Tag: security

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In the whole blogroll and rss feed nudging of the last few days after Crafting {:} a Life, Luisa Carbonelli alerted me that my blog hasn’t updated in 41 months….according to the Feedly rss reader. And when I tried it myself I got the same result: ‘unreachable’.

That seemed odd, so I took a look at my server logs. Indeed Feedly requests for my feed all get a ‘403 not allowed’ response.

My server’s error log shows the reason why. Because feedly in its request says it is ‘like Feedfetcher-Google’, it triggers a filter to block bad bots. After all there’s no Feedfetcher-Google anymore, so anything pretending to be it can be denied access.

However Feedly is a useful service, and strictly speaking not even a bot, as it reduces the requests for info for all Feedly followers to just one fetch of my feed.
I submitted a ticket with my hoster asking them to allow Feedly, [UPDATE:] which resolved the issue later today.

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At Re:Publica I came across the Tactical Technology Collective (Info_Activism on Twitter), who do great work to teach journalists, activists and anybody else how to act more securely on the internet.

While for me, and possibly for you, a lot of what we do on the internet is currently uncontroversial (which in no way means we should not be concerned), for a lot of people around the world their safety, and lives, quite literally depend on knowing how to be more secure on the internet.

Upon a first internet search of safety measures you very quickly get to all kinds of arcane tech details you can’t really be bothered with if you’re not in the tech scene. Or you may simply lack the knowledge about what you should be aware of in the first place.

The Berlin based Tactical Technology Collective makes sure journalists, citizen activists and NGO’s do have access to the required knowledge. They make both the explanations and the tech instructions on what to do available in easy and beautifully designed ways.

I took a bunch of their leaflets and bought two of their internet security instruction kits for dissemination and personal use.

Why? Maybe not directly for myself. But there is something to be said to make sure that the ones who need protection do not stand out because they are the only ones taking precautions. That would make them targets by default. Privacy is not a crime, was a t-shirt I saw today at the conference, and that applies here. If only the ones who are under threat wear rain coats they are easy to spot. If more of us wear them, the cost of surveillance rises, and those that need protection have a bit of additional safety in the herd.