Hey, what's up everybody?
We are live.
Look at that.
Okay, this is my first time doing this.
Hopefully the sound is coming through okay.
I'm just going to check it really quick on X because that's where we're streaming.
So give me a second to check that.
Okay.
Looks like we're good.
Okay, sweet.
Well, welcome to Freedom Tech Weekend.
I am your host, Marks, and this is a new show that I'm going to be doing every Friday,
and it is Freedom Tech Weekend, one tool that you can play with this weekend.
So it looks like we've got two people viewing on X.
I think one of those is me, so welcome to the, oh, three people now.
Sweet. Welcome to the other two people. Awesome.
My name is Marks. To introduce myself, you might already know me
you're following me on X potentially, but I run a company called OpenSecret and we make a
confidential backend for mobile app and web app developers. Every user in your app gets their own
private encryption key. And so all of their data is privately encrypted, which protects you as the,
as the developer protects you from their liability of the, from the liability of their personal
information, but then also protects the user from you and from anybody you hire at your company,
as well as others who might hack into the system,
get a data breach, and take the data.
We also have our main app is called Maple.
Go to trymaple.ai,
and you can get AI that is private, encrypted, end-to-end.
Anything you chat with in the AI is private to you.
Okay, so what are we wanting to do here?
The goal of this show here is I'm going to broadcast every Friday at,
what time is it right now?
This is the time that I want to broadcast at.
So UTC at 1530 UTC is my plan.
But also, I live in the United States.
I'm currently at Bitcoin Park Austin in Austin, Texas.
And so we're going to say I'm recording at 1030 a.m. Bitcoin Park time.
Because there are two Bitcoin Parks.
There's one in Austin and there's one in Nashville.
The first one in Nashville.
They're both in the same time zone.
So you heard it here first, folks.
there is a new time zone established and that is called Bitcoin Park Time, BPT. All right. So
every week, come check this out. 1530 UTC or 1030 AM Bitcoin Park Time. I'm going to try to keep
these to a half hour. And every week, what you're going to get from me is that I will research a
freedom tech tool. It might be something that I use on a regular basis. It might be something new
that just came out or one that I'm not as familiar with, but it's been around for a while.
And I'm going to do a little research on it, show you what it does, show you some of the trade-offs
from a privacy perspective, from an autonomy perspective, a freedom perspective, and then
also just show you how the tool works, some of the things you can do really with the goal that,
you know, that weekend, tomorrow, Sunday, whenever you have free time tonight,
You can play around with the tool and then slowly but surely you can start to replace some of the proprietary tools that you use, the commercially available tools that maybe are closed source and do not support the ethos of freedom tech.
You can start to replace some of those with some of these freedom tools that you learn about on this show.
This will also be archived.
So if you are not hanging out on the live stream right now, that's totally OK.
I will archive these.
Hopefully the goal is stream on X, stream on Noster with Zap.Stream, also on YouTube,
maybe put this up on Rumble. I want to get this out everywhere I can, and then there will be a
podcast feed as well, an RSS feed that has the audio version of this available to people who
want to listen to it later. I know me personally, I do watch some video streams, and I do watch some
video series, but for the most part, I like to listen to audio format, and then if the episode
is something that is very visual, then maybe I'll hop over to YouTube and watch that one
on video. So feel free to consume this however you want to, but I am going to be here week in
and week out as much as I can. Now it is called Freedom Tech Weekend, which means I'm going to
give myself a little bit of leeway that sometimes Friday at 10 30 a.m. my time, Bitcoin part time,
will not work. I am running a company with me and my co-founder and we're running this together
And sometimes we will have things that come up during that time slot that just take precedent and take priority.
So please be a little flexible with me.
We might have to move it to later in the day, that specific day, or even on a Saturday, hopefully not even on a Sunday.
But there might be times that that happens.
So number one goal, 10.30 a.m. this time.
Okay.
What is Freedom Tech?
Freedom Tech has a lot of different definitions.
So for today's first stream, I just want to talk a little bit about what I think freedom technology is and then some of the tools that I might be showing off here.
But the hope is that as this grows over time, if we get more people watching over time, coming on a regular basis, chatting in the chat.
I can't see the chat right now with Twitter, with X.
But eventually I'm going to have live stream chat open up as well.
And really, I want all of you to help figure out what we look at next.
So next week, I'm already going to tell you I'm going to look at Goose,
which is a freedom tech tool for doing AI and having AI tools talk to each other locally on your computer.
So I want to have you ask questions and say, hey, these are things that I am interested in learning about Goose.
And then I can do some prep on that and then address those questions.
and then also as you ask questions live during the stream,
hopefully address those as well.
And then I want you to suggest tools
that maybe you want to learn about in the future,
and I can look into those,
and we can play with those live together on air
and really make this more of a community thing if it can be.
So I wanted to get everybody involved
that would like to be involved with this,
try and decentralize this as much as possible.
I'm not streaming on zap.stream today
because the tool that I'm trying out for this
didn't let me set it up right away.
So I've got to get that figured out.
But I wanted to go live and get this going.
So hopefully next week, this is available on zap.stream
for the Nostra users out there
and those who want to send zaps and use lightning
and all that good stuff.
Cool.
So Freedom Tech, right?
In my mind, Freedom Technology is something
that embodies a few different things.
one it allows a person to be more autonomous in the way that they handle their own user data
so this is a tool that lets you take control over your data where it lives how it's transmitted
and then it's also a tool that is permissionless you don't need to ask someone's permission to use
the tool and to create with the tool or consume with the tool but then also privacy usually is
a strong component of that. And I think that kind of goes along with the first two, but there should
be a strong privacy angle to it. And user privacy is really essential to have freedom. And then
lastly, open source is not a requirement, but it typically is a big part of it. And maybe it is a
requirement. I'm still kind of noodling on that one, but there's a huge overlap. So most freedom
technology tools are open source by nature. And maybe as I think through it more this weekend,
maybe it is a requirement, some level of open source-ness to the tool. Okay, how long have
we been going for here? We've been going for eight minutes. All right, sweet. Just trying to
check my schedule. These first episodes are going to be awkward as I'm learning how to do this.
So you can go right along and learn the awkwardness with me as we go.
Yeah, go ahead and follow me on X if you want to.
I am Marks underscore FTW.
So M-A-R-K-S underscore FTW stands for most people for the win.
But for me, I used to do an old podcast over the last couple of years called Freedom Tech Wrap.
Rap with a W.
I did not have prose and lyrics for rapping the Freedom Tech news, although that would be cool.
But no, I was just kind of every week I would wrap up what kind of freedom technology news there was out there.
And so that's what FTW started as.
But really, to me, it means more Freedom Tech works.
And that is this idea that really freedom tech is a technology that does work.
It can function in our lives.
It can help us to get more autonomy with our data.
And I think over time, what we see with most technologies out there is that we trend toward
freedom technology.
I mean, look at the internet, for example.
The internet started as this proprietary system being developed by government and Department
of Defense.
And then as they started to plug nodes together and turn on more nodes on the network,
it started to realize that this idea of the Internet wanted to be free
and did not want to be hidden behind proprietary software and proprietary connections.
And so then we saw TCP IP come out and other technologies that broke it free.
And you look at the servers running the Internet.
We started with mainframes.
We started with Unix, IBM, these lockdown systems.
And then Linux came on the scene, broke it wide open,
and now Linux is powering over half of the servers on the internet.
I don't know what the exact number is, but it's quite a lot.
You've had proprietary systems that have tried to come in, like Windows.
Mac even, Mac OS even had a server for a while.
These things just don't gain traction.
It's the freedom technology that wins in the long run.
And I think we will continue to see that
where commercial options are disrupted in the long term by freedom ones.
So Freedom Tech Works, FTW.
All right, let's get into the tool of this week.
So the tool of the week that I'm choosing is called Tail Scale,
which is based on WireGuard.
And one of the difficult things that I have with choosing these tools
is that I know that there's going to be a lot of opinions out there of,
well, you know, this tool is totally captured,
or this tool isn't totally following the ethos of freedom technology,
this or that.
So I'm going to run that risk and you can push back on me.
And I would love for all of you to shape my opinion over time of some of these tools and really what it means to be a freedom technology.
But my goal is really to show anybody watching this stream, those who do not even know what freedom technology is,
all the way on the other side of the spectrum of those who are making freedom tech tools.
I want to provide things that help people to decouple their lives from commercially available software that locks them in and requires permission to use.
So when I talk about a tool like Tailscale, there is a commercial company behind it.
They do have open source.
They do use WireGuard.
They do use some of these open protocols and things.
And so there are options.
This can help people to get value and get more privacy in their lives,
even if it's not 100% on the freedom side of freedom technology.
So I hope that makes sense.
But now I'm going to share my screen using new streams here.
So let's just see how this goes.
We are going to share the entire screen.
Live on the wild side.
okay here we go all right so let's make sure that this this is uh sharing correctly i'm
going to look at the stream as you see here i have two things pulled up in my chrome browser
perfect there it goes okay i've got on the left side i have maple this is maple ai you can go to
try maple.ai. Let's show the address here if I can. There you go. Try maple.ai. Get a free
account if you want to sign up for a paid account. Start using private end to end encrypted AI.
I'm actually going to have this here because this is my companion throughout the show.
And I'm going to be using it pretty much on a weekly basis because this is what I use
every day in and out with what I do for work and in my own personal life. Okay, so Tailscale. We're
going to go to tailscale.com. This is the website. As you can see, it is a business. They've got a
sales team. They have a pricing page. They have all the markers of what looks like to be commercially
locked in software, but don't let that fool you. They do produce a tool that is very useful for
people who are freedom tech oriented. So let's go in here and say, tell me about the privacy
and freedom tech nature of tail scale. Okay. And that's going to tell us that they do have
their privacy policy here. You can go read through that. And I always encourage people
to comb through privacy policies of tools that they're going to use before they use them to
make sure that they understand what they're getting into. You can throw this into AI and
have it digest it for you and explain it to you as well. Okay. So this has come back here.
It's a zero config peer-to-peer virtual private network. It's decentralized architecture,
end-to-end encrypted, uses the WireGuard protocol. It does not log your information
and helps protect user anonymity, and it is open source. I do want to call out this no logging
thing. A lot of the apps and a lot of the services that we use, especially VPN services,
tell us that they don't log. What does that even mean? It means that they're not recording
your IP address. They're not recording the data that you're sending across the network.
It means that they're not keeping these on their servers. So that way, if law enforcement or if a
hacker were to breach the system, they would not have any information on you as a user other than
maybe your email address that you use to sign up. And you can use a privacy email address so that
even if they have that, they don't know who you are. The caveat here with the no logging is that
this is a just kind of a trust model. You have to trust that they are not logging. You can't
actually see the server code that they are running on their servers. And so you're just
kind of trusting in their reputation and hoping that they don't do that. Now there is a technology
that allows you to see what that is,
what's running on the servers,
and those are secure enclaves or confidential computing.
That's actually the business that we are in at OpenSecret.
We make the confidential backend for app developers
so that users are protected by knowing
that the server code is not logging
because they can actually see the server code that is running.
But that's a story for another day.
You can check out OpenSecret.cloud if you want to.
so freedom tech aspects talks about how this can be self-hosted tail scale lets users host their
own vpn servers it's community driven has an open source community and it does not depend on
centralized services limitations there's a dependence on wire guard protocol which while
secure may have its own limitations or vulnerabilities there is key management concerns
with public key cryptography, which requires proper management and to ensure security.
Public key cryptography is the basis for so much of what we do out there. So if you don't know how
to use it, I highly recommend you learn how to use public private keys, look into those, and
you probably are using them without even realizing that right now. And then there's network
configuration stuff that could be a barrier for non-technical users. The reason why I'm bringing
up tail scales because it's actually really easy for non-technical users to use so what is tail
scale i should have said that from the very beginning tail scale is a vpn service for your
own personal vpn many people in corporate america use vpns with their work so they they want to
work from home a lot of us started working from home when you know a few years ago and so you're
working from home, but you still need access to secure things that are only on the company
network. Well, you download the company approved VPN software, you click a little button in your
menu bar, and it connects you to the VPN, the virtual private network. And what that does is
it makes it as if your computer is now at the office and logged into the local network there
at the office, giving you access to all sorts of tools. Now, by nature of this, a lot of companies
now because they are spread out globally or even just within the same country but have multiple
regions the the term of being inside the office quote unquote is uh is less of a physical thing
now and more of a a virtual thing or a logical thing and so a vpn is a really powerful thing
that allows us to kind of be within this virtual office of our company. So VPNs are super useful.
They encrypt all your traffic from your computers, talking to internal computers on the network.
But it's really useful to have a VPN for yourself. Why would you want a VPN for yourself? Well,
at home, you have all sorts of devices on your network. You've got smart TVs, you have smart
speakers, you have other computers. Maybe you have something like an iMac that's plugged in,
that's a family computer and you're storing all your family photos on there or other things.
And when you are away, you're in a hotel, you're at an airport, you might want to access that data.
Well, it can be very tricky to set up your router and set up all these things and run your own
service. So that's where Tailscale comes in. Now you can log in to your home computer
and access that stuff while you're away. Another great thing about Tailscale,
another great reason to have your own VPN is you can protect yourself when you're on a public
network. So let's say you are at the airport or you are at a hotel and using public Wi-Fi,
you don't just want your traffic out there for others to sniff and access. So you can use
Tailscale to VPN into your home computer and encrypt all your traffic. So now your traffic
on that public Wi-Fi is encrypted through a tunnel into your home computer. Yes, you can
use another VPN service for this. A lot of podcasts talk about things like ExpressVPN or NordVPN. I am
not endorsing those products. I'm just saying those are ones that you're probably familiar with,
and this is their value prop, is that they say, oh, protect yourself on public Wi-Fi
by tunneling through our servers. I can't verify if those are really safe or not,
but that's their value prop.
So why trust them when you can just run the software yourself,
something like Tailscale, run it on your home server,
and run it on your home computer,
and then VPN through that and tunnel everything yourself.
Okay, this uses WireGuard.
What is WireGuard?
WireGuard is a VPN tunnel software,
and it's open source as well.
You can see the source code here.
And so Tailscale is built on top of this.
You can learn more about that if you want to.
In fact, we can say,
explain like I am five what is wire guard.
And we will let that go on that.
And come back here.
Tail scale.
So imagine you're sending a secret letter to your friend.
You want to make sure that only your friend can read the letter and that nobody else can intercept what's on the inside.
WireGuard is like a special envelope that keeps your letter, or in this case, your internet traffic, safe and private.
Okay?
So it creates a tunnel, protects your traffic.
All right.
How long have we been going?
I think we're getting close to the end of my time here.
Let me see.
2021.
Okay.
You just saw my studio.
Boom.
All right.
So I've got a few more minutes here.
Let's talk about actually using the software now that we've talked about what it is.
So you can download it.
I'm going to show you here on their website.
You just go to downloads.
They support all the different platforms.
And then they also, I like to go look at the source code, which I had it pulled up.
And then I lost it.
Let's see.
Source.
Here we go.
Open source.
So they talk about how they're largely open source.
They're not 100% open source.
For example, the user interface on Mac is not open source fully,
but you can build the Mac client software
that runs with a command line without a user interface.
That is open source.
The Linux and Android versions are fully open source.
You can build those yourselves and run them.
So this is where we get into trade-offs
within freedom technology and privacy trade-offs.
If you are a person on a Mac and you don't know how to build code and you don't know how to audit code, maybe you are just trusting public opinion, your web of trust, the people that you follow online that you think are in the know.
And they say, oh, Tailscale on a Mac is safe.
Download and run it.
Maybe you're trusting them.
You're giving away a little bit of your, you know, you're making a tradeoff here on your privacy.
And that's your choice to make.
then for those who really want overall control and freedom and the ability to do uh introspection
then uh they can download the linux code they can download the android code they can
look through it themselves hand it over to ai and ask it to look for backdoors and then they can
build it and run it themselves and know that there are no backdoors in there in the software
that they're running so that's one thing i like about tail scale is it provides different options
based on your risk profile and what you're willing to sacrifice and trade off.
So I do want to make it over eventually to GitHub.
So here's their GitHub.
This is their organization.
Tailscale is a WireGuard-based app that makes secure private networks easy for teams of any scale.
Okay, so you can check out all the repos that they have here,
download them, audit them, build them, do what you wish.
Okay, they just made a check-in 15 hours ago, so they're actively developing this.
So once you download it, I downloaded the macOS version.
You install it. It lives up here in your menu bar.
Now up here, I am not connected at the moment, but I have signed in with my GitHub account.
You can sign in with an email. You can sign in however you want to.
They have different options.
Excuse me.
That's how I did it.
And then, oof, do I turn it on?
I didn't think through this while I started streaming.
I don't know if it'll interrupt the stream.
So, shoot.
Well, I'm not going to turn it on today because I don't want to interrupt the stream.
I'll test that out another time.
But I'm going to walk you through what it does.
So if I flip this on, the cool thing that happens is on this menu, a bunch of things pop up.
And it shows other computers that are on your Tail Scale network.
So, tail scale only works if you have it running on at least two devices.
So, I have a computer at home that is plugged in, running 24-7.
I highly recommend everybody get a computer that they can just have running at home.
It doesn't need to be expensive.
It can be small.
It needs to be more than a Raspberry Pi.
Please, for the love of Freedom Tech, don't get a Raspberry Pi as your home server.
Get something else.
There are plenty of old Dell computers out there,
old Windows computers out there that you can download
that are still plenty powerful.
You can get an old Mac, get a Mac Mini, something used,
or even a new Mac Mini.
I always go refurbished if I'm buying a Mac
because they're 15% off,
and they come with the same warranty as brand-new computers.
So you're effectively getting a new computer for 15% off.
Get something, an old laptop, plug it in,
have it connected to your network running 24-7.
The great thing about that is then you will have the ability to play around with a lot of these tools
that we are going to talk about on this stream week in and week out.
And I think you will use it a lot more than you are expecting.
So, Tailscale. I installed Tailscale on that home computer.
So, when I turn it on, now I am able to connect to it as a node.
So, then all of my traffic, this whole stream, would then go through...
All right, hopefully I cleared that out.
This whole stream would go through that home server, and it would be as if I were at home
instead of here in Bitcoin Park, Austin, and I would be streaming, as far as the internet
is concerned, I would be streaming from home.
And so there's a lot of great benefits to that.
The other option you have, too, is you can choose to tunnel all your traffic through
the VPN, or you can tunnel just traffic that is only available on that network. What does that
mean? So you could, let's say you're on public wifi, you're at the airport, and then at home,
you have this app running on your server that lets you watch movies that you've downloaded
legally, of course, duh. And so you want to watch a movie at the airport. Um, but for some reason,
you don't want to tunnel all your traffic through. I don't know. You just don't want to,
right? You only want that address for your home movie server to the traffic for that to go over
the tail scale network. Maybe you just have low bandwidth at home. And so you don't want every
other app on your device talking to your home network. You can do that. I tunnel everything.
I just, I don't want anything running on the public network. So I'm going to tunnel it all
through. That's your choice. But yeah, so you can have multiple devices. And so if you,
if you have a trusted family member in another region, living in another state or city or country
even, you could put a home server at their house and install Tailscale there. And now you are able
to VPN through their network, obviously with their permission, VPN through their network. And maybe
you use that for all sorts of reasons where you might need to have a an IP address in that local
region so tail scale is great it's really flexible there's a lot more that we could get into but we
are running low on time here so I am going to stop sharing my screen go back to go back to the main
video screen here there we go sweet all right well we're out of time thank you everybody for
jumping onto this first one. Wow, we're up to 16 people on X. Holy cow. You rock. Let me show off
my shirt here. I'm wearing my heat punk shirt. You don't know what heat punk is. It's a new term.
I don't know how long it's been around, but 2025 is really where it's coming on the scene.
Heat punks are people who have Bitcoin miners and they'll run a Bitcoin miner in their house
and then they want to use the heat from that to heat their room. And this could be just on a small
scale of heating your room all the way up to commercial people who want to use the heat from
bitcoin miners to do commercially available things like there are people who dry out cocoa beans and
drying cocoa beans takes a lot of heat and so they're using they're using bitcoin miners and
all the heat coming off of those and drying out the cocoa beans but then they also get to keep
the bitcoin so heat punks um i think it's really cool idea i've got a heater that i run at home
during the winter to heat the office that I work out of at home. So, um, cool.
All right. Well, thanks for joining. We're going to be back next week on Friday, 10 30 AM Bitcoin
part-time, which translates to 15 30 UTC. Uh, next week, I'm going to be going over the tool
called Goose. And Goose is a tool that you can download on your computer. It's put out by the
company Block. Block is behind Square and Cash App. And it's a tool for getting different AI
apps to talk to each other. And it uses something called MCP, which is an open protocol for AI apps
to communicate.
So I will post a message on X and on Noster
for people to ask questions about Goose,
things that they want to learn about,
and then also start taking feedback
on what other Freedom Tech tools you want to learn about.
So in the meantime, you know, this weekend,
check out Tailscale, check out WireGuard,
or check out any other Freedom Tech VPN tool that you like.
Play around with them.
If there's other VPN tools that you like that are similar to Tailscale, let me know.
Damn, what's going on with my throat today?
Excuse me.
Okay.
Well, again, my name is Marks.
Thanks for joining me.
Follow me on X, Marks underscore FTW for Freedom Tech Works or Freedom Tech Weekend, Freedom Tech Wrap, For the Win, whatever you want it to mean.
All right.
Later.
Thank you.