This is the story of how my online-addled brain misfired some neurons and an objectively dumb and bad idea was created. That idea would bounce around inside my skull much like the DVD logo screensaver on an old TV for the better part of a week before I decided it needed to be removed, the only way I knew how: by making it a reality. This is the story of Stonks.info - Info about Stonks.
It’s hard to pretend that privacy isn’t important these days when every other day there’s another story about a data breach leaking millions of peoples’ private data into the public when they were really meant to be shipped off to a government surveillance program, or that Facebook was again lying and selling your account security phone number to every company who had spare change to spend on it, or some other equally dystopian nightmare. Unfortunately there’s not a lot any individual person can do to prevent that sort of stuff (except maybe deleting your Facebook, which you should definitely do), but you can limit what you do out in the open by encrypting everything.
In this week’s installment of Extremely Justified TBH Privacy Paranoia Theater, we’ll take a look at making sure one of the most popular download tools isn’t broadcasting to everyone in between your ethernet port and your peers in Estonia what kind of weird torrents you’re into.
The web is a wild, untamable mass of infinitely shareable information. It was designed to be entirely open; anything on it would be downloadable by anyone else with a connection. This is the reason your browser has a “Save image” menu option when you right click a photo and not even the most proprietary-focused, litigious, IP-clutching companies can do anything about it. So when I headed over to the album that my friend’s wedding photographer had posted, and saw that right clicking was blocked, I was filled with the spirit of Free Software and a self-righteous drive to free these photos from their DRM-ish prison.
As I’ve mentioned a few times, I have a PLEX server full of delicious, nutritious content. Thanks to an update some time ago, I can easily share this content with my friends and family via their own PLEX accounts, so that I don’t have to go handing out my server admin login info, or deal with seeing suggestions for all the stupid crap they watch.
In my real job, we use Jenkins to build our junk. Actually, two instances of Jenkins (don’t ask). Actually, two instances of Jenkins that write artifacts to a Maven repository and also to a special location in Perforce (seriously, don’t ask). We live in a strange world somewhere between a number of build tools and processes standardized within the company and usually end up using some combination of them that we duct tape together with some python code, shell scripts, and happy thoughts.
