Kik Messenger - once the thing you say when you ask a girl out in middle school, now pedo haven

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ah, Kik. that thing from 2013. it used to be THE messaging platform. when you saw a girl in your school that you really liked, the first thing that you'd say to them would be "yo what's your kik?"

it was THE way to talk to your friends outside of school or meetups. one of the earliest geometry dash collaboration levels were made using it as a communications platform!

now, it has become Kink Messenger. a place for pedos to sexually exploit children. a place for assholes to take advantage of people that need a shoulder to lean on.

this was a time before snapchat streaks. before matrix existed. when Novell GroupWise was still a commonly used business messaging protocol (maybe?). when Pidgin was new and exciting.

Kik first started out at the University of Waterloo on Canada and was intended to be a music sharing app. it was released on October 19, 2010. just 15 days after it was re-released as a messaging app, it already had 1 million registrations, with Twitter being the catalyst of it. it allowed sharing photos, videos, sketches, mobile webpages etc.

it was supposed to be an "anonymous" messenger. it did not require a phone number or even a valid email address to sign up, although this wasn't enough to make it anonymous as it didn't use end-to-end encryption, still tracked users and logged IPs. these informations are, of course, given out to law enforcement if requested. it had HORRIBLE security, as it had scored only one out of 7 points on the Electronic Frontier Foundation's secure messaging scorecard. it recieved a point for encryption during transit but lost points bcause communications are not encrypted with a key to which the provider does not have access, users cannot verify contacts' identities, past messages are not secure if the encryption keys are stolen, the code is not open to independent review, the security design is not properly documented and there had not been a recent independent security audit.

recently, a YouTuber called tuv made a video called "The Horrors of Kik Messenger". in it, he made a fresh new Kik account with a fresh new e-mail address and saw what happened. within just 4 MINUTES of him making an account, he was getting dm'ed by tens of sex bots sending him links to scam erp games. he hadn't even opened the app yet. when he did, he saw a "live" section which was literally just porn. kik also has a "tags" function where you can mark and see chatrooms related to a topic. kik even has a list of pre-selected topics like naruto, k-pop, tiktok, etc. stuff that kids like yknow? but do not be fooled. when you click on ANY of these topics, you will get 18+ dating chatrooms. inappropiate chatrooms are not supposed to be allowed in these tags. so how do they bypass it? they do it by just adding some other random characters on top of the host word (e.g: #Narutowormgum). basically they're killing 2 birds with one stone. they still show up because the topic still includes naruto in it but the filter doesn't get triggered because it's technically not #Naruto, it's #Narutowormgum.

he even went to reddit to look up kik-related subreddits, many of which were nsfw. from the non-nsfw ones, he found a guy who have been using kik for a couple of years, a Kik veteran. he said that another tactic that these abusers use. they look up depression, lgbt or similar tags and abuse people there (i.e: taking advantage of people who need a shoulder to lean on.)

although they ban inappropiate topics like "child", "sex", etc. so they must be protecting the kids right? WRONG!

can we go back to that nsfw rooms topic rq? if you join any of those nsfw rooms, even more sex bots will start DM'ing you. this is kidschat.net all over again.

btw, if you don't know what kidschat.net is, nexpo made a good vid about it. go watch it.

ANYWAY, by now, you'd think that kik is an 18+ app right? NOPE!

look at the age ratings of the kik messenger app on both the app store and google play. the app store says it's 17+, but the google play store says it's 13 and up.

they even have a fucking parents guide, WHICH HAS BEEN DELETED.

of course, they have the blanket statement that you need to have permission from your parents to use Kik, but cmon. what kid is gonna ask their parents to let them install goddamn Kik? and even if they allow it, you have no way of proving it.

the best part? these kinds of groomers go under the radar because Kik is not a mainsteam app anymore. discord has a lot of groomers and doxxers too but since it's a mainsteam app they're more likely to get caught.

give me your honest answer. no seriously, literally email your answer to me. who is more likely to get caught? a groomer who uses Discord or a groomer who uses fucking Kik?

this quote from tuv's original video sums it all up perfectly.

"Moderation? What is that?"

oh and btw, here is tuv's original video. a lot of this blog post was taken from there.

The Horrors Of Kik Messenger Fri, 29 Jul 2022 21:03:24 +0000

rant about storage issues and linux as a whole

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so ive been having lots of storage issues recently. i have no idea how i managed to exhaust 128gb of storage within a year but whatever.

this is a half storage issues, half Artix Linux rant so be prepared.

i wanted to film a 2007-style tutorial on how to pirate games starring windows vista. sounds easy right? set up a Vista VM, install a shit ton of programs to make it seem like a legit setup, open notepad, start filming, put Let The Bodies Hit The Floor as background music and boom. ezpz.

well my computer said otherwise. first i had the trouble of getting the Vista ISO. i went on archive.org and typed in "windows vista ultimate" and downloaded the most popular iso. i had already set up virt-manager so i had a vm setup ready. it took me 4 HOURS to download the ISO. direct downloads stopping because my computer crashed multiple times, direct downloads stopping because i ran out of storage and it couldn't download anymore, torrent downloads stopping because i closed my laptop lid, torrent downloads stopping because i left it on idle for a while, me not being able to go back to direct downloading because librewolf wouldnt even START since it couldnt write to the database or whatever bc i ran out of storage, it was a mess!!!

when i DID manage to get it downloaded, the ISO wouldnt boot because it wasnt even bootable. i later found out that virt-manager was lying to me and it was because it didnt have the proper permissions to read the fucking iso.

of course i learned this AFTER i started downloading the ISO for another Vista image, this time the edition being Home Premium. it downloaded without any issues and when i tried to put it in Virt Manager....

my whole system would lock up. i tried multiple times and it would still lock up. i tried VirtualBox since i had that installed as a dependency of Genymotion, an Android emulator (more on dependency hell later), and to my surprise VB worked!

it installed without any issues and it seemed that everything would go smoothly after that point and it kinda did. i was able to install a shit ton of programs including WindowBlinds and Windows Live Messenger (with Escargot) and i was ready to start filming!

BUT, not even 5 seconds into filming, i got a VirtualBox error that the system ran out of storage and i would have to free up some space to continue virtualization. i immediately checked my file manager and there it was, 0 bytes free. so what did i do?

i just deleted the VM.

suddenly, 21 gigs of storage was free! wtf????

now we get to the storage part! the most obvious way of freeing up storage which is removing unused apps is almost impossible on Linux. why? dependencies! let's take Inkscape for example. it's a drawing program. i don't use it. i wanna remove it. but linux says wait! inkscape is also a dependency of Numix Icons, which is a dependency of Oomox, which has a ton of other dependencies too. i dont use Numix Icons either, but i do use Oomox. so i wanted to remove a single program but i had to remove 3 programs instead. operating systems like Windows don't have this issue because they distribute dependencies as DLLs instead of just standalone programs. i mean theyre called libraries but the operating system still treats them like programs.

i COULD just put the VM in my 64gb emmc card but i fear that would face the same permission issues that i faced in virt manager. theyre different programs so i may not but still. even if i tried it i still would have to re-install Vista and the million other programs that i installed in the VM. i would waste 5 to 6 hours of my life doing that.

also, in Linux, when your storage runs out, you pretty much cant do anything other than free up space. on Windows the OS pretends like nothing happened.

but /and i feel like richard stallman saying this/ linux isn't an operating system. the distros are. so maybe if i just install linux mint or fedora all of my problems would be magically fixed.

or i could go back to Windows 11 like a bitch.

Mon, 27 Jun 2022 20:55:42 +0000

how NOT to use a computer

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WARNING! this post is in more of a microblog style, so if you are allergic to microblogging, then please exit.

these are some things you absolutely should not do on a computer, with effects ranging from can-be-fixed-with-a-force-shutdown to Absolutely Catastrophic.

1. messing with your bootloader settings and not knowing what you're doing
2. flashing a bios update while a thunderstorm is happening and your power going out mid-way
3. making a fork bomb and running it on your main machine "just to see what would happen"
4. losing network connection midway while updating your system and rebooting without reconnecting and re-updating
5. randomly pressing keys while in SysRq mode

Wed, 25 May 2022 20:22:26 +0000

the sudden rise of subscription services

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You will live in the pod. You will consume. You will own nothing and you will be happy.

so, as you may know, the concept of actually owning stuff has been slowly dying off. instead, cloud services and subscription services have been replacing them.

with subscription services, to buy a service, you need to "subscribe" to it. when you complete your subcription, you will be then charged a repating fee. you can cancel the fee at any time, but doing so, you will lose access to said service. notice how i said "access"? that's because you don't actually own anything with these services. you're paying for access and that access can be taken away from you at any time. it's nuts.

the term "cloud" in computing refers to services being hosted on someone else's computer. this usually refers to apps. e.g: "cloud storage" means that you're storing your files on someone else's computer, "cloud apps" refers to apps being hosted on someone else's computer and you usually being able to access said apps, etc.

the most notorious user of subscription services is Adobe with their Creative Cloud suite of applications. stuff like Photoshop, After Effects, Premiere, etc. stuff you have probably heard of before. they make it extremely hard for you to cancel your subcription, even giving you a cancellation fee if you cancel early.

another notorius user of subscription services + cloud is streaming services. stuff like Netflix, Disney+, Hulu, Paramount+, again, stuff you probably have heard of already. it was just Netflix at first, but then companies started seeing the market for streaming services which then led to every company ever making one and exclusives becoming more and more common you had to pay for a whole new streaming service just to watch one show and nothing else in the sea of garbage produced by these services.

this trend is usually used in software, but it has made its way to completely unrelated things.

like teslas! elon can literally just remotely disable your car at any moment. if you don't believe me, look it up. it's so dystopian. also, in order to "unlock" certain features of your car, you need to pay up

OEM whitelists are a huge problem too. in many hardware devices, you can't install random hardware that is supposed to be compatible with your prebuilt computer, no, it has to be from a "whitelisted" vendor. if you install hardware that is not whitelisted, your computer will usually error out and disable said hardware.

i hate it. and i'm not alone. why is it so bad to just own stuff? in "Ye Olde Times" you used to be able to just pay for the software you want and then do whatever the fuck you wanted with it. copy it onto another computer or a cd, mess with the hex code of the program, launch it without internet, you name it. oh and speaking of the internet, many of these subcription based programs rely on key management servers to prove ownership. that means you can't even launch the damn thing without internet. it'll usually error out with a cryptic error message. that also means it restricts the programs life to the kms servers' life. you ever heard of the term permacomputing? that term absolutely shits in the mouth of practically any modern software that is SaaS. not everyone has a good connection. not everyone wants to use it all the internet all the time.

so why are they doing this?

simple. it's because of $$$. these companies KNOW what subscription services are essentially user hostile. they know that people don't like it. but they don't give a fuck. companies exist for the sole reason of making money. THAT'S IT.

rant over.

Fri, 06 May 2022 07:47:56 +0000

flat design can be good if done right.

[link—standalone] yep, you heard me right. the 2000's loving retro weirdo is praising flat design.

this article is gonna be completely contradicting my skeuomprhism article and i promise i'm not being held at gunpoint to write this but here we go. so, as you may or may not know, i love skeuomorphism. i genuinely prefer it over flat design. but, i rarely use it in my own things. in fact, the only thing i have used skeuomorphism for is the icons for the platforms i use on the main page of this site. my setups and other things made by me are almost always flat design. why is that the case?

there are three reasons why i mainly use flat design.

1: skeuomorphism takes lots of effort to master and if done poorly can be just as soulless as corporate-level flat design

2: there is only a niche group of people that like skeumorphism and most people just prefer flat design. many projects involving skeuomorphism tend to get described as "aged like milk" and "straight out of 2005"

3: sometimes, there are cases where skeuomorphism doesn't really fit well.

nothing is as easy to make than flat design. i can easily create a flat design videosharing site mockup in like what, an hour? but, there are some examples of good flat design.

stuff like tela-circle, rose pine, metro (if scaled down), sweet (the desktop theme), etc.

although i've found that flat design really fits well on phones. granted, there are stuff like ios 6 which is just.. *chef kiss* but that's really about it. you can't really find good skeuomorphic themes for phones anymore. ipearos 6 exists but i don't really like it.

oh and did i even mention gradients and blur? I LOVE THEM! they're making flat design 50% more bearable for me tbh.

there is also neomorphism (is that how you spell it?) which is like a middle ground between skeuomorphism and flat design. i have mixed opinions on it tbh. sometimes it's good, sometimes it's not. i dont even know anymore

so yeah that was my article about why i sometimes prefer flat design

Sun, 17 Apr 2022 16:17:36 +0000

my experience with piracy

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i was 5. i stumbled upon some ben 10 game that was just rebranded subway surfers. it costed 5 liras (jesus fucking christ!). i wanted it BAD. i begged my dad for it, getting the typical dad response "i'll look into it."

a couple days went by, i was still thinking of the game. i thought that my dad had just decided against it.

some minutes passed. my dad called me and said to close my eyes. i did. when i opened them, my dad had "bought" the game for me. i was so excited.

i'm putting "bought" in quotation marks because he didn't actually buy the game, rightfully so. instead he downloaded it from a strange app called Blackmart. it was basically this sort of underground app store where people share ccracked apps. he also showed me how i could download my own games too. needless to say, i did.

i downloaded a shit ton of games through there, mainly sonic games and android ports of console games. sonic advance, sonic advance 2, sonic 2, sonic 3 & knuckles, pororo, i can go on and on and on. whenever i saw some paid app or game i thought was cool, i straight went to blackmart to see if my homies had it. it was my #1 app store.

this continued on for a couple of years until doomsday hit. an update came like usual. i hit update and it started requiring some very peculiar permissions like cam n mic. the app had basically become malware and all the downloads for it had been pulled down.

i was sad. devastated. now where would i get all of my games? although fortunately i grew up and moved on to other platforms like aptoide and apkpure.

today? i still use those platforms today to get stuff not available on aurora store and fdroid, primarily for pirating games and getting old versions of apps. nowadays i don't rely on them as much but i still rely on them somewhat.

so yeah. that was my piracy backstory.

Wed, 30 Mar 2022 18:05:26 +0000

quote unquote free speech social networks (like Gab, Minds, Parler, etc)

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you know what i'm talking about. ""free speech"" social networks that are just echo chamber shitholes in disguise.

my hatred for these will never end because most of the time they're not even really free speech. these networks are one of those places where free speech == hate speech & homophobia. they also usually lack moderation. the most blatant example of this is Parler. it along with basically all of the other networks like it requires a phone number to sign up, which is personal info the government can use to basically track you down and censor you. in fact, Parler actually allows you to literally send in your ID so you can display a shitty badge on your profile. yeah, i'll admit, it's not mandatory but people still sent in their ID because badges are cool right? in fact they didn't even have good security, resulting in an inevitable hack which then also results in millions of boomers getting doxxed. we're talking full-blown doxx here. full names, faces, ids, phone numbers, all leaked. although surprisingly, it wasn't LAPSUS$ who hacked them..

if you really give a fuck about free speech, you also need to make your so called free speech platform private.

they are also not decentralized, meaning the government can shut down the entire fucking platform if they feel like it. and again, since these platforms store a fuck ton of data about their users so the government now gains access to those as well.

you can't just go "WOOHOO FREEDOM!!!!! WE DON'T BAN ANYONE!!!!! ANARCHY RULES!!!!!" because you'd have to ban at least one person on your platform, or struggle and eventually collapse like Voat.

*COUGH* *COUGH*

Voat had to shut down 4 of it's own subverses, 2 of which hosted sexualized images of minors ("jailbait).

these platforms also make it extremely easy to spread misinformation because "muh free speech". i could say birds aren't real on there and everyone would believe me. parler in particular hosted a campaign saying they would give out 20 thousand dollars into any left-wing person that joined. almost all of those accounts have been suspended. also they ban poop and bad words but not literal fucking racism, misinformation, etc.

tl;dr: parler sucks, get over it you dumbass

Fri, 25 Mar 2022 17:18:22 +0000

test test

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skeuomorphism > flat design

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so, i was messing around with audacium today. i was in the settings and i saw a skin called "pro tools". i wondered it was and selected it. i was not dissappointed. skeuomorphism everywhere, oh my god. it was absolutely gorgeous.

it reminded me about how much i love skeuomorphism over flat design. it honestly just feels alive and way less corporate. when i first used computers, i was like "oh what do these 3 lines do?" "what is this random rectangle at the bottom of the screen?" "why is this so boring?". i had more questions than answers. that's another benefit of skeuomorphic design. it doesn't just look nicer, it helps old & young people learn technology faster because the design largely resembles objects in the real world (imo). it also takes more effort to do, while you can easily create a flat design video sharing site mock-up in less than an hour (wink wink). skeuomorphism just takes more time to learn and perfect. sure you can easily slap transparency, blur effects, horribly overglossed icons and call it a day but it'll be just as soulless as flat design. it doesn't really capture the vibe of skeuomorphism yknow?

Wed, 23 Mar 2022 18:18:40 +0000

don't believe everything companies say.

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don't believe everything a company says about their products.

i am largely writing this for normies who still think open source means less secure.

another reason why i refuse to use lamestream chat programs like telegram and signal is because i can't be sure if they're secure. yeah, signal or pavlov fuckangsndiesnmnesnki may have said it's secure and private, but how do i prove that? just a simple lock isn't enough for me. i cannot even see the encryption keys that is being used to "encrypt" my messages. how can i be sure that billy boy isn't emailing my messages directly to the fbi so they can see if i'm a cYbErcRiMiNaL or not? how can i see that it isn't phoning home and sending a billion requests to google analytics? how are be sure if my messages are even being encrypted in the first place?

the answer is simple. i don't. that fucking paddle lock gives me a false sense of security and nothing else.

also, they literally contradict themselves when they say it's private since they ask for the user's PHONE NUMBER when they sign up. even worse, signal doesn't even have usernames. you literally have to know your contact's phone number to shoot thema message.

anyone remember MobileCoin? that shady ass cryptocurrency? yeah signal implemented it into their app. and when i say that it's shady, i mean it. when they first added mobilecoin onto signal, they of course got backlash. it was so bad that the mobilecoin.foundation website went offline for a period of time. thehatedone made a good video about that.

at least telegram has usernames but it also requires a phone number (which are literally bound to passports in russia, where telegram originated and in some cases can flat-out replace them) and it's not open source. plus to encrypt a conversation you'd have to start a "secret chat" where as in Signal all of your conversations are encrypted by default.

i know there are forks of signal like Threema and Session but it's still centralized. the government can take down signals servers any microsecond and you would be able to do bat shit about it.

so how do i believe my xmpp and irc which are incredibly more shady to normies, are secure?

first, both xmpp and irc are well-documented and open protocols. no, not apps, protocols. these are messaging protocols that developers can integrate into their clients.

^{p.s: don't use irc for any super secret conversations. irc is incredibly insecure since it was the first ever chat protocol made in the '80s. some networks support ssl but most of the time you're chatting in plaintext. for support and general chit chat, it's fine but if you need to be secure use xmpp instead.}

second, both xmpp and irc are decentralized. that means you aren't sending and recieving messages through a central server like in pretty much any mainstream chat app, but instead you are sending and recieving messages from a wide network of servers hosted by many different people. you can also run your own if you want.

this means the government can't just take down xmpp, there are literal thousands of servers out there so it'd just a be a waste of time.

second, xmpp (but not irc!) is "federated". that means you can add contacts and join group chats (or as it is called in XMPP-speak, "multi user chats") from any server out there. in irc, if you joined a channel from EFNet for example, you are only gonna be able to join channels that are also hosted on EFNet. in xmpp, you can make an account on e.g: blah.im and join a group chat from e.g: nuegia.net. this provides all of the advantages of decentralization without the drawbacks.

some other decentralized and federated protocols include: email and matrix.org.

third, as i have said before, both irc and xmpp are open source. that means if you think something fishy is going on, you can make sure by looking at the source code.

but kantraa! you may say. because it's open source that means it's less secure right?? hackers can just look at the source code and make their pesky viruses based on it!!1!

to that i say, no. a thief doesn't need to know how a lock works in order to open it. vulnerabilities are easily able to be found and patched. in fact, when you make proprietary software, you're betting that your devops team is better than literally any other developer on the entire planet.

but how do they patch it??

first of all, they need to "fork" the repository which basically means cloning it and putting it on your profile. the original author will still be shown, in the format of "(forked from (app name) by (developer name))". then, you need to create a pull request which means asking the developer to merge your branch with the existing one. the developer will be able to see exactly what you changed in the pull request, and will able to decline it if they want.

plus, if there is no binaries for your operating system, you will be able to compile the code yourself.

and last but not least, it doesn't require your goddamn phone number.

i hope yall understand what i'm saying.

Wed, 23 Mar 2022 12:25:51 +0000

This is what a post looks like

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This is autogenerated by the blog. As you can see, an equivalent RSS feed entry and standalone blog post is generated after you finalize the post.

Wed, 16 May 2018 14:38:38 -0700