My grandfathers (no longer alive)

Looking or peeking or browsing through old physical albums, in the celebration of my birth I found this rare photo of my grandfathers (there’s a warm embrace but they were not close, except in this photograph)

“Color-corrected grandpas,” someone has sent me. “They looked way too orange.”

Via Techrights

From our wedding (and beyond) album

VER a decade ago the mainstream (corporate) media brainwashed people into thinking they needed to hand over their personal photos to surveillance companies. In return, they would get “likes”. Is this a good exchange? No!

Less than a decade ago I set up this album for our wedding. It wasn’t the first as I had already set up a similar album in 2004 (last updated 2005 or more than 17 years ago!).

A few weeks ago our wedding (and beyond) album exceeded 5,000,000 views. We didn’t need anything like Facebook/Instagram or Flickr to share our photos. This site is not self-hosted in the sense that I host it from home (sending large images upstream from a residential copper connection would not work); but at least it’s controlled by us at the domain level. More people should quit social control media (I did completely, only months ago) and invest in their own presence online. Stop renting. Take control. There is no such thing as free hosting. The Net is not a charitable project.

VER the past two decades I’ve done a lot of activism, which intensified over time. This Web site was created in 2002, modeled at first or branched off some academic format. I actually copied one of my lecturers’ layout, which was a simple heading, mug, followed by a list of interests. It was hosted in another domain, not this one. Months after I had started my Ph.D. (and having been asked about that other domain) I decided to register my surname in the .com namespace. Since then I’ve posted a lot of stuff here, but a lot more in other sites, which aren’t personal. As I recall it (vaguely), this site started in October 2002 and by 2003 it looked like this already. Not much has changed in that page since. schestowitz.com is generally quite outdated, most of the pages here are from my early 20s, but at least it’s still working and I’m very pleased with my webhost.

ur reckless, corrupt regime (there’s a reason why Borisnaro gets canned) seems to have adopted the “herd immunity” mentality/pathology. Yes, “COVID coming soon! To you too!”

“COVID FOR EVERYONE!”

Is there any sincere effort to curb the spread and protect people?

No.

Are people here still keeping distance and wearing mask?

No. Few do. Usually older and more vulnerable people. But to be protected they need other people to wear maskS and not spread droplets etc. That’s not happening.

The government is one step away not from actively discouraging inter-personal distance and masks (which harms the spying agenda).

For those of us wishing to know how bad things really are there’s ONS, not NHS. It suggests that an average classroom now has one person infected. Not a recovered person but an actively-infected person. An infection vector. This is crazy. This is not acceptable.

Now watch this:

We were meant to have full data updates available “Wednesday at 4pm commencing on 6 July 2022″ (and every week after that). So why is the portal being neglected, as shown above (promise) and below (reality)? We’re intentionally left in the dark as COVID-19 spins out of control across the nation (all my siblings and my parents got infected already… despite trying to avoid it; my mom got infected more than once).

This is what the official portal looks like right now:

That’s 9 days ago already. Promise broken. The “new normal” is nihilism and mass death.

t is no secret that I turned 40 just several months ago. I said it openly several times. I’m not ashamed of it. I think I’ve accomplished a lot over the past 20 years (the first 20 were mostly spent growing up and developing educationally).

Back in the old days, well before exceedingly toxic political discourse, wars/conflicts, a serious pandemic and high inflation (or dare we say hyperinflation; it’s almost 20% per annum in Estonia! Even a large economy like The Netherlands saw 12% inflation!) I thought to myself, “when can I retire?”

The decision not to have kids goes a long, long way back. Seeing the direction the world has taken, it was the right decision (for me anyway).

Over the past few years I thought about part timing, as I’ve worked full time for nearly a decade already (maybe a full decade this summer) and I’ve been at the same employer for 11.5 years (milestone coming soon, some time this summer, August 12 being the exact date if I recall correctly).

I still wish to more extensively focus on freedom-fighting activism in the digital realm. It’s a lot more important, not from a “legacy” point of view; it’s just a lot more satisfying and personally rewarding than working for clients. It’s a community effort rather than a corporate objective.

This post isn’t a “Why I Left Sirius” post (or “Leaving the Job To Do Techrights Full Time”); I still need a job, I need to save money, and my wife does too. I’m not resigning. But I might have more free time.

The decisions aren’t only mine. It’s personal. Some I cannot talk about.

But we both made a decision earlier this year; whatever the outcome, we need to focus on our sites, notably Tux Machines (just turned 18) and Techrights (turning 16 this year). Those sites are important for many reasons, to a lot of people. These people want to emancipate themselves from proprietary shackles, not working for proprietary software companies (or with proprietary tools) all day long.

At the same time, professional life has changed somewhat. Back when I joined this company we used OpenLDAP (broadly used, not underused), Jabber (self-hosted) etc. But a lot of our Free software-centric workforce left (yes, brain drain), so now there’s Gulag (Google disservices/spyware), AWS (NSA tandemocracy), Slack (Saleforce ‘surveillance capitalism’), LastPass (outsourcing passwords to untrustworthy parties) and some other proprietary junk. The name of the company is still the same, we generally support Free software, but the tooling isn’t compatible with the mission (like deploying Moodle on Microsoft/Azure, which is proprietary ‘surveillanceware’; Moodle is good, but putting it on Microsoft servers can lead to misuse of pupils’ data). If one wants to spread Free software to loan sharks, surveillance and military outfits (or even criminals like Bill Gates), then fine… good luck with that.

That Bill Gates did this under an NDA (that I did not sign) is strange enough, especially considering the timing. Many mysterious things happened around that time, including corporate bullying. Being an NDA, it’s shrouded in secrecy, leaving one always guessing, at best… about all sorts of hypothetical possibilities… not a suitable working condition for a company that’s open or transparent.

If things worsen in terms of pay, in terms of skills (we think we can see where this is going) we’re advancing not real computer skills but dependence (people can do more than just pick up the phone).

When I joined in early 2011 we had some high-profile people on board, even Debian Developers (back when becoming a DD meant something, nowadays an increasingly political decision and vetting deficiencies give room for state actors). That’s no longer the case.

Meanwhile, my workload associated with personal projects has increased to the point where I can hardly travel (too many activities require physical access inside the home). We still need to renovate the sites (upgrading things in the process), I want to sleep better, I need to become more active in and around IRC, and I wish to produce more articles and videos. I used to aim for a dozen a day, but when working full time it’s just too difficult to maintain that as a daily pace (as opposed to occasional “bursts” or “marathons”).

When I started writing in the non-personal sites, third-party sites, and this site (and in various other sites) I was still a student. Then, I was partly employed. Over the past decade it has been full time work, so a lot of potential (e.g. to write) was not fulfilled. I left social control media almost 5 months ago, freeing up a lot of time. The next stage might be reducing the number of hours per week that I work. Maybe a long overdue change. Maybe not even that… the decision is not purely mine.

Personal autonomy and freedom are connected to self-determination in digital realm, more so over time. Many decisions were made without consulting the staff, the technical people, choosing trends and brands over substance and fake (perceived, shallow) security over real security. I spoke openly and candidly about it. It’s the moral thing to do.