Now I’m hosting my personal XMPP service, so you can realize that I’m using a VPS. Currently I’m using Namecheap as a web hosting since I thought it was a good idea to learn how to use Bitcoins and Bitcoin Cash, but now I’m moving my site from Namecheap to my current VPS.
Why I’m interested in Bitcoins? Privacy has little to do here, indeed using Bitcoins is less private. The main reason it’s that I don’t trust banks, some people could say that I was getting a bit paranoid, enough Mr Robot for me…
But my family was victim of the bank two months ago. I always was right about it, but people didn’t believe me.
In Mexico, using the electronic funds transfer cybercriminals are stealing your money and banks are reluctant to talk about it, you can tell that many of them are bank workers, you will learn more about these crimes in this post than in the news.
Anatomy of the crime
I searched about many cases and compared them with my own experience. These is the modus operandi of these criminals:
Step One:
They choose a victim who has several thousands of pesos in his/her account. As they steal at least $5000MXN in each transaction.
Step Two:
Enabling the cellphone transference. This is the most elaborated step and varies from person to person, its a way of identity theft crime, the criminals are able to enable a bank service that you didn’t request, in order to enable the cellphone transference means that they are either able to clone your SIM card, or are working in the carrier/bank company.
Step Three:
Stealing the money stealthy. There was the case of a woman who had her number suspended just before the moment of the crime, that means that these criminals are involved with the phone carrier company. It could be means of hacking into the system or due to unethical workers.
However in our case the stealing occurred on Saturday’s midnight which is the sleep time.
My advice is that if you live in Mexico, don’t trust Mexican banks, Bancomer is the worst bank in Mexico, Banamex is also a bad choice. And making public this crimes is bad for the reputation of these banks. They only care about companies relying in them whereas individuals are being stolen.
Its important not enabling the cellphone transfer service in the cellphone because otherwise cannot be demonstrated in any way the crime since enabling the service requires a call phone from you which will be recorded and that is your evidence.
This new says that the problem is the software used for the transference is insecure.
Read: the official version of these crimes (Spanish):
With bitcoins you are the only person that owns your money, I’m planing in self hosting my wallet in cold-storage, it means that the wallet is offline and never is connected to internet.
Paysafecard method.
My VPS includes Paysafecard as payment method. Some months ago I wrote a post telling you the future of my site and how my boyfriend was helping me. And indeed my boyfriend helped me several months, and not only my boyfriend, in the past a boy also helped me a lot to begin with my site, when I was so immature and impulsive, that is the reason why my site is not active as in the past.
But now my boyfriend is not able to continue helping me.
I like Paysafecard, the payments only should be easy, but banks and organizations are to obsessed in controlling the market that they forgot what the client wants. No documents, no contracts, no bank accounts, just paying, that is what Paysafecard is like.
XMPP
I have many XMPP accounts, in the past months I had been having bad luck throughout my life, so I had many spare accounts, I had issues with many of them so I got the idea that hosting XMPP was hard. But that actually was not true, it was extremely easy to host an XMPP instance. With regard to my bad luck, even my spare accounts failed at the same time.
I think that a pleroma admin is more reliable than an XMPP admin, often a Pleroma admin is known in the Fediverse while a XMPP admin is anonymous.
I’m still using Slackware, I been using it for 1 year and half and this Linux distro has supported all the issues I have been through life lately, specially failing PSU and motherboard which made me to replace most of my computer.
When my computer died, also my cellphone stop working and I used my old Symbian cellphone with an xmpp app and it worked. But then my app stopped working, but I had a spare cellphone of the spare, but the same happened to the app in the spare phone. In the end my main cellphone continued working again.
XMPP motivations
In XMPP I was able to use OMEMO in the cli, this is useful if my system is not able to boot properly, and it actually happened. I had several latency issues with privative apps, but XMPP worked just fine. And I found an app 1MB which saved a lot of battery in my cellphone.
Besides my hard disk is 11 years old and using XMPP my hard disk is not being written and read a lot.
And I got a liking for Sathariel which is using XMPP too.
I love to use Tor in a daily basics due a conclusion in a philosophic questioning about the existence of privacy in the world, and XMPP is more suitable for Tor. Umatrix, Ublock origin is not enough my friends.
I am not a good example for privacy, that is the reason I’m interested in privacy, because it’s something that I’m missing, and it will always be like that. Also I use privative applications and I like to download torrents.
These months I have been thinking in spiritual matters, love and life. Meditation is important for a blogger and a sys admin I guess. These months are like meditation for me.