Privacy

Ditching Google Analytics for GoatCounter

Analytics Doesn’t Require Tracking

As a very fast follow to my previous post, I’ve now ditched Google Analytics as well. As I noted there, I was interested in privacy-respecting alternatives, so I found quite a few interesting ones.

The options I considered were Plausible, Offen, and GoatCounter. I ended up choosing GoatCounter because it provides a free SaaS tier for strictly personal use websites, which this is. Plausible looks super slick, but is $4/mo even for my minimal traffic, which is almost what I pay every month for hosting. It’s just too much for a low-traffic personal website, unfortunately.

Replacing Disqus with Commento.io

If You’re Not The Customer, Then You’re The Product

You’ve probably heard this statement before, and I don’t know that it’s always true, but it’s become something of an axiom in the web/internet space. It’s true enough in the ways that matter, though, and that brings us to the topic of the day.

Today a post made it to the front page of HackerNews written by Supun Kavinda on his blog entitled “Disqus, the dark commenting system”. Thanks to the comments on HN about this post, I found out that I had somehow missed an announcement that Disqus was acquired by an ad-tech company in 2017, probably while I was still traveling and actively updating this site. I was also apalled by how user-hostile the tracking behavior of Disqus is.

Setting up OpenVPN on CentOS 7 using DigitalOcean

Introduction

Why Bother?

As should be abundantly clear from my prior writings I am about to leave on a trip for a year. During that time I’ll likely be making use of numerous public Wi-Fi access points, not to mention whatever dodgy cellular providers are available in each location I travel to. As part of my overall stance on privacy, its essential I take steps to secure my communication while traveling, the primary of which is using a VPN for basically everything on both my laptop and my phone. To do this, I’m using a droplet from DigitalOcean that’s just $5/mo and doesn’t have to be shared with anyone else (from an IP/network perspective anyway).

Setting Up a Macbook for an OpSec Focused Developer - Part 2

Introduction

My apologies for the delay in posting part 2. I encountered a few chicken-and-egg problems in that I wanted to write this update from my new Macbook but needed complete the remainder of the setup in order to have a comfortable and secure environment to do so from. Without further ado, on to the meat of it.

Organization

I’m breaking this article up into several parts to both assist me in the process of writing it and to make it easier to digest. I’m taking some steps out of order, but am making an effort to organize them into the most logical order possible.

Setting Up a Macbook for an OpSec Focused Developer - Part 1

Introduction

That time has come again, and I have acquired a new Macbook Pro. In this case its primarily in preparation for my trip so that I can edit photos effectively on the go. It replaces my aged 2011 Macbook Air (which has served me well). It seems an opportune time then to write up my process for setting up a Macbook, and with a particular focus on security.

Organization

I’m breaking this article up into several parts to both assist me in the process of writing it and to make it easier to digest. I’m taking some steps out of order, but am making an effort to organize them into the most logical order possible.

The Ops Approach to Linux Server Security

This post was originally a response to a question I received from a friend via email, with some additions. I’m not going to try to get very in-depth here, this is more of a high-level overview of what you should be doing to secure a server running Linux. This is mainly focused on a business environment where you have multiple users and multiple servers (and are hopefully using configuration management software).