Recent content on Diyar Ciftci 🇵🇸
Having an email address especially one that is publicly announced like mine, you should expect spam emails. I generally don’t get many but this one was stupid and funny in my opinion so it deserved a short post about it. The TLDR of the story is people trying to make you pay tonnes of money to supposedly purchase a Chinese version of your domain name before another company who is already…
I hate cloudflare so fucking much. In return for providing a few nice services, they fucked up the internet. What Can they provide? They can provide a lot. Here are a few things. Content delivery networking Distributed denial of service protection Web application firewall SSL Load balancing Analytics Bot management A lot of their services are provided for free. This naturally brings in many users.…
I’ve added an important change so have set this as a repost. In the UK, I think a majority of the people that live here believe free speech in a society is a good thing but they also want harsh limits on free speech and it is constantly being further restricted. In my view, there isn’t really a difference between free speech and thought. One depends on the other and if you can’t…
The gemini protocol is an alternative communication protocol to options like HTTP or gopher. It is currently considered feature complete and works quite well. Gemini is a protocol heavier than gopher, lighter than the web, aims for high power to weight ratio, takes user privacy seriously and isn’t looking to replace either gopher or HTTP. They have an FAQ answering many common questions. It…
The focus of this post is on “universal” package management systems. There are a lot of these. Some make sense but a lot of them are very flawed and just makes package management more difficult on a system. Learning Normal Package Managers Normal package managers like apt and pacman can sometimes be annoying too. It means that if you use various different distributions that are…
You may want to use a custom kernel because the normal version you can get from the repos aren’t very good for you. They may have unnecessary parts included or do not support some kind of very specific hardware you have. You can also test out patches and provide feedback, disable something that is causing a conflict, and possibly increase the speed of your machine by a small amount.…
Sometimes you may want to use a cloud storage provider or service operated by someone else instead of hosting them yourself but you do not want anyone other than your intended recipients to be able to read that data. Some programs are designed this way using things like E2EE but what are you supposed to do when you want to use a service that doesn’t do this for you or critically fails…
Last Edited 2025-10-11 Steganography is the act of hiding information within something else. As you can see from the wikipedia page, it comes in many forms like with numbers revealed under different colours or Jeremiah Denton blinking “TORTURE” in morse code when he was held as a prisoner of war. For this post, I will be focusing on steganography in digital forms. I will not cover all…
Ed is a very basic line-oriented text editor. When other CLI editors like nano, vim, ne, emacs or tilde are not available on a UNIX-like system, it is very likely ed will be so it is a good idea to learn to use this basic program. Below is an example of me doing some simple editing with ed. # Create file touch textfile.txt # Edit file with the prompt '->'. It will output current size of file (0…
Onionshare Tor is a useful program for secure and anonymous communication with other people. There is a GUI and CLI for this program. Read the documentation for more information. Tor Onionshare uses the tor network. You can set various options regarding this in the program including using a bridge if tor is censored in your country and to auto-connect to the network. Options After connecting, you…
Setting up a minecraft server isn’t hard but it really depends on what you want your minecraft server to be like. This post goes over some things but I will not go into extreme detail on each point because this post will be needlessly long and parts will become outdated very quickly. Requirements The minimum requirement is to have a computer that works. That is pretty much it. It is only as…
Some services you use may operate a warrant canary. There are pros and cons to using one. It is an implicit way to inform users if the service has been served with a subpoena. The idea of a canary comes from a little while ago. I think it is fitting to use it in the way it is used today. A mechanism to test for unsafe conditions, originating from the use of canaries in coal mines to detect…
Whonix Tor is a high security (and anonymity focused) operating system ran as a virtual machine. In this post, I am going over installing it on a system with debian as the host with KVM. If you are confused about any steps, just refer to the documentation. I am following this page. I’ve already got KVM set up properly on my system so I am skipping that part. Download And Verify I do not have…
Simply put, Metadata is data about data. Metadata is the information surrounding something rather than the thing itself. For example the metadata of a picture could be when it was taken, what device it was taken with, the location the picture was taken and a lot of other information but the picture of what you took isn’t metadata. Inspection + Removal A useful program I recommend is exiftool…
Last Edited 2025-10-11 Randomness is very useful for various things in computing. Trying to get a better random value is critical depending on use case. Use Case There are many circumstances where randomness is useful. A lot of the time, users don’t see that it is being used so they can’t see how important it is. Simulate various physical, chemical and biological phenomenon that are…
In this post, I’ll be going over a few things to do when building your own computer. After years of learning other things too, building a desktop for myself today is trivial. First time I built my own desktop was a little difficult but it isn’t really as hard as some people expect it to be. The TLDR is to just get the parts and put it together. You will of course need a screw driver…
Qubes Tor is a very unique system and very secure (depending on usage). It a system of many machines within it to separate your computer usage into different virtual machines (various qubes) with Xen as its hypervisor instead of KVM which I am more used to. There are a few different operating systems the qubes ISO comes included with but you have options to add others. To learn for yourself, you…
rEFInd is a very handy program I use. As described on the website, rEFInd is a boot manager and not a boot loader. This program is very useful in setups such as multi-boot on a macbook, for a hackintosh setup and generally for setups where you have several disks and want a single, simple boot manager to choose what to boot on your system. When I have confronted issues when trying to boot on my…
Arch installation is very easy since archinstall. This post shows a simple installation in a VM. I went to the downloads page and selected to download the ISO from a mirror of my choice which was mirrorservice.org. Follow the instructions on this page if you want to verify your download. If installing on hardware, write the ISO to a flash drive as described in the arch wiki and select to boot from…
I will be going over a simple network installation of debian from a minimal CD. If you want to have an easier install from a live environment with the right desktop and some handy pre-installed programs, please go with the live install images. There is a good install manual too. I am going with the amd64 ISO (currently version 11.6.0). I am installing in a VM. If installing on hardware, write the…
You usually need a media player on a system and mpv is my favourite. Other media players like VLC are still good but I prefer mpv. No Telemetry Unlike some other media players, mpv does not collect any information about its users. No opt-in or opt-out for it. It’s a pointless waste of bandwidth and doesn’t feel required anyways. Simple And Powerful Mpv has a very simple UI that is easy…
Web browsers are very useful but choosing the right one and using one safely isn’t always easy. A lot of people today use computers and a large portion of their time is spent in the browser so people should be careful. Thank you to @pleo:matrix.org for recommending this topic to write about. Browser Choice There are many browsers to choose from even if a majority use the same engine…
Navigating the I2P network has been made very easy with addressbooks. Addressbooks help to find new eepsites you may be interested in and helps with not having to remember a very lengthy address. For clients, please look at my previous post. Address Length + Discovery A base32 address is determined by a base64 address for the eepsite. The b32 address is still too long for most people to remember…
Last edited 2025-10-11 When I first heard about this, I didn’t think it made much sense. When I was using virtualbox on a macbook running windows, I could see the performance degradation inside the VM in comparison to normal system use on the host machine. With GPU passthrough, I can’t really tell the difference between host and guest machine performance anymore (in most scenarios). It…
Installing gentoo isn’t as hard as people describe. People get very elitist about what distro they use, what init system, if they use a tiling window manager and so on but the truth is I don’t think anyone cares. There is a place for everything so use what is right for you. Gentoo is a source-based distribution so expect a lot of time spent compiling programs especially if you are…
I think a majority of crypto currencies are not valuable as a currency and are run with pump and dump schemes that a lot of people end up fooling for. There are stupid things like stable coins that aren’t stable and meme coins. A lot of people don’t use crypto currencies as a currency for buying and selling things but instead trying to profit with buying when it’s cheap and…
This is one of the coolest types of denial of service I’ve seen and I had to make a short post on it. Usually with a denial of service attack, you need a fast internet connection to make a server unusable or where they are limiting speed per machine or you need a lot more, you need to DDoS with a botnet preferably personal computers (for residential IPs). A slow loris attack in comparison…
When I go to a URL linked to by my search engine or visit my usual websites that I have saved, it shouldn’t download over 15 MB before it starts to function or push my CPU usage to 100% when I look at htop. A lot of websites today load a lot of things that users don’t want and ruin the experience of browsing the web. One major thing is trackers which I am not completely against but…
Setting easy to remember, hard to guess passwords isn’t as difficult as people say. Making strange passwords that are hard to remember but aren’t very strong is something a lot of people do. Using a passphrase is a better idea. An XKCD comic gets the point across. You can go to dicewareto generate one, generate one in a password manager such as KeePassXC or you can pick up a physical…
Data that is “deleted” on most operating systems isn’t genuinely deleted from the disk. The data on the disk is still very much there. The place where it was stored on disk is marked to be overwritten when disk space is needed by another program. Depending on the size of the file and how much space is available on the disk, it may be recoverable with no damage or partly…
If you want to securely and anonymously access a machine, this may be for you. You may not want to do this if you want a very responsive experience. This is done on debian so change commands to what is required to make it work on your own system whether with different package manager than apt, different init system than systemd, etc. This does not require opening any ports on your router.
In comparison to countries such as Iran and China, internet censorship isn’t too bad here in the UK. However, blocking does still occur much more often than countries like the USA. Censorship is usually done with a good motive behind it but it causes a lot more harm in many scenarios. Traffic Discrimination Depending on which ISP you choose, they may throttle or block different types of…
There are many reasons why it is a good idea to create your own website and I will go over some that I think are very important. This goes for most people including people that have nothing to do with software engineering. The only people that I think shouldn’t have one are those that want nothing to do with modern technology such as mormons, serious orthodox jews etc. It Isn’t Very…
I use signal because it is a simple private messenger that looks to be secure. I started using it long before a lot of the drama with whatsapp. It is very friendly so getting other people to move to this isn’t too difficult. However, some people may not like the default client but there are some options. With all of these, accounts with phone numbers are still required and the service is…
Last edited 2023-05-14 Thanks to notbob for the suggested edits. You can email them at notbob@i2pmail.org or notbob@mail.i2p (within I2P network) for any questions you may have. Other contact methods are listed on their eepsite. If you do not know what I2P is, read the wiki. There may be other clients but the three that matter most is I2P with java, I2P+ with java and I2PD with C++. I2P looks…
TempleOS isn’t really your daily use operating system of today but it is a very interesting, fun, lightweight and easy to use system. This OS is said to be the prophesied third temple. It was written entirely by Terry A. Davis and it is his final gift to us. He wrote the compiler, the language it runs on (HolyC), the kernel, several games (unfun and fun), etc. Everything runs in ring 0 and…
On most Linux systems, sudo is a pre-installed program. Sudo is a very large program and for what most people use it for, it doesn’t have to be so complex. It being such a large program means vulnerabilities come up more often. For a program almost all Linux systems have, its CVE reports don’t look very good. If you want to run a program as root from a normal user account, use doas.
The UK government are on the attack against E2EE again. I’m sick and tired of out of touch politicians trying to get these draconian bills passed. They don’t seem to care how much harm bills like this can cause against companies and their users. But They Aren’t Banning E2EE In some sense they are but overall no they aren’t because it’s even worse than that. They argue…
Setting a simple tor service up isn’t too difficult. The tor project has their own page Tor for it and you can find many other places on the internet telling you how like this from riseup. Below is an example I have with nginx for the web server on a debian based system (apt for package manager). Text editing is done with nano in this example. Use whatever you want (vim, gedit).
If you want to hide what packages you are downloading, this is a nice way to do that. #install required packages apt update && apt-get install tor apt-transport-tor -y After installing, edit all repositories listings (/etc/apt.sources.list , /etc/apt/sources.list.d/* , etc.) adding “tor+” before “http://”. Example below. deb tor+https://deb.debian.org/debian bullseye main…
Last edit 2025-10-11 For this, I am not going to be talking about any mobile phone OS like android or embedded systems like libreCMC. Distro Hopping When I entered the linux world at first, I did this and it is one of the most stupid things to do. Look at this linux distro tree (png). There are so many distros and many are created and abandoned. Many do not hold any special purpose.
Smart homes are becoming a bigger thing over time and I don’t really like them a whole lot. A lot of people that end up buying and setting these up don’t think a whole lot about the negative consequences. Security A lot of these devices like smart cameras, lights, thermostats, etc. have to be connected to your network and have internet access. Many of the companies that produce these…
A VPN isn’t a bad thing but the way in which they are usually advertised to people are. A VPN isn’t for the purpose they advertise. What these companies are advertising is a glorified proxy. Logging They can and probably do log. Any that say they don’t could just lie. They can’t acquire everything but they can collect a reasonable amount of information. Security and Privacy…
I dislike using cell phones for many different reasons and for me, I can’t find one I can like to use. Repairability Companies that produce these devices intentionally make it more difficult to repair the device you purchased by implementing DRM and making exclusive deals for parts manufacturers to not provide them for anyone else. With this, the user is forced to go the company for any…
Last edited 2025-10-11 Guns in the United Kingdom can be a sensitive subject. After events such as the Dunblane massacre and Hungerford massacre (committed with legal firearms), gun laws became much stricter and they have continued to become stricter over the years. Currently, the process to get a gun in the UK means you have to meet various criteria and will take a lot of time. In this, I may use…
Last edited 2025-10-11 I thought it would be good to create my own site to talk about what’s on my mind or what I am doing and make some services available to people. Where I can, I will try to keep the site light and accessible. If you have discovered an issue or would like to request something, please contact me. I’m utilizing several networks so this site can be reached by people…