Erwin Bierens

Knowledge is Power

How to block Facebook from your PC

2016-05-28 2 min read Privacy Erwin Bierens
Facebook wants to sell every Ad and you on the Web. The social network will show ads to non-Facebook users on other websites. Companies like Facebook and Google offer you their services for free, but free always has a cost. Advertising pays the bills and the contributors, and these big companies separate themselves from serving up ads that are better targeted than other smaller networks. By tracking you across the web and building a profile (Big Data) that helps which ads you’re going to click most likely. Continue reading

Privacy and Anonymity

2016-05-23 3 min read Privacy Erwin Bierens
Privacy Privacy is an increasingly rare commodity these days. To find out what kind of information is there about you do a search for yourself on Pipl.com, you might be surprised at the number of companies that claim to have information about you and your relatives. That’s because your personal information, including your email address, phone number and daily activities on Social Networks and apps, are worth a lot of money to legitimate businesses, your new employer, government and bad guys (read hackers). Continue reading

Deleted Facebook

2016-04-22 2 min read Privacy Erwin Bierens
From a lot of Facebook to No Facebook At the beginning of this year, I removed my Facebook profile. Here’s what drove that decision. Social Life Using the FB apps was a daily routine in my life. I checked it getting out of bed, while eating breakfast, while driving to work, during work, while watching TV and before going to sleep. I was always online. Sometimes I closed the app on my phone, only to reopen it two seconds later — it became a natural reaction, a process that you can call addiction. Continue reading

Travel router with automatic IPVanish VPN connection

2016-01-08 4 min read Privacy Erwin Bierens
GL-iNet AR150 Travel Router Recently is bought a little mini router/firewall/accesspoint (Travel Router) on dealextreme.com. I was looking for a simular device as the TP-Link WR703N, wich I already own. I found this little device called the GL.Inet GL-AR150. The device has 2 ethernet ports, WAN and LAN (both PoE) and there is a Atheros 9331 (same as WiFi Pineapple Mark V) WiFi chipset on board. So I ordered and yesterday received it by mail. Continue reading