Privacy Bear

The new year has begun, and it has been quite a while since I have written anything. I have many reasons why, but the biggest has been time away from my computer, and my mental health. These two things have contributed to why I have kept away from this blog. Don't get me wrong, a break every now and then is a good thing, but I do love to write. So, for this blog entry, I will talking about what's happened, and some general privacy/security updates.

First off, mental health. Mental health is, bar none, one of the biggest challenges we face today. There are a lot of problems with the medical fields ability to handle mental health issues, and the biggest is lack of doctors. There is a lot of waiting. Waiting to find a therapist, waiting to find a psychiatrist, waiting to get in, waiting to get a diagnosis, waiting for medication to fully take effect. These all, of course, rely on your diagnosis being correct, which very often, takes multiple takes. This waiting game caused me to have a massive breakdown over the holiday season. That breakdown went into January, and still continues into February. I am still waiting on results for a test; a test that was started five months ago! The reason this has taken so long is because the system is so overwhelmed, that you will see months go by without an appointment. This is my case, and why I take this so seriously.

The second big reason is life in general. There was much travel this holiday season, and that had me away from my computer for over two weeks. During those two weeks, I could not even think of what I wanted to blog about. Add the mental breakdown, and my urge to write here was zero. That's really it.

Now, some security and privacy updates. As some of you may know, we had the Database 1-5 leaks, plus a few more since. These have lead to an insane amount of passwords and other data being out in the open. I personally had an old Google password leaked, so I changed my newer password. What did I change it to? Honestly, I have no idea. It is a randomly generated one, from the great password manager KeePass. I urge everyone to use a password manager. If you want it to work for you, use BitWarden. If you want to make it yours, use KeePass. It was also shown that the new 2080i GPU could crack an eight character password in 2.5 hours. That's any eight character password. So get a password manager, make your passwords as long as you can, and be safer.

Matrix released Riot 1.0. This is a big release that sets up the Matrix protocol 1.0 release, which will give it stable E2EE. Personally, I use Matrix to follow a few rooms, since it seems a semi-Discord replacement, and with the Riot 1.0 release, it comes closer to replacing Discord.

For now, those are some things I wanted to touch on. Soon, I will write about my journey getting rid of Facebook, and the known challenges that is going to cause. However, Facebook has become a massive blow to my mental health, so it is a much needed deletion.

Signing off, Privacy Bear