Geek Blight

Not long ago, Flickr changed their terms of use and now free plan users can upload up to 1 TB of images, and videos too provided they are not more than 3 minutes long. I took this as an opportunity to have a remote backup of my family pictures.

The upload process is slow but I’ve uploaded more than 3,000 pictures already. I’ve been uploading them with restricted permissions so only future friends and family members can look at them, which is probably a futile exercise after the NSA debacle that started at the beginning of this month. (original story). I stopped uploading at that moment.

One of the last analysis of this situation comes from Bruce Schneier and reached the front page of Hacker News today. I second his words completely and would like to stress how this matter gives ammo to dictators and freedom haters all over the world to partly legitimize their crimes.

I remember watching Cao de Benós being interviewed in a Spanish TV show (sorry, I couldn’t find this interview with English subtitles) defending the North Korean regime. It was painful to watch him debate and being able to attack our supposedly perfect and free society so easily thanks to the double standards, incompetence and malice of our own governments. Not good for anyone.

Also somewhat related to this story, the last few days I’ve been re-learning a few basic cryptography concepts because I’m writing a toy application that will help me keep a password-encrypted diary or log (based on AES-256), with entries sorted by time and a bookmarks facility that will allow it to double as a notes application. It’s being written in Python2 and will use PyCrypto and a simple Tk GUI. I hope to get the details right and will look for advice in the last steps. So far, the very simple backend is almost finished and I’ll start writing the GUI soon.