About

I’m an seasoned nerd, semi-professional programmer, sort of a gamer, music lover and beer drinker with a weird taste. This is my blog, where I write mostly about technology these days. It’s basically a notebook for some tweaks I would otherwise forget.

I used to write about society and culture as well, but the older I get, the less I understand either one of them.

Contact

If you want to contact me, I like plain old email. You can also encrypt it with my public PGP/GPG key. The key is listed on my Keybase page and the correct fingerprint is:

2DB7 5FE3 3D56 858F 68B0 A237 2DE8 1C17 4CE1 2F06

I am happy to confirm this fingerprint by phone or SMS.

Other pages related to me

Email and chat

  • Email (There’s also a ProtonMail account, send me an email to the normal one if you want the ProtonMail address)
  • Matrix: I am @psy-q:matrix.psy-q.ch

Why encrypt email?

Email is a very insecure communication medium, it’s even less private than a postcard. Any person and any mail server along the way can read everything you write, servers can manipulate any message you send, and you’d never notice unless someone makes you aware of it. Only encryption guarantees that you can communicate privately using email. Treat unencrypted email like writing on a wall in public, because it’s no more secure or private than that.

In addition, email services run by surveillance capitalist companies like Google mine your messages to create personal profiles. Encryption prevents you from getting exploited like this.

If you absolutely have to use an insecure webmail system such as Gmail, Outlook.com, GMX or Yahoo!, please consider installing Mailvelope and encrypting your messages in your browser.

You could also consider moving to a webmail provider that respects your privacy and offers full mailbox encryption. Some examples are:

It is arguably less secure to use message encryption in the browser, so if you want to go absolutely sure, you would be better off using a local email client with encryption:

  • Thunderbird: Has encryption built in.
  • Claws-Mail: Has encryption available using the PGP/Mime plugin.
  • KMail: Has encryption built in.
  • Apple Mail: Use GPGTools.
  • Outlook/Outlook Express: Support for privacy and encryption is not good on Windows. This might be a testatement to how little respect for your privacy Microsoft has. The Gpg4win project has managed to add GPG encryption at least to some older 32-bit versions of Outlook, but you might want to try Claws-Mail for Windows instead.

Once you have an email client that can encrypt messages, you just need to import my public key. Please point me at your public key in your first message so I can send an encrypted reply as well.

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