Don't Use Wable.com

Don't buy/rent servers from wable.com. Why? Several reasons: The way they set up automatic backups is clearly a scheme to nickel and dime you »

Political Change via Strategic Voting

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 »

Face it: Hillary Clinton is Terrible

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 »

Black Lives Matter Surveillance

Black Lives Matter activists are under surveillance from various parts of the government. Excerpt from an ACLU petition to stop said surveillance: By trolling Facebook, Twitter »

Good

Good things that have happened in the world: 2016.05.19: Marxist economist Richard Wolff made this amazing video about how class works in the US »

ProtonMail: Quick Review

I just signed up for ProtonMail to try it out. Here are my first impressions. [EDIT: I was pretty harsh in this review, but I now »

They're Watching You

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 »

Portfolio

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 »

Welfare

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 »

Surveillance

Why is surveillance dangerous? From this Amnesty International blog post: Amnesty reports on human rights violations worldwide. Our researches rely on confidential sources – witnesses and victims »

Go

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 »

Tools

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 »

Quotes

"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 »

Telegram

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 and Android.) Why »

Patterns

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 »

Barrett Brown

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 »

CrypTag

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 »

LetsEncrypt on Nginx

To generate a valid SSL certificate via LetsEncrypt that could be used by Nginx to host this (Ghost) blog, I ran: git clone https://github.com »

Paris Attacks

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 »

Bio

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 »

Privacy

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 »

Skype

First of all, if you can avoid using Skype, do so, as it has been backdoored by Microsoft for the NSA and is no longer secure »

Guns

EDIT: Scroll down to see countervailing data compared to what I talk about here first. The disparity in homicide rates and gun control laws showed "gun »

CSR

Here's how to generate an SSL CSR: export domain=YOURDOMAINHERE openssl genrsa -out ${domain}.key 4096 && openssl req -new -key ${domain}.key -out ${domain »

Upgrade Tor

Got a Tor relay you set up during the Tor Challenge or before? Run these commands to upgrade: sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install deb.torproject »