Yavin IV

Recent disclosures made by Verax have made the effort at Yavin4 even more relevant. Data ownership and privacy go hand-in-hand. To this end:

Opt out of PRISM, the NSA’s global data surveillance program. Stop reporting your online activities to the American government with these free alternatives to proprietary software.

The  has compiled a great list of alternatives that can be found at prism-break.org.

The rebellion is very grateful, and will use this valuable information for the remaining frontiers of data liberation.

Next locked-on-target: Dropbox!

Gmail, and it’s associated google account have been permanently deactivated. But it was no easy feat, and there were some disturbing surprises during this battle…

Let’s start off with the preparations that were made before even thinking about hitting the big red deactivation target.

All messages in the Gmail account (2004) have been scanned for sign-up and /or confirmation mails for online services such as blog subscriptions, e-commerce sites, social networks etc..

This resulted in a list of 70 candidates for migration. Of these 70:

• 10 accounts were classified as false positive.
• 7 accounts were classified as not recoverable, for various reasons
• 8 accounts were deactivated!
• for 31 accounts the old credentials were registered in keepass for future reference. For each of these accounts deactivation was not possible! At least no more spam from these sources
•  Only 14 accounts were classified as valuable, and have been migrated to Yavin4.

Let’s highlight two troves of liberated personal data during this process:

In 2010 I enabled Latitude to investigate what this feature was about. Played around with it a bit, but then was stupid enough to forget all about it. Nonetheless, the servers at Googleplex have been diligently collecting and profiling my location data ever since, as I stumbled upon the Latitude Dashboard.

Google calculates how much time I spend at home, at work and out, analyses when I’m on a trip.

Whoops; Delete all History. Disable.

The other trove of information was liberated from afaspersonal.nl (Yunoo.nl when I signed up). At this convenient online service I have  uploaded my bank statements for a duration of about two years to gain insight in my  financial situation… But to their merit, it was one of the few services that made it clear and easy to deactivate.

No thank you!  Luckily GnuCash has been identified, and is in use as a great offline alternative.

Before moving on to permanet deactivation of Gmail, backup measures were implemented for Yavin4. Instructions for a cheap and reliable offsite encrypted backup solution that is stored in Amazon s3 can be found here.

After all these precautions, it was time for the kill. All it took was one push on the big red button..

and confirming 11 checkboxes,

and typing in my password for the last time.

Ah, freedom.

The following steps were taken for a swift & clean operation:

• Download & backup all email via POP3 (10 years worth of personal data, from 2003 – 2013)
• Identify and update all accounts that were based on the hotmail address to the new yavin4 account (luckily only 2!)
• Delete all mails, obfuscate personal details. (see the … … in the picture)
• Close the mail account!

Closing the account was done conveniently by using the secret link.

Current locked-on target: Gmail

A viable alternative for Hotmail and Gmail has been identified.

Installation of iRedMail was as fast and easy as proclaimed on the website. Have been using the included Roundcube webmail client for a while now, and I am very pleased with it so far.

The IMAP server (dovecot) communicates flawlessly with the mail clients on my Macbook, Android phone and iPad. Mail accounts reside a in a database (postgres), which makes it very easy to create single purpose email addresses for example. Also I believe it’s better for security to isolate mail accounts from shell accounts.

All in all a great turn-key solution.

Time to liberate some data! Hotmail/Live/Outlook has the privilege to be the first ‘locked-on target’.

roundcube

In order to set up a succesful campaign for complete separation from the cloud empire, and regain control of personal data, the construction of a personal base is the key activity.

Here is the list of pressing frontiers of dependence that have been identified so far:

• Hotmail
• Gmail
  
• Dropbox
• Facebook
• LinkedIn
• Google Chat
• Google Calendar
• Whatsapp messenger
• iCloud

The plan is as follows:  Each frontier will be researched for alternatives that can be hosted on Yavin4. These alternatives will be tested & tried out. When a viable alternative is found this will lead to a migration to Yavin4. After all personal data is secured from the cloud, the original account will be deactivated.

Yavin IV is were independence starts.