💾 Archived View for nicksphere.com › page › 8 captured on 2021-11-30 at 20:18:30. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content

View Raw

More Information

-=-=-=-=-=-=-

        _     __             __              
  ___  (_)___/ /__ ___ ___  / /  ___ _______ 
 / _ \/ / __/  '_/(_-</ _ \/ _ \/ -_) __/ -_)
/_//_/_/\__/_/\_\/___/ .__/_//_/\__/_/  \__/ 
                    /_/                      

WELCOME TO PAGE 8 OF THE NICKSPHERE!

Hello and welcome to my journal! Here I write about my own ideas and promote others' ideas. I mostly talk about computing, philosophy, spirituality, privacy, and society but this journal is not limited to those topics.

Navigation Links

Previous Page

First Page

About

Promoted

Atom Feed

Journal Entries

SIUe e-ID Creation and Maintenance Problems

Date: 10 June 2020

Read time: 8 minutes

Summary: Somehow SIUe can't create a decent looking webpage for managing your own university account. It should undergo a complete redesign, but that probably won't happen for a while since it isn't losing the university money.

SIUe Cyberstalking Feature

Date: 06 June 2020

Read time: 1 minute

Summary: Every SIUe student, faculty and staff member's full name, year, address and phone number has been available through the university search engine for years. It could facilitate stalking and it's a huge data privacy concern. It should at least be behind a login portal and remove phone numbers and addresses.

Exposing Zoom

Date: 23 May 2020

Read time: 20 minutes

Summary: Since COVID-19 spread everywhere, the world now relies on Zoom to provide video communication for job meetings, university classrooms, courtrooms, government meetings, mental health services and personal interactions. It is based in China, a surveillance state country with little government/corporate separation currently committing cultural genocide against Uyghurs. Zoom itself has an awful security and privacy track record and contains known malicious features. What could possibly go wrong?

The Self

Date: 02 May 2020

Read time: 11 minutes

Summary: There is no isolated, unchanging self that answers to the name of "I". The feeling that there is this self, this center to the flow of experience, is only an illusion. Experience has no center. The self is the unbearable burden that we're all better off without.

Rejecting Visual Studio

Date: 30 April 2020

Read time: 10 minutes

Summary: This is my free software story. This semester I took Intro to Artificial Intelligence at SIUe. Artificial Intelligence is a senior level course. I'll call the professor, "Professor X" to preserve anonymity.

The Victim Mentality Versus Individual Responsibility

Date: 10 April 2020

Read time: 13 minutes

Summary: This is a compare and contrast of two seemingly opposing ideas. What I hope to show is that actually they are just two ways of talking about the same thing. I hope to find some common ground between left and right ideology. One is often referred to as "the victim mentality" and the other is what I call "individual responsiblity fetishism".

Inception - Rejecting Discord, Draw.io, and Visual Studio

Date: 30 March 2020

Read time: 10 minutes

Summary: This is my free software story. In the spring of 2018, I took software engineering at SIUe. Software engineering is a junior level CS course. In my view, it serves as preparation for the more demanding two semester development effort that is the senior project. I'll call the professor, "Professor X" to preserve anonymity.

Rejecting Discord and Google Colab

Date: 30 March 2020

Read time: 5 minutes

Summary: This is my free software story. This semester I took Deep Learning at SIUe. Deep learning is a senior level CS elective course. I'll call the professor, "Professor X" to preserve anonymity.

The Tipping Point - Rejecting Windows, Zoom, Lockdown Browser, and the Lockdown Monitor

Date: 30 March 2020

Read time: 8 minutes

Summary: This is my free software story. This semester I took networking at SIUe. Networking is a senior level CS course. I'll call the professor, "Professor X" to preserve anonymity.

Unless otherwise noted, the writing in this journal is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

Copyright 2019-2021 Nicholas Johnson