Jordan - Build Tech That Can’t Be Tread On

Imagine telling a stranger your most personal message so they can walk it across the room to your partner—then watching them copy it into a company database. That’s how most digital communication works today. We unpack why privacy is not secrecy, why “I have nothing to hide” is a trap, and how to build a tech life that works in your interest rather than mining it.

We dive into sovereign computing—the practice of choosing tools that resist surveillance and censorship. From the Cypherpunk framing to the hard lessons of the COVID era, we explore how speech without reach is no speech at all, and why Overton window shifts make privacy essential even for people whose views never change. We cover concrete progress: GrapheneOS moving beyond Pixel-only support, Signal’s minimal data posture, and the rise of end-to-end encrypted, local-first design that denies gatekeepers your data by default.

AI takes centre stage as both superpower and risk. We break down how to use LLMs without handing over your crown jewels: running open models locally if you can, or using privacy-forward layers and trusted execution environments when you can’t. We also get real about agentic AI—tools like OpenClaw that can act on your machine—and the security playbook you need: separate accounts, least privilege, and the assumption that anything an agent can read might leave the box. Along the way, we highlight freedom tech you can use right now: Nostr for decentralised social, Bitcoin for uncensorable value, BitChat and mesh-friendly comms, plus self-hosting with Nextcloud and the joy of a Linux laptop.

If you want a simple starting point, we’ve got you: adopt a password manager like Bitwarden, then move your primary email to Proton and route sensitive chats through Signal. Small steps add up to real autonomy. Subscribe, share this with a friend who still says “nothing to hide,” and leave a review telling us the first tool you’re switching to this week.

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Transcript

Framing Privacy With Snowden And Cypherpunks

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Well, there's a quote by Edward Snowden, you know, think of him whatever you will, but he said that saying you don't care about privacy because you have nothing to hide is like saying you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say. And so if we all just kind of give up our our privacy and and say it's not important, you know, I get convenient features and products out of it, so I'm fine with giving it up. It's kind of like the boiling frog metaphor. Like there's gonna be a day that comes when we're gonna drown and maybe our government is doing something that we disagree with, or maybe we are now being oppressed, whether it's financially or politically, and we're gonna say, hey, we should organize against this, but then they just turn off our communications. Then we can't organize. You know, then we we might get thrown in jail or we lose our job for saying something uh against the powers that be against the establishment.

SPEAKER_01 0:58

Welcome back, everybody. This is the Straight No Chaser Podcast, the show where we talk about human freedom through money, technology, philosophy, and economics. Today's show is all about privacy. I'd like to start off just by reading an excerpt from a manifesto written by Eric Hughes, and it's called the Cypherpunk Manifesto. The opening lines go like this. Privacy is necessary for an open society in the electronic age. Privacy is not secrecy. A private matter is something one doesn't want the whole world to know. But a secret matter is something one doesn't want anyone to know about. Privacy is the power to selectively reveal oneself to the world. I think this is framed so fantastically well. Often people talk about privacy as though it is some kind of secret thing, the usual story. Well, if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear. Uh and this conversation with my friend Jordan, we go into the issue of privacy, why it is important. We talk about some of the possible attacks that we are facing uh on privacy in the modern world, and what you and I can do about it to just keep your information a bit closer to your chest, and you can decide how how much you want to selectively reveal to the world. It's a great chat. I know you guys will enjoy it. Jordan, uh good to see you, my friend. Welcome back. I think it's been not quite a year since we last spoke, but getting close to that. And um, yeah, good to have you on the show. Welcome.

SPEAKER_00 2:39

Thanks for having me back.

What Privacy Means And Why It Matters

SPEAKER_01 2:42

So the topic that we always love to talk about is privacy, uh, the idea of privacy, uh, things that you can do to improve your privacy. But before we talk about that, uh maybe you could just tell the audience uh what is it, like what does privacy actually mean? Why is it important? Uh and why is it an increasingly hot topic I see on social media these days? Uh so just from your point of view, talk to us about privacy and the importance of it.

SPEAKER_00 3:16

Yeah, I think privacy is a part of a broader topic that I like to call sovereign computing. I didn't come up with that name, but I think it's a good name. It captures an umbrella of using technology in a way that works in your interests, you, the user, and not the interests of some other company or organization or government. So typically I think of technology that's not trying to censor me or surveil me and not trying to take my energy and monetize it for somebody else's benefit. And so privacy is a big part of that. Because if I am being surveilled the whole time, uh, well, first of all, even if it's just quote unquote just for monetization, you know, that's still terrible. I don't want my personal life to be used as a training data for some AI company that's going to make a ton of money on it. Or even if it's just for advertisements, um, you know, we've all had that creepy feeling of we say something to somebody we're talking to in person, you know, we're having a conversation with our loved one or friend, and then suddenly we're getting Instagram ads or Facebook ads for it, and we never typed it in. So it's that kind of stuff that's really it's a gross feeling to know that you're being recorded. Um, and and you could just extend that to all of our communications. There's an analogy where if I'm talking to my wife, let's say, and we're messaging each other on some typical surveilled tech app. You know, this could be um WhatsApp or could be whatever, pick your favorite messaging app that's not private. It's as if I am saying to my partner in life, you know, the person who I confide my secrets in and we share everything. It's as if I'm grabbing some employee from a giant tech company, international tech company, and saying, you know, whispering my secret into that person's ear and having them go over and give it to my wife. Uh, and by the way, they are typing it into a database and uh sharing it with the rest of the company so that it can be monetized. Now, of course, that's not literally what happens, that's not how it works. You don't have to have a person typing it in, but it just paints the picture of how invasive it is and how unnatural it is. And this is not how we've lived uh our lives up until this point in history. And we would all be kind of appalled if we saw that happening in front of our eyes. But because it's happening behind the scenes, most of us don't really think about it. And so um, my what I've started to learn over the past few years and really become passionate about is can we use our technology in a way that isn't like that, that serves us, that does what we expect it to do and nothing else, that isn't uh doing nefarious things without our permission. And what I've increasingly found is that yes, it is possible. We don't have to be a Luddite living in a cabin in the woods with no electricity and no internet. Uh, we can actually use 99.9% of all of the modern cutting-edge conveniences that allow us to be hyper-productive and uh communicate with people all around the world. So that's that's the main motivation behind my interest in all of this.

SPEAKER_01 6:52

So, would you say that the problem started with the advent of the big social media tech companies, or was this something that was coming in before that? From my point of view, uh, I think I'm probably only aware of sort of Facebook suddenly appeared on the scene, and it was this great sort of new, shiny new thing, uh bit of a convenience toy. People played a few games, they would share pictures, they would sort of go to some uh restaurant and say, Hey, I've arrived at this restaurant, I'm checking in. And, you know, it was this sort of fun, gamified sort of experience where you would become the mayor of a certain area if you clicked in X number of times in a week. And it seemed to be a fantastic way to connect people. Um, is this do you think where it started, or or was it starting before then?

SPEAKER_00 7:48

Well, um, so it wasn't just with Facebook, for example. I mean, Google, if you do a little bit of research on the origins of Google, it's very nefarious in terms of um the circumstances in which Google was founded. So as soon as they started becoming um widely used, they they got into bed with the intelligence community in the US, so the NSA, the CIA. And so they this sounds like crazy conspiracy stuff, but there are popular books written on this topic. It's not a big secret anymore. And so you have like the surveillance apparatus of the United States government working hand in hand with companies like Google and then later Facebook and these other ones. Um, so that's that's one aspect of it because they they just have such a massive ability, capability to capture data unprecedented in human history because of the internet. And the other factor is so you had a little bit of the that first factor is is government intelligence agencies, and there's motivation there because A, they're kind of coerced into it, hey, work with the government, you know, do your duty, be patriotic. Um, the other factor is they will just, it's just a sheer monetization scheme. And so the incentives line up such that it is profitable to harvest people's data, to collect as much as possible, and to use it for advertising purposes, tracking purposes. Um, the more that they can track you, the more that they can identify you, the more that they can charge for advertisements. And so these companies, uh Google, Facebook, etc., there's a reason why this model of the consumer not paying anything to use their product became so popular. And it's because, as you've heard the saying, if you are not paying for the product, you are the product. So we all as consumers and users of these companies of Google, you know, I go to the Google homepage and I've never paid a dime to Google in my life for using their search engine. You go to Facebook and you've maybe never have you uh paid a dime to Facebook in your life for using Facebook. And that just became the the standard model in Silicon Valley and other parts that have adopted this. And that's because there's somebody that is paying them, right? They didn't become trillion-dollar companies by just giving stuff away for free, they are being paid by advertisers, and um, so that's that's their whole model. So we are being harvested to uh generate a product for somebody else that they're paying for. So um, I guess I hope that answers your question. But there might be routes that go back further. Originally, the internet consisted of a more decentralized set of nodes, you know, you had blog sites and message boards and email servers, and um, and then and then even when the world wide web started with web pages, it was still very decentralized. Uh, it wasn't until the era of um the walled garden model that that it really took off the centralization and the surveillance. So, first you had AOL, they they were probably one of the big walled garden efforts in the early days, and then um they kind of fell by the wayside, and you had Facebook sort of reinvent that model and take it to a whole new level.

SPEAKER_01 11:18

Yeah, so I suppose the message there is uh no such thing as a free lunch. Um, you know, when these when these shiny new things came along, as you rightly say, it didn't cost you anything to use them, and it was kind of fun to do. I think uh I certainly didn't see anything wrong with it. It it just seemed to be great. Um, so what do you say to the person that says, I actually quite like the fact that um I'm talking to my friends about something and tomorrow I get some ads on it, it's so convenient, I never have to worry about anything. Uh if I just you know I lose my phone, I just type in, I just log back in and all my stuff is back, and this is brilliant. Uh, someone that has got zero interest, or they don't see the harm in it, they just see the positive side.

SPEAKER_00 12:07

Well, there's a quote by Edward Snowden, you know, think of him whatever you will, but he said that saying you don't care about privacy because you have nothing to hide is like saying you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say. And so if we all just kind of give up our our privacy and and say it's not important, you know, I get convenient features and products out of it, so I'm fine with giving it up. It's kind of like the boiling frog metaphor. Like there's gonna be a day that comes when we're gonna around and maybe our government is doing something that we disagree with, or maybe we are now being oppressed, whether it's financially or politically, and we're gonna say, hey, we should organize against this, but then they just turn off our communications. Then we can't organize, you know, then we we might get thrown in jail or we lose our job for saying something uh against the powers that be against the establishment. So the ability for us to have communications that are not censored and not surveilled is, I think, key to a free population. It's as it's as important as freedom of speech, because in this modern age, if if the government protected freedom of speech, let's say, let's say it was perfectly effective, you know, that the idea of freedom of speech was founded in an era before tech this kind of technology. So I have the ability to go out and maybe be a town crier on the the corner of my street, but that doesn't really have an effect in our modern age. We need to be able to communicate digitally across the internet. And if I'm prevented from doing that, I've essentially been silenced. So the ability to silence dissident voices, even if it's people that we disagree with, it's kind of like the free speech thing. We we should free speech is meant to protect not just speech we care about, or not just speech we agree with, but speech we disagree with. And the reason is because one day what we say might be the disagreeable thing, and we want that to be protected. So similarly, we want our privacy, digital privacy to be protected because one day we might be counting on it for our survival or for our freedom.

COVID As A Censorship Wake-Up Call

SPEAKER_01 14:21

Yeah, 100%. You know, I had a conversation with a friend of mine the other day, and I was actually talking to her about the show. And I said, Hey, you should come onto the show. Uh, I'd love to chat to you. Uh, she's a formerly educated financial person, and um, she sort of said, Well, she wants to get a bit more experience first. Maybe in 10 years she would feel more comfortable coming on to the podcast and talking. Um, and I said to her, But you know, uh, people grow and develop all the time, and your ideas should be changing all the time. Not every idea will change, but there's gonna be a lot of stuff that you hear about today. You may agree with it, and then uh in a year or two, or maybe five years, you sort of hear another side of the argument and you might change your opinion. So I try to encourage her and just say, look, you know, it's what you say, it's not gonna be cast in stone. It's not like you have to have this reach this level of uh you know the truth now before you can come onto a podcast and talk. You can just come on and tell me what you think, and I'd be really interested to hear it. Uh, but it got me thinking about this thing where I think everybody has experienced uh a changing of their mind on some matter or another. Uh and it's actually a good sign. If if you never change your mind about anything, you're actually just not growing, you're not communicating, you're not thinking, there's no critical thought going into anything. Um, so I I find that that's really, really interesting, the whole thing about free speech, as you clearly said, that if you don't uh if you don't think it's worth protecting, you haven't really had anything to say, or you haven't really thought about what is being said, because you you may very well change your mind, and then suddenly you're the bad person. Uh COVID, I think, seemed to be a magnifier on this problem. Uh, I know there was a lot of uh what was the word, deplatforming, people losing their jobs, and really smart people being criticized for what they said, and quite qualified people who disagreed with areas in their field were sort of losing their jobs or being ostracized. Um do you uh what did you think of the COVID thing? Was that like an awakening moment that uh where the normal person in the street got a chance to actually go, hang on a second, this is not normal.

SPEAKER_00 16:51

Yeah, I mean that's COVID's a huge topic, right? We could we could do hours on that, but um the so I'll I'll scope it specifically to my what I learned or what I started to discover about privacy and big tech and technology during that period. And it's exactly like you mentioned, uh, people who were simply raising questions that later were completely validated as correct, right? It turned out a lot of the things that the government or the popular culture or just the media in general got wrong and then later did a complete 180 on. Uh, but the people who had been sounding the alarm early, the few dissident voices, were completely silenced. They were canceled, you know, they were uh deplatformed, whatever all the terms are. Some of them were debanked. Um, they were fired from their jobs if they had one, they were prevented from uh basically participating in society. And uh I noticed that you saw after COVID as well, and all of this censorship stuff happening, that there was a backlash in terms of people starting to create alternative tech platforms. Because at that time, everybody just thought, oh, why wouldn't I just use Google, YouTube, you know, um Facebook Messenger, et cetera, et cetera. But people were getting kicked off of these things. And um, so you had like the raw, the the recognition for alternative platforms, and I think that was a good wake-up moment for myself and for many people. And the good news is that nowadays it's only gotten better. There are great options for you can do all of your computing in a much more sovereign way. You don't have to use these big tech platforms, you can do things in a way that allows you to retain control of your data, allows you to stay private, and prevents you from being censored as well, if there's ever another event like COVID or something similar.

SPEAKER_01 18:55

Okay.

Overton Window Shifts And Self-Censorship

SPEAKER_00 18:55

There's one more thing I wanted to add. Um, so you mentioned that that people change their opinions, which and I 100% agree with that. But there's there's another reason, even if you personally are not changing your opinion, there are many people who have experienced this over the past 10 years, let's say, or or 15, where their opinion has not changed, but the zeitgeist, the popular opinion has changed. You know, the overton window has shifted in terms of you, it was allowable to think X and you still think X, but now X is abhorrent and you are a bad person for thinking X because you're supposed to think Y. And so think about a scenario like that where you are your ideas have not changed. You still are thinking what you consider to be the right, the true, the good thing, but now you are gonna be canceled for that. So that's another reason why you might want to have more control over your technology.

SPEAKER_01 19:51

Yeah, that's a great point. And I think that's very often overlooked. Uh, so I'm glad you mentioned that. Thanks very much. Uh fantastic point there. So, Jordan, just to um uh let's take a look in say the past year, the last since the last time we spoke to now, uh, have there been changes in this space, uh in the privacy space? Um, and if so, has there been anything notable in the past year? Good or bad, I might add.

GrapheneOS Updates And Device Sovereignty

SPEAKER_00 20:19

Yeah. So um the first thing I I want to talk about is there or update everybody on is I'm a big fan of Graphene OS, which for those who don't know is a de-googled Android that you can use on the Google Pixel phones. Um, unfortunately, you might have noticed in that sentence there, I said that in order to de-Google, you have to use a Google Pixel phone. And there are tech good technical reasons for why Graphene OS only works on Google Pixel devices, they're very secure. But from a marketing standpoint or from a persuasion standpoint, it's it's a bad look to have to say, oh yeah, yeah, you want to get Google out of your life. Here, use this Google phone. So um, there is good news on that front, though, is Graphene OS, the project, has announced that they are they have partnered with a major phone manufacturer and that in the Q4 of 2026 or possibly early 2027, they're gonna be releasing this phone with Graphene OS preloaded on it and fully supported, so that you no longer can only use Graphene OS on a Pixel. Uh so that's really exciting. They said that it's gonna be a top-of-the-line flagship quality phone, so you're not stuck with some, you know, lower tier phone. Um, I'm definitely gonna be trying that out, even though I have Graphene OS right now on a Pixel 9, which works great, does everything I need it to. I have zero complaints. Um, I just think it's great for the privacy space to have another option for their phone. So I'll be trying that out as soon as it comes out. And um, maybe by the next time we chat, I'll have more to update on that. So that's that's one thing. Um, I've got a couple more. Updates I want to give, but before I do, anything you wanted to add there?

SPEAKER_01 22:04

Yeah, so graphene is super interesting. I've read a lot about it. I have not yet gotten my hands on it to mess around with. And uh so I'm looking forward to doing that. But as you say, uh there's only one phone manufacturer in the world that produces the phone that supports the operating system. And I kind of thought, does this is this not just an easy, an easy way to kill the project? If uh Google just decided they're locking it down, you're not going to be able to. I'm assuming you sideload the thing or something. It's not a prop probably a standard install. Um, but if there's only one phone in the world that can handle it and the powers that be decide to just crush it, uh it almost looks like too easy for them to do it. Uh so great news that they're coming out, that the OS uh designers are coming out with a handset as well. That's fantastic. And I hope Google continue to support it on the Pixel, and you know, maybe more options will come out. I think it's great.

SPEAKER_00 23:04

Yeah, exactly. Like you said, you know, it's a single point of failure, and Google has been the the impetus for them to find another manufacturer was exactly what you talked about. Google has been slowly making it more and more difficult for open source projects like Graphing OS to develop by dragging their feet in terms of releasing the code. So that's that's exactly what's going on there. But it'll be great to have another option.

SPEAKER_01 23:33

Yeah, for sure, man. What was your what were what were the other things you wanted to cover?

AI, LLMs, And Private Alternatives

SPEAKER_00 23:39

Yeah, so in the AI space, this is probably one of the fastest moving areas of tech, which is um LLMs and other generative AI. And I I'm a software engineer by day, and in the past year, we have fully adopted using LLM coding agents in our day-to-day work. And so they are they're enormously productive, uh, productivity multipliers, and this is changing computing. Um I'm this is not news to anybody who's been following the space. Um, but a lot of people don't think about the privacy implications because obviously, when we are using a third-party company, whether it's uh OpenAI's Chat GPT, Google's Gemini, or uh Anthropics Claude, every time you type something into that, it's sending that data to the company so that they can process it on their machines and then sending the result back to you. And this is obviously a problem if you want to retain control and privacy of your data. So the um the good news is that the open source LLM space is also evolving very rapidly, and there are a lot of options for using LLMs in a more private way. The most the best option, if you can afford it, is to set up your own computer with a high-powered GPU, which costs thousands of dollars these days, and then you can LLM on that, and you can basically use it as the way you are using a third-party company, but it's your own server and it's running in your house. That is not an option for everybody, including myself. I don't have the money to throw to spend on that sitting around these days. So there are some good middle grounds. Uh, one of them off the top of my head is Venice.ai. And that is a service that that allows you to use LLMs in a more private fashion. There's kind of two options that they have there. One approach is they simply act as an anonymity layer between them and one of these big company uh third-party providers that we just mentioned. So you still get the high quality output of these cutting-edge LLMs from the big companies, but you are anonymized, right? You don't have your account that's tied to you with your IP address. So that's a good anonymity layer, adds a lot, and it's very easy to use. You get the same um user experience. The other one that the other company that that I can think of that offers a good privacy option is called try, it's called Maple. They're their URLs, try maple.ai. By the way, I'm not affiliated with any of these companies, I just use them and and like them. Um, so that that offers something similar. You can select your model, you can select your provider, and you get that anonymity layer. However, they also have both of these services also have open source models, which is cool because they, you as a person who is doesn't want to spend a ton of money on running your own hardware, they are doing it for you. And so this is a lot more private because it's running in a in the case of Maple, especially, they use something called a trusted execution environment. That's a technical term, a TEE. And it's a type of cryptographic server where it's running specialized hardware that actually encrypts it locally and prevents tampering. So you get an extra layer of protection there and security and privacy. Uh, so those are a couple of good options for running um LLMs in a more private manner. And then for those of you who do coding, there's something called open code, which is like clawed code, uh, but it it allows you to plug in any model provider. And so you can also use these two two providers that I just mentioned.

SPEAKER_01 27:44

Well, I'm I'm glad you mentioned the AI thing because I there was one of my notes I wanted to ask you about as well. Um uh everybody's using AI, and uh it's reminding me of the shiny new thing that Facebook and you know all these other social media platforms were whenever it was, uh 10, 15 years or yeah, 15 years ago, or 20 years ago, in fact. Um, and I was just wondering if the same issue is going to happen now because everybody seems to use them. And I think the difference between uh the LLMs uh and like social media is the LLMs can be used for everything and anything. So people, I'm sure, are using them for for a while a wide variety of tasks. It's not just posting a photo or saying, hey, I'm in Switzerland on a ski trip. You know, you're starting to ask questions. How do I do this? How do I do that? I've got this problem. Oh, here's a photo of my x-ray. What do you think? Do I need surgery or or you know, do I need to see a doctor? So people can be almost giving up way more of their uh personal information uh into this the shiny new toy and not really thinking about what could happen to it. Um I I know one of the uh one of the things that popped up on my radar was something called open claw. And I think it might be connected to uh I think it was part of a Clawed, uh fork of Claude or something where people were trying to use Claude as a local AR agent on your device, on your on your laptop or your desktop PC. Uh I I think it went through a few name changes. There were some complaints about uh trademark uh infringement or something like that. But the long and the short of it is uh you can now download these uh autonomous AI agents onto your device. Have you looked at this? Have you tried it? And what do you think about uh uh doing something like this?

Agentic AI Risks And Security Hygiene

SPEAKER_00 29:42

Yeah, and one more thing before I uh get into open claw, which is these so chat GPT, which is open AI's product, uh the ex-NSA director, that's the national security security agency of the United States, is now on the board of OpenAI. So it's this direct surveillance pipeline. If that doesn't tell you what you need to know, I mean you should assume that every single thing that you send to these companies is being uh kept, tracked, and and collated and sorted and used for all kinds of purposes. Um definitely keep that in mind when you're using these products. But um to have a truly more private experience, you would need to use one of those options we talked about earlier. What open claw is open claw is a it's like you said, it's an open source, um similar, it started out similar to Claude Code, but it does something a little bit different. It has the agent tooling. The agent tooling, for those who don't know, is you it is simply allowing LLMs to not just spit out text and talk to you like in a chat, but allows them to actually tell your computer to take action. So, like it can it can open up a program, it can you know navigate in a web browser, it can send an email, these kinds of things. That's what an agent does. And so what OpenClaw does is it's an agent that it can run multiple agents that can operate your entire computer and it's all powered by an LLM. Now it's important to recognize that when you are using OpenClaw, the agent is running on your computer, but it's still making API calls to a third-party LLM provider, such as you know, OpenAI or Google or Anthropic for Claude, et cetera. So you're not getting any kind of privacy benefit there. What's what the real unlock um of the of OpenClaw is that it's just more capable of running your computer? Um if you want to use OpenClaw in a more private manner, you can. You just have to make sure you're using a private LLM provider or running that LLM locally instead of using one of these big tech providers.

SPEAKER_01 32:03

Okay. Um that sort of makes sense. Um is there any concern about other privacy leakage using this type of agent? So for example, um, you know, I tell it to send an email and it's got to open up the email, find an attachment, attach the attachment to the email and send it off. Um, if I keep passwords, for example, on an Excel spreadsheet. Now I know don't let your hair fall out. Uh I don't do that. Um, but I think some people might be keeping passwords on an Excel spreadsheet. Um is there a chance that sensitive information on your computer can be accessed and sent off?

SPEAKER_00 32:46

100%. It's not just a chance, it's a very high probability. This is very cutting-edge stuff. So if right now, as we're talking about this in February of 2026, things are evolving very quickly. But if you go look up any tutorial on how to set up OpenClaw, one of the big topics that you're going to have to cover is security. And people who are programmers or system administrators professionally have known about this for a long time because this is what they do for a living. But it is very challenging to keep a computer secure, um, one that has the ability to reach out to the internet and has the ability for the internet to reach into it. So the the whole skill of keeping a server secure is one that has been honed over decades. And so you're if you're setting up OpenClaw, you're kind of having to get a crash course in computer security. Um, what most people who are using OpenClaw right now do in order to help mitigate this possible security breach for themselves is they're not giving it access to their own personal email and contact book and and that kind of stuff. What they're doing instead is spinning up separate accounts for it. So, like if you are using Google Calendar on your in your personal life and your Gmail, which I don't recommend, by the way, there are plenty of good alternatives. But let's just say, for the sake of argument, you're using that. You would then, if you want to start up OpenClaw, you would create a separate Google account specifically for OpenClaw with its own calendar and stuff. That way, if somebody hacks into it, they're not going to get access and be able to completely destroy your life and getting into all of your files and communicating with your contact list. So that's that's what I would recommend for people who are getting into OpenClaw, trying it out. Um, but but do your research on the security of it. It is very important.

Age Verification Mandates And Pushback

SPEAKER_01 34:50

Cool. Thanks for that. Um one of the things I've noticed uh that has been popping up in my socials uh recently is this age verification push by various governments and institutions and tech companies. And I suspect it's coming more from the governments, the bureaucracy than it is from the tech companies. But it uh governments wanting to verify age of users of uh specific software or access to certain sites, um, which on the surface of it sounds okay, fine. I don't want my 12-year-old child, you know, running into a porn site by accident, um, is the obvious one. Uh but on the other hand, that means every single person on the planet has to do some sort of fatal ID uh identification to be able to access the website. So it seems like a quite a well, it's not very clever, it's quite obvious. But in laying out the protect the children, uh these companies are now actually forcing everybody to give address, uh, social security number or ID, facial recognition, all this sort of stuff just to utilize a service. Um, have you noticed this on your side? Uh, and and is this something to be concerned about?

Self-Hosting And End-To-End Encryption

SPEAKER_00 36:18

It is something to be concerned about. Um, I I've heard a lot about this going on in the United Kingdom in particular, not so much in the US, although we are seeing recently the company Discord, which makes the the chat platform, they they announced that they're gonna require age verification and ID verification. And the response, at least the response from me and people who think similarly to me, is absolutely not. Um, I'm gonna find an alternative. So if I was using Discord before and this this um, and now I'm required to submit my ID to use it going forward, I'm simply gonna move to another platform, find an alternative because to me that's unacceptable. The argument of this is for saving the children. This is by by now we should all be wise to this argument, right? They they use the say think of the children argument to push any authoritarian uh action that they want. I mean, this has been going on since probably before you and I were even around, right? This argument has probably been used since the dawn of time. You you talk about the safety of the children, these these people that don't have the ability to protect themselves, and you say because of possible threats to them, we are going to reduce the freedom for everybody else. Um, I have children. I'm a I'm a fairly recent father, and I, of course, don't want them to be seen running into any terrible stuff on the internet, but that's my responsibility as a parent, right? No matter what the laws are, it's first of all, it won't save them. If you are if you are not paying attention to your kids' lives, they're gonna find objectionable stuff that you don't want them to find. So no law is gonna prevent that. And secondly, that law is then going to make life worse for everybody by just implementing these draconian measures, reducing freedom all in the name of a little bit of security. And there's the uh the famous Ben Franklin quote that I might be butchering, but it's those who trade off a little bit of uh freedom or liberty for security are gonna receive neither. So that's I think that's true in this case as well.

SPEAKER_01 38:40

Yeah. Okay, cool. Well, one of the things I wanted to ask you, and you've mentioned it at least twice in the conversation today, is more and more tools are coming up, and there are more and more platforms and other tools to use. Do you want to sort of talk through some of those tools uh as alternatives to uh sort of the big tech that we use today?

SPEAKER_00 39:05

Yes. Um, for those who don't know what self-hosting is, self-hosting is a superpower once you've learned about it and figured it out. Self-hosting simply means that you are running on your own computer what you previously might have used some company's computer for. So instead of running, uh instead of using iCloud or Google Docs to have all of your office documents on, you're running it on a computer that sits maybe in your living room. And it's running something like Nextcloud, which is a free and open source office suite that's a complete replacement for the Microsoft Office or the Google Docs or that kind of thing. Um, so and and I could just go down the list and tick off every single thing that you're using in your life that's that's running on some company's servers, you can replace with something that's running on your own. Even and there's also a middle ground, even if you, let's say, haven't gotten around to trying it out because it does take a little bit of time to change up your workflow, right? So there are some companies that are better than others, even if they're running on a third-party server, they are at least better in two ways. One is that they are run by a company who's putting privacy forward as their main product. They're saying, we're staking our entire reputation on this. We're gonna we're gonna devote our efforts to making a private product. We are not competing with the Googles of the world on simple features, right? It's gonna have the same features. Don't worry, it's gonna work just as well, but it's going to actually be private instead of Google's option, let's say. The other thing that they do is they actually engineer it in a way that it makes it so they can't do nefarious things with your data. And the main technique there is called end-to-end encryption, which is simply a way of saying that every device that you use, it's encrypted locally on that device before to the company's servers. So the company is unable to access your data, even if they wanted to, which is great, because then if they're compelled to by a government agency, let's say, they can't. We saw a great example of this when um over the years, Signal, the Signal messaging app, they are really good about publishing on their website, on their blog. Anytime that they receive an order from a law enforcement agency like the FBI to go after one of their users, they are legally compelled to comply and give up all the data that they have on a user. And they say, sure, here you go. And here's exactly what we have on this user. And it's simply like the last time that this user logged on or like used the app and the phone number that was used to register it. That's it. They don't have the contents of it, they don't have any metadata about who they're talking to. So that's that's great. I mean, every company should be operating like that. You they, in my opinion, it's better to be to not have that data as a liability, but you know, I'm not thinking like a Silicon Valley data gobbling VC.

Practical Replacements: Signal And Proton

SPEAKER_01 42:16

Yeah. Um, so you mentioned Nextcloud as a self-hosting solution. You also mentioned companies like third-party companies that make privacy part of their basically their selling privacy, I suppose you could say. Um, so you mentioned Signal. Are there any other companies, third-party companies, that you would be able to suggest that people take a look at if they wanted to move away from the Googles and the Apples of this world?

SPEAKER_00 42:47

Yes, Proton is a great company that um provides privacy as their selling point. And they are intending to replace things like Gmail, uh, Google Drive, that kind of thing, calendar. So um that's a great option. There are a whole bunch we could do hours on this, but I would I would recommend people check out the Sovereign Computing Show, which is a podcast I have. It is currently on pause because of uh I have a new baby, so I've been busy, but don't let that stop you from listening because the episodes are still less than a year old and they are all very relevant. All the recommendations in them are are very useful, and we cover everything from how you could replace your entire tech stack with more private and sovereign options.

Freedom Tech: Nostr, Bitcoin, BitChat

SPEAKER_01 43:39

Cool. So um talking about some of the the new tech stuff, um we mentioned well, I I get the feeling that from a privacy point of view, we seem to be losing uh the battle in terms of regulation. I think regulation seems to be anti privacy. And it's becoming more and more onerous. Uh, I don't know if you agree on that. That just seems to be a perception that I have. Uh, and this age verification is sort of one of them, and companies demanding access to your communication, uh, maybe another example. Uh, so it seems to be governments are pushing harder against the privacy thing. But then on the other hand, uh the the freedom tech seems to be pushing right on back. And uh I just made a note of a couple of uh, in fact, three that just sort of came to mind. Um BitChat, uh, which is uh a new texting uh communication tool. I think it's uh Jack Dorsey from Twitter Fame, originally one of the founders of Twitter. Uh his company is behind that. And I saw uh an update the other day to say that they now include uh visual and like audio and uh pictures on our able to be transmitted via BitChat. Um I think the nice thing about BitChat is it it's a Bluetooth and it now also operates on Meshnet as well. So if you have those mesh tastic units dotted around, you can communicate on that. Uh that was the one. Um Noster, which is uh sort of a decentralized, uncensorable sort of social media platform. Uh it's in its infancy, but it's certainly getting busier and busier all the time, and the the user experience is improving. Uh, and then of course we have uh you know the mighty Bitcoin, which is uh uncensorable money. Um so yeah, those are just three things that I think have really, I mean, Bitcoin's been around for a while, and so has Nasta, but uh I think the point is that uh as governments crack down harder, um, freedom-loving individuals are finding ways to push back. Uh is there any sort of freedom, what you would call freedom tech, I suppose, uh, that has popped up in the last year, or or you think has really developed nicely in the in the last year, that's worth mentioning.

SPEAKER_00 46:11

Well, all of those things you mentioned are great. I use Noster, I use Bitcoin, I use um what was the other one?

SPEAKER_01 46:18

BitChat.

Private Speech-To-Text And Linux Wins

SPEAKER_00 46:19

BitChat, yeah. I've used BitChat. Um, these are these are great options, and I think the way you characterized it, I would agree with, which is that despite you have companies and maybe not so much companies, but but governments that want to surveil and encroach on our privacy, you have the technology side, people are innovating in a way that's pushing back. It's um there, there's you know, you know the old uh don't tread on me slogan. Well, this is this is can't tread on me, which is like we're designing it in a way that you can't surveil it, you can't censor it. Um, you know, like Bitcoin, Bitcoin is uncensorable. So I think there's a lot of great solutions that are born of the technology space where we're saying it's it's kind of designing in parallel. It's saying, okay, yeah, you you make your laws and regulations, and we're just gonna design over here and make things that are separate from your whole system. So um now that being said, I can't think of anything in that exact milieu that I've used recently, but there is one more piece of technology I'd like to add, which is it kind of goes hand in hand with the LLM stuff we were talking about, and that is speech to text, AI and AI-powered speech to text. There are plenty of companies that will do this um, you know, for a price, you send it off to them and it trans or it transcribes it and sends it back to your computer. But um, I found a couple of good open source local first private options. One of them is called Whispering, and the other is Voka Linux. And that second one is just for Linux, but Whispering is for all platforms, Mac, Linux, and Windows. And this is really handy when you pair it with AI, with LLMs, so that you have, for example, instead of having to type everything into your LLM chat box or code editor, you simply speak it and it's just gonna print out all the text. And I've seen people being really productive with this. I mean, you can have five different windows or chat boxes open at once because each task takes a little bit of time for it to process, right? So you say, okay, do thing A here, and then you switch to the next box and you say you talk into your microphone, do thing B, and you switch and you go down, you set up like five of them going at once. By the time you get to the fifth one and you finish, the first one might be done with its task, and you can just be incredibly productive. So whispering is I would I would check, I would recommend everybody check that out. If you um pair that with LLMs as well, you're gonna be very impressed.

SPEAKER_01 49:05

So you you meant you said a word there that got my ears uh pricked up, and that was Linux. Um so uh just to update you a little bit on my journey down this privacy uh road since we last spoke. I have uh set up a home server and I'm busy experimenting with that and backing up all my photos to my local server, so it's not going up to the big tech guys. Um and I've separated my work stuff from my personal stuff, and I've got all those files going through as well. Um but one of the things that I looked at doing was uh replacing the operating system on my laptop. And I in the past I had messed around with Linux a little bit, but I was kind of a bit daunted. It would, you know, to install a program, sometimes you had to use a command line interface or something. And it's I I I'm not used to that. You know, I'm an old guy now, so old dog new tricks, all that sort of thing. Um, but in December, I decided to grow a pair of balls and uh I just downloaded Ubuntu, I think, and just dumped it on my laptop, cheers Windows. Um, and I gotta tell you, um, every time I switch my laptop on, it just puts a smile on my face. Uh, absolutely loving it. Um, but uh is it is Linux uh a more secure uh platform, or is it just that there's less bloatware or junk on it? Uh what's your what's your view on Linux?

SPEAKER_00 50:35

Well, security has a very specific meaning in the in the tech world. Um it's it's distinct from privacy. So you can have something that's very secure, but not private at all. An example would be Google. You know, Google has tens of thousands of engineers that are paid a lot of money to make things very secure. So that means that a a bad actor, like an external hacker, they are gonna have a tough time breaking in. Um, however, it is not private. And by that I mean the the individual user cannot expect their data to only be seen by themselves. It's gonna be seen by many people with the company, third-party advertisers. In other words, people who are authorized to see the data can still see it. And Google authorizes a lot of people to see your data. It's just that people who are unauthorized to see it cannot see it, which is good, but it's not enough. You want it, you want both security and privacy. So if you're using um macOS, for example, I know you said Windows, but let's talk about Mac OS for a second. Mac OS is a very secure operating system. Um, and so if you're using it, you can have a reasonable expectation that you're not gonna get hacked by by some Chinese hacker or something like that. However, it is completely controlled by Apple. And so you should you have no reasonable expectation of privacy from Apple. Windows, on the other hand, is just complete and utter spyware. I mean, at this point, it is, and the number of security vulnerabilities that are constantly found in Windows is atrociously high. So you kind of have don't have an expectation of either privacy nor uh security on Windows. So congrats to you for making the jump to Linux. Uh, what you said, I I totally agree with. Whenever I'm using my devices with Linux or other private OS on them, it's a good feeling knowing that what I'm doing is only being seen by me and anybody that I explicitly send it to. Nobody else, I don't have to worry about. Well, should I censor myself here? Should I watch what I say? Um, you know, because I don't have to worry about that. So it's a great feeling. I'm glad to hear you've you've jumped on board the Linux train and hope it goes well for you. And as a as a Linux geek, I can talk about this for hours. So if you ever have any questions about it or just want some advice, feel free to message me anytime.

First Steps: Password Managers And Proton

SPEAKER_01 52:57

I certainly will. Uh I've I've bumped into something called the year of the Linux laptop. Uh, it seemed to be going around. It's probably been going around for 20 years, uh frankly. But uh, you know, my phone is listening. My phone is listening. So I was on Twitter and this thing popped up. Uh, and every time I see it, I give it a like and a repost. Um, just a little bit of more power to you. Uh so that's just a little bit of fun on my side. Uh, Jordan, we're pretty we're coming up on time. Um, I do just want to ask you one final question. Uh, for for people that are listening to all of this and saying, okay, I hear what you're saying, but this sounds super complicated. Can you just give one easy win for a normal person to just move them in the right step uh or direction? Uh obviously you mentioned your own show, Sovereign Computing, and I'll put the links in the uh the show notes on that. Um I've listened to pretty much all your episodes and I highly recommend it. Uh but just someone listening to the show, uh, what is a small quick win for them?

SPEAKER_00 54:04

I would say if you don't already have a password manager and you're using it for all of your login info, you need to start doing that. I know it sounds like a hassle, but once you've made the switch, it'll actually make your life easier. And by getting a handle on all of your logins and your credentials, it's going to give you a huge step towards personal sovereignty with your data. Uh, because once you do that, you can then start to control your passwords, your logins, you can see how many accounts you have. And people who aren't using one of these tools just kind of have an ad hoc system where they're saying, Oh, I'm gonna write it on a notebook or a sticky note or I'll remember it, or something like that. And it's it's just not a great approach. So if you're not already using one, use a password manager. If you're wondering which one to use, my favorite is Bitwarden, because you can start out using the hosted service. And then in the future, if you ever want to, you can move to your own self-hosted option. Um, if you're saying to yourself or to me right now, but I already do that, give me another tip. The next thing I would say is try Proton and the suite of products that they offer. So maybe instead of using Gmail or Apple Mail, you could use Proton Mail. And then there are other products that are that are similarly, they can replace your Apple and Google stuff.

SPEAKER_01 55:34

Fantastic. Well, thank you for that. Um any closing comments or thoughts from your side?

SPEAKER_00 55:42

No, but thanks for having me on, and it was a pleasure talking to you.

SPEAKER_01 55:46

Awesome, man. Always good to talk. Uh, I'll certainly put all that in the show notes. And uh nice to see you again and looking forward to chatting and seeing what amazing your stuff has come up. Probably in a year from now, maybe we'll talk sooner. But uh, always good to talk. I learned so much. I really appreciate your time. Thanks, Jordan. Thanks a lot. Cheers, um,