Thu, Nov 22, 2018
Web server access logs keep track of the addresses of computers that made connections to your server - in other words: Who is visiting your web site. I always thought that it’s not really necessary to record the individual IP addresses of everyone - it’s private data and you usually don’t even use it. Also it may even be a violation of the European GDPR directive.
Unfortunately the popular web server nginx is preconfigured to record this information and it’s not trivial to turn the feature off. This is especially so if you want to keep some form of identification in order to be able to identify groups of requests in your access log that originated from the same computer (e.g. when debugging).
These instructions let you configure your nginx server to record IP addresses in a »fuzzy« form, which is anonymous but still allows some debugging.
Mon, Oct 22, 2018
Bei Jugend Hackt, einem Event für junge Menschen, die sich fürs Basteln und Programmieren interessieren, habe ich am letzten Wochenende Metawahl vorgestellt. In dem Video stelle ich kurz das Projekt vor und gebe dann einen ultrakurzen Überblick, wie man sich mit einem Crawler Informationen aus dem Web zusammensuchen kann um daraus etwas neues zu bauen.
Mon, Oct 1, 2018
Auf Metawahl gibt es jetzt eine Prognose zur gewählten Politik bei der Landtagswahl in Bayern diesen Monat. Interessanterweise gab
es wieder hauptsächlich Fragen, die so, oder so ähnlich, auch in anderen Ausgaben
des Wahl-o-Mat gestellt wurden.
Ein paar Sachen sind mir dabei gleich aufgefallen:
Mon, Sep 17, 2018
I have written about building an Arduino-based soil monitoring system
and how to predict time until next watering with linear regression.
Yet, to see these results I had to shutdown the Arduino every morning, remove
the SD card it was logging data to, copy that to my computer and run the
analysis script. That should be wireless!
So I setup a bot for Telegram messenger that I can ask for the
current measurements.
Mon, Sep 17, 2018
In the last post I wrote a follow-along to building
an Arduino-based soil monitoring system. In this post I want to write about how
I used linear regression to predict how much time is left until the plants are
dry again.
Hibiskus wet (56.40%)
Walnuss wet (50.18%)
Dieffenb B 2 days (53.21%)
Dieffenb H 3 days (64.22%)
Yucca 7 days (45.06%)
Edit: After running this for two weeks I found the predictions to be very
unreliable and not very useful. Sometimes the sensor values fall continuously
and then it works great, but often the influence of sun/warmth on the readings
makes them unpredictable.
Thu, Sep 6, 2018
Another thing I wanted to have since I was maybe 5 years old? PLANTS with MICROCHIPS! Probably the hardest part about keeping my green friends alive is making sure that they get enough water even when I am busy with other stuff, on vacation, etc etc. Now that there are cheap Arduinos to have it has gotten quite easy to realise this!
Wed, May 23, 2018
Cellphones make available large amounts of personal information about you in public airspace. I propose building a metadata petting zoo to raise awareness for this issue and some possible solutions.
This broadcasting of metadata is a necessity for you using your phone. It cannot be disabled until cellphone technology is recreated from the ground up with privacy in mind. It doesn’t require hidden surveillance technology but makes use of the most common network systems such as Wifi, LTE, GSM and Bluetooth.
Mon, May 14, 2018
Everyone should have a button on their computer that reads “make a new website”. This is one of the things that the Dat project is working on with the Beaker browser: Making it easy to self-publish content on the web without using centralized infrastructure services from the likes of Google and Amazon.
As I create this blog using Hugo, a static site generator, I thought it should be pretty easy to make it available on Dat.
Tue, Apr 24, 2018
Vincent Bernat writes about the replacements he used to make his blog more privacy aware instead of relying on an abundance of external services. Whatever.
read A more privacy-friendly blog
Thu, Apr 12, 2018
Cal Newport beschreib Silicon Valley’s tiefen Glauben daran, dass man die Menschheit mithilfe von Technologie verbessern kann. Dabei geht es nicht nur darum, Leiden aus der Welt zu schaffen, sondern auch darum, das Gute im Menschen zu vervielfachen. Wenn Menschen Bekanntschaften knüpfen und sich vernetzen um gute Dinge zu tun, dann könne es nur gut sein, wenn man dieses ins Extreme katapultiert und alle Menschen miteinander verbindet. Er bezieht sich dabei auf ein Memo eines Facebook-Ingenieurs, in welchem dieser seine Beobachtung beschreibt, das genau dies Facebooks DNA ist, das undiskrimierende Vernetzen aller Menschen überhaupt.
I read these lines as arguing that the natural state of human interaction is hopelessly irrational and ineffective. Facebook hopes to replace this “fragmented” state of human sociality with something better; something that spans borders and languages; something that offers many more connections; something that can leverage big data and smart AI to direct our relationships in an optimal manner.
This vision is classic High Modernism — merely shifted from city cores and farm fields to the digital realm. It should, therefore, scare the hell out of us.
If you went back in time 15 years, and showed James Scott a draft of Boz’s vision, Scott would almost certainly warn you that an attempt to reshape something as fundamental and messy as human sociality with a “better” technological solution would backfire in unexpected, dark, and painful ways.
http://calnewport.com/blog/2018/04/11/the-disturbing-high-modernism-of-silicon-valley/