Jonas Voss

I 1996 var jeg i Hong Kong. Jeg havde været hjemmefra i 10-11mdrs tid, og kommunikerede hjem til København vha breve, som jeg skrev på stort set hver dag, og sendte omtrent en gang om måneden. Jeg modtog nyheder hjemmefra ved at besøge hovedpostkontoret (General Post Office - GPO) i nogle fastlagte byer langs min vej, som min familie og venner kunne sende post til. Det betød at jeg også fik post hjemmefra cirka en gang om måneden.

I Hong Kong stødte jeg for første gang på en internetcafe og tænkte, at jeg da kunne sende en email til min far, som var den eneste jeg kendte på det tidspunkt, der havde en emailadresse. Vildt fedt, det ville han nok blive begejstret over, tænkte jeg.

Jeg fik en computer på cafeen, en af de ansatte startede noget software (jeg tror det var Netscape Communicator, men kan se den først lige udkom i beta i april 1996, så det er måske lige utroligt nok til at være sandt), og jeg satte mig til rette for at komponere min email.

Jeg beskrev i blomstrende prosa mine eventyr i Oceanien og i Østen. Malende beskrivelser af Australien, Indonesien, Malaysia, Brunei, og Singapore. Om duftene, maden, menneskene, og vejret, som jeg vidste min far gik meget op i, og jeg sad der vel i 45min og skrev lystigt. Da jeg havde fået afsluttet min fortælling indtastede jeg min fars email som modtager, udfyldte emne-feltet, og trykkede send.

Der skete ikke noget, Communicator sagde den forsøgte at kontakte min emailudbyder. Det forsøgte den i et stykke tid, hvorefter den gav op. Hmm, jeg prøvede at trykke 'send' igen. Det samme skete. Jeg kaldte en af de ansatte over til min plads, og spurgte hvorfor den ikke ville sende den omfattende email jeg havde forfattet. "Har du indtastet din email, og din emailudbyders serverdetaljer?" spurgte den ansatte.

Det havde jeg ikke, for jeg havde ingen af delene. Og det var således jeg lærte, at for at sende en email, skal man selv have en emailadresse. Min første email fik jeg først sendt da jeg startede på universitet i september 1997, og senere samme år fik jeg internet hjemme. Desværre kan jeg ikke lige umiddelbart huske hvilken email der rent faktisk var min første, og egentlig er historien om hvad der kunne have været min første email, uden tvivl også bedre.

#internet #nostalgi

• Take the power back is about how we can work our way back to the independent decentralised internet we were supposed to get. The method? "Changing from passive, to active. From scroll to search, from react to rethink, from like and retweet to write and link."  Also, turns out that teenagers today don't know what browsers or URLs are. To them, a browser is this weird app that sometimes pops up, and URLs are these cryptic things you have to write to go somewhere, it's just bad UX really. Proprietary apps is where the internet is, according to them [insert "old man yells at cloud" image here].
• Want to leave Facebook, but don't want to lose the easy access to your friends, relatives and acquaintances? Do you also find it a bit FOMO inducing to leave it all behind? How about making it not worth going there in the first place? I followed a tip on Quora to effectively unfollow everybody in my newsfeed. Now, even when I load Facebook, my feed is empty, but I can keep Facebook as my interactive, self-correcting address book, which it is still very good at.
• Last time I recommended installing EFF's Privacy Badger. I should have also recommended the Disconnect browser extension, which stops a lot of trackers from working on the sites you visit.
• In Cuba, where internet penetration is at 5%, the Sneakernet is one of the most efficient ways of getting information to the rural areas. It's pretty much a weekly "Best of the Internet" on a USB stick that gets distributed around the country. It's called "El Paquete Setimanal", and shows what a curated, infrastructure-less internet can look like. You can see a directory of what was in the one from October 10th, 2016. Informational 7 mins YouTube video on the topic. Academic paper on Cuba's offline internet.
• Do you think it's ok for your 9-year old to take public transport on their own? If you do it in the US, you might end up getting the Child Protection Services sprung on you by concerned citizens, while in Japan, your kid could be part of a TV show about sending kids on their first errand. The reason? A larger sense of social trust and self-reliance in the latter.

#stickylinks

• Ad nauseam is a browser extension meant to click on all the ads that you come across when browsing the web. The philosophy behind it is, that if you click on all the ads that you come across, the advertising profile that will be built from this data, about you, is useless. You have no characteristics. You like everything. If that kind of stuff is interesting to you, you should read the article “Monkeywrenching the Machine”, it's about how you can make it harder for corporate AIs to mine your data. Both are relevant in this day and age. If you prefer something less reactive, you should install EFF's Privacy Badger in your browser. It minimises how much of your activity is trackable online, by blocking ads and trackers. You can also make some internet noise to confuse data collection algorithms.
• I recently spent 3 weeks in Costa Rica on vacation. Fascinating country, warm people, and exotic animals. The Costa Rican address system is also exotic. They don’t really have a formal one, as you do in a city like London. One guesthouse we stayed at had the address “200 meters past the intersection with the church, on a particular road, in this town.” Their address system typically uses recognisable landmarks, and navigates you from there via directions. It turns out that 4 billion people in the world, live without an address, and one company trying to tackle this is What 3 Words. They do this by putting a 3mx3m grid over the entire world, and give each square a unique name, which is a combination of 3 words. It’s genius. We should all use it, it’s even good enough for Switzerland! Surprisingly Awesome did an episode on postal addresses worth a listen if you find this interesting.
• More geography fun. The United States has 10 cities where the population is more than 1 million people. For China, that number is 102. I might know a handful of them. This helped me better understand exactly how populous China is, and how concentrated the population in the US is.

#stickylinks

I've been a LastPass Premium user for a couple of years, and I've really enjoyed it. It's a good product, very user-friendly, and the apps are well-done. I've been wanting to switch to another password manager for a while, due to security concerns. Plenty of compromised cloud companies out there, and LastPass might as well be next.

Over the last few days, lastpass has been down, or running a suboptimal service for many users, including myself, and since my last attempt at renewing my LastPass Premium subscription was declined by my bank for some reason, I figured now was as good a time as any, to make a move to something else. 

I've dabbled a bit with Master Password App, which is a stateless password manager. I really like the idea, but then what do I do with all the logins and secure notes I already have stored in my lastpass vault? I don't see a simple way of storing those in Master Password. My alternative then was down to a stateful password manager, and here's where KeePass comes in. KeePass is an open-source password manager from the 00s. Initially for Windows, but ported to a staggering variety of platforms, most likely including the one you are reading this on. It saves its content in an encrypted database, which you can then stick on a server, and get access to it through as many apps as you like.

Getting your vault out of LastPass

I wanted to export my Lastpass vault, and import it into some form of Keepass port. Here are the steps I followed:

1. Logged into Lastpass on the web, clicked on "More options" and selected "Export"
2. Saving the resulting page doesn't help you at all, so you have to select the content of your now unencrypted lastpass vault, and paste it into a text file (any empty document in an editor will do)
3. Save that text file and give it the extension .csv

Getting your vault into KeePass

The next step was to get my LastPass csv-vault into a KeePass database format. It turned out finding an app that supports direct import of plain csv-files was not so easy (most required XML files), but in the end I managed to find one called KeePassXC which accepts csv-files. Handy. Alternatively, if you can't find one that will import csv-files on your platform, you can use lastpass2keepass.py to convert the .csv-file to XML, which will then hopefully work for you.

Once imported, you will have a kdbx-file, which is the encrypted KeePass database, and somewhere along the process you have to create a password for the database-file. Think of it as your master password from LastPass, the one password that gives you access to your vault. Need help picking a good password?

Putting your file where all your apps can access it

Obviously you can keep the file on your local device, being laptop or phone or wherever you'd like it to be, but the real value from password managers are when they are available to you whenever you need them, which means to stick them somewhere on the internet. The benefit of Keepass is that you can stick it on a bunch of different services. Dropbox and Google Drive seems to be the most commonly used, but if you have one, you can also host the database file on your own server, and access it via sftp. You simply upload the database file to a place on your server, and it's then dependent on the app you use, if it supports sftp.

Mobile and web apps and Chrome browser extension

I'm mainly an Android and ChromeOS user, and for Android there's a number of options. I ended up going with KeePass2Android Password, and that does the job for me. If you need access to the file from a computer that is not your own, you can use KeeWeb, and point that to where your file lives (easiest if you have it on Dropbox or Google Drive).

For Chrome (and thus ChromeOS), there's an extension called CKP - which provides you with readonly KeePass password database integration for Chrome. You simply point it to your file, type in your master password, and you are away. 

#opensource #passwordmanagers #security