sort of new fascist movement that could conceivably take control of the White House this year, though I find it difficult to believe that the boards actually float

<img id="cryptag" src="/files/cryptag/appGrid.png"> CrypTag: Encrypted, Taggable, Searchable Cloud Storage The Vision Goal #1: to enable every internet user to securely access all their data from all their devices without trusting any intermediaries (such as the company storing the data)

To generate a valid SSL certificate via LetsEncrypt that could be used by Nginx to host this (Ghost) blog, I ran: (I had to stop Nginx because letsencrypt-auto momentarily starts a webserver on port 80 to do its thang.) I then modified my Nginx config to use SSL (and redirect

Read this VERY important interview with two NSA whistleblowers about a program one of them created at the NSA, called ThinThread, that the NSA didn't want to use because it was so efficient and automated that it would eliminate the need for lucrative contracts to be given to

Hi! I'm Steven Phillips: techno-activist, computer programmer, and philosopher. I love ambitious people, democratizing forces, and revolutionary projects. Intro The two life accomplishments I'm most proud of are the creation of Executable Philosophy (http://www.executablephilosophy.org/), a new philosophical methodology that enables us to compute

Why does privacy matter? The most common thing people say when asked about privacy is, > "I don't have anything to hide." The way I see it is: activists are the immune system of society. If activists' efforts to make the world a better (or

First of all, if you can avoid using Skype, do so, as it has been backdoored by Microsoft for the NSA (http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/11/microsoft-nsa-collaboration-user-data) and is no longer secure, and does not provide the best experience even if you want your convo to be