Hey, hey.
What's up, what's up, what's up?
Freedom Tech.
Whatever.
We are live.
I'm checking here to make sure that the sound is working.
Let's go.
Alright.
It's working on X.
Jump over to the YouTube real quick.
Check that out as well.
Move that window over here.
Get my setup going.
Hope you're all doing great today.
It is Friday.
Feeling good.
Freedom Tech Weekend is here, and we've got a tool for you.
This one is coming by way of audience choice, if you will.
So let's just go here.
All right, we got live on YouTube.
Okay, and we've got streaming audio.
Sweet.
Okay.
And, of course, I have Bitcoin Prize open.
If you guys care, Bitcoin is above $95,000.
Again, today is what?
April 25th, 2025.
Welcome to Freedom Tech Weekend.
Let's stream together.
We've got three people watching.
Hello to the three.
And I assume we will have more people jumping in
because these are exciting times.
And it is the weekend.
People want to learn about a new tool
that they can play with over the weekend.
and that's what we're doing here together on freedom tech weekend we uh we have lots of tools
that we use in our life lots of software apps tools servers you name it pretty much anything
you do on a device is interacting with some kind of app or service and so a lot of those are built
by companies that are commercial closed source and try to keep your data to themselves and they're
going to monetize your data, but really we could be keeping the data for ourselves using their
tools. And we could, if we need to pay them, we can pay them, but we can pay them for the software,
but we keep the data for ourselves and we can use that. So that's really the more healthy
relationship that we would have rather than services giving us something for free, but then
monetizing our data and using it at will. I'm quickly going to sign into X over here on my
demo computer because I have not done that and I would like to be signed in so give me one second
because I want to show something off while we're there so if you're just joining us for the first
time the way that I am doing my setup now is that um demoing live streaming from my computer and
and running software especially if I'm doing things like AI models that really tax the system
I don't want to interrupt the stream by doing that so I actually have a home
server that I use now for my demo environment and that's where I'm going
to do everything it's nice too because it's kind of a clean environment
compared to my work environment where things get kind of messy and choppy so
it gives me a little more privacy
Oh wait, I'm signing into the wrong one. Hello. We're up to five people now. Hello
to the five people. Feel free to hop in the chat. Let me open up the chat. Chat,
where you at? Sweet. Okay. Feel free to post comments in there if you voted on
the poll. I posted a poll a couple days ago just to ask what y'all wanted to
explore today. So feel free to post them there or if you just want to say what's
up do that as well.
Every day I do this, every week I do this, I feel like I get things down a
little bit better as to not waste anyone's time on here with this setup
stuff. Pretty soon this can be a well-oiled machine. We'll jump right into it and things
will be going well. Okay, great. So we're here now. I hope that my mouse isn't too loud. Let me,
I usually have like a mouse pad during streams and I don't. So I'm going to use the nearest
thing to me, which is this book, the Satoshi Papers. So, by Reflections on Political Economy
After Bitcoin, edited by Annalise Molenski. I'm going to turn it upside down so I don't
ruin the cover here, but let's do this. Okay, great. Cool, cool, cool. Well, now we can
jump right into it. Let's get going, everybody. Thank you for bearing with me. All right,
Let me share my screen.
And again, feel free to make any comments.
Ask questions along the way.
We're up to seven listeners now, viewers.
This is great.
Hit share.
Let me make sure that, all right, I'm down in the corner there.
Sweet.
We've got our screen going.
Got a nice little Freedom Tech Weekend background.
Okay, sweet.
So back on Wednesday, I posted this poll.
I had two tools that I wanted to cover, and I didn't know which one to do.
So I just put it to a vote.
And we did it.
I didn't sign into Noster on here.
So, well, Noster trended the same way.
We put out a vote.
Which one do you want to cover?
Bitwarden, which is a password manager, an open source password manager.
It also has a companion that the community created called Vaultwarden.
And then there is Orion, the web browser built by Kagi.
And Kagi is a company that became famous for having a privacy version of search.
So after a couple thousand views, we got 66 votes in the poll, and the people spoke.
You all spoke.
We're doing Orion, and that's what we're going to cover today.
But have no fear.
We will cover Bitwarden next week.
That's what we'll do.
We'll cover both Bitwarden and Vaultwarden, how those two work together, which one is
a company, which one is a community, and we'll try and talk about all of that.
Great.
So we're jumping into Orion today.
Thanks for voting.
I'll try and do these kinds of things more often.
Obviously, next week, I already said we're doing Bitwarden, but I would love feedback.
People, please suggest things to me that you want to cover and want us to go over, and
we will do that.
Okay.
So, let's jump into it.
What is Kagi?
Kagi is our company that we're focusing on today, but really, it's a project Orion.
But Kagi started as a web search company, doing their own index of the internet, and
then trying to give people a private version of web search. And it's a paid service. Again,
the idea behind that is that you are paying for the software, so you are no longer the product,
you are paying for the product. And then they are incentivized to make the best,
most private version of search for you, rather than displaying ads, rather than tracking you,
all that stuff. That is not part of their business model, so they're not incentivized
to do that kind of stuff. Well, they have made their own browser because who doesn't have their
own browser these days? Do you have your own browser? I have built a browser before. It is not
a fun, fun thing to do. Okay. So they came out with their own browser a few months ago. It's
called Orion. They claim it to be incredibly fast. It's built on the WebKit engine, which
Chrome used to be WebKit and then they moved over to their own Chromium engine.
And they claim zero telemetry and we will go into that. They also have web extension support
and a built-in ad blocker. So they're taking a lot of things that people liked about say Firefox
or Brave and they're trying to take it even a step further. All right and I like the call out
here, certified snappy. Any of you who have been around the Apple ecosystem for long enough,
snappy is one of those funny things. If you know, you know. Look it up sometime. In fact,
I've got Maple here. What is the snappy reference with Safari web browser and Apple?
Maple is our private AI chat that we use on all of these streams. It is actually an AI chat that
I build with me and my co-founder, but this is 100% encrypted, no tracking, totally private.
All right, so here it is. Basically, from every Apple event, developer conference,
or even their more, what am I trying to say, marketing-focused Apple events,
they love to talk about when a new version of Safari comes out, it is snappier than the one,
faster than the one previous to it. This says in 2020 is when it was referenced, but it goes back
a lot farther than that. And I think this is just saying in 2020, he was kind of referencing the
joke. So kudos to you, Kagi, for continuing it. All right. They have this privacy matrix here on
their page. And I actually want to bring this up because somebody on Noster, when I shared this on
primal they they mentioned that that Orion or that Kagi was not being
totally up and up on their privacy claims so I'm going to call this out I
don't have Nostra logged in on the thing that I'm screen sharing so I'm
gonna read this to you instead and then I actually got a response from Kagi that
I will read as well let me jump in here
Okay.
So somebody said, hey, I went to their page.
I highly doubt that they are very important in the privacy market.
What privacy company makes a browser comparison without including
Mulvad Browser and Brave Browser or Onion Browser?
I am rather vowing for strengthening open source projects like Firefox
and Mr. Riddles instead of short-sighted projects acting kind of disconnected
since whichever project that is improving on Firefox will help all users of Firefox derivatives
where opting in the Apple ecosystem cannot lead to transparency and openness.
The Apple company is not part of transparency in the open source.
So no way to verify whatever claims.
So there's, in my take, and this is tough because, like, it's tough having a debate over a stream
where, oh, what's going on over here?
Speaking of Apple.
Stalling iOS 17 runtime.
Hello.
But it's hard having a debate on a stream because it's kind of one way, right?
I can read your thing and then I get to pontificate however I want to.
But what I will try and say here is that, well, one, they are bringing up Brave here on their comparison.
And they bring up Firefox.
No, they do not list Moldad.
So, sure, they can add that.
But they do have Brave on here.
And then WebKit is open source.
Sure, it is supported by a company.
Apple is the one supporting that one.
But a lot of major open source projects are financially backed by large corporations.
But they still develop out in the open.
I'm trying to get back to the comment just to make sure that I can respond to the rest of it here.
And then Firefox.
You bring up Firefox.
They have their own hot water when it comes to privacy.
If you don't remember, a couple months ago, they updated their terms of service and their privacy policy to make it sound like they were going to start monetizing user data that they were collecting and telemedic data that they were collecting.
So I know that they tried to backtrack on that a little bit, and they released an updated version beyond that and made a statement.
And so supposedly they're not doing that, but go look it up.
You can go look into that yourself.
But a lot of people in the privacy community said, farewell to Firefox.
There's been a lot of paper cuts along the way, and this was just the final one.
But I agree with the overall statement of this comment, that we should be supporting open source projects and helping to create great derivatives from that.
In my mind, Orion is a great derivative from the open source WebKit project, and they're trying to build something that is private.
All right, and let's go look at one of these claims.
So they have zero telemetry on by default is what they say.
There has been an independent audit.
If you're not familiar with this, this is called Size of Cat.
It is a website, not a blog.
It is a website that writes articles and really dives deep into some of the stuff,
and they have a browser-focused telemetry 2025 edition that they do.
And they have tons here.
They've got Vivaldi browser, which I'd love to cover in the future,
Tor browser, Onion browser with Onion routing, which that comment brought up.
Tor is also very privacy focused, but I think that we're always making trade-offs, right?
And Onion browser, or sorry, Orion is focused on using your main computer, your main network.
Maybe you're going over VPN, but it's a different relationship or arrangement than using Tor,
because Tor is going completely over the Tor network, the Onion routing network.
And that has its own trade-offs with speed as well as not knowing the exit nodes and that kind of stuff.
So I think that the two are great for their own purposes.
Okay, let's jump down to Kagi Orion.
And here's their, what they do, what Size of Cat does is go through and monitor using tools, tools similar to Little Snitch.
I actually don't know which direct one they're using,
but they use tools to monitor how many network connections are going out
from a specific app as it's running.
And they saw that there were zero network connections going out from Orion
other than the direct network connection that you were making
to the website that you're going to.
So obviously, if you're trying to pull up a website,
this is an internet browser, so if you're trying to pull up a website,
it's going to make a network connection out to there,
but it's not making any other erroneous or extra ones.
So you can look at some of these other browsers, right,
and look at how many things that they're doing.
For example, let me scroll real quick.
Sorry, I'm making me feel sick here.
Let's look at Firefox as the first on the list.
So their engine is the Gecko engine,
and this is their application size,
and they make 29 extra calls.
They open up the TCP connections over different ports.
Are they all TCP?
Oh, there's some UDP as well.
But they're making connections to other things.
Services.location.services.mozilla.com.
We don't know what that's doing.
It's encrypted over 443,
but it is calling something called location services.
Now, Mozilla is actually doing that,
so it's probably trying to figure out
some information about where you are.
They don't have to name it that way.
They could have named it something else,
like superprivateprotection.mozilla.com,
but really it's looking at your location.
So the point is, any of these extra things,
we don't know exactly what they're doing,
and there are all sorts of possibilities
for IP addresses to be leaked and logged somewhere,
location to be leaked and logged,
or really any other information that you don't know
and that you don't want being shared with other people.
Now, of all these and other browsers
that I wanted to go over sometime on the stream,
and it looks like they actually make 11 network connections.
So I'm going to be keeping my eye on it a little bit more.
I think this is an interesting metric to watch with size of cat.
Okay, now I did receive an official word back from Kagi.
I asked him to respond to the question that was raised.
I don't want to dock myself, so I'm not going to bring it up.
Actually, let me just stop sharing my screen and then I can pull it up on Twitter.
So I'm going to pull up my DMs.
Stop sharing.
Just for a second here.
Okay, let me pull up my DMs from Kagi.
Okay, how can I make this perfect?
There we go.
All right.
There's nothing sensitive in here.
okay perfect here we go i'll start sharing my screen again
okay so here's the response from kagi they said hi there regarding the comment brave is there
in the chart not so not sure why they what they mean ask for the rest it's not realistic to
against every other browser on the market.
They are welcome to perform their own independent tests
the way that others have here.
And then they actually point to the size of cat posts,
which I was already planning on covering.
So that's their official response.
I really think it's cool that Kagi
was willing to reply to this
and give me a response because they don't need to.
They've got a lot of other stuff going on
than to respond to some rando online
like me and like this other person
that raised the concern.
So thank you, Kagi.
And now let's actually download the browser and play around with it for the last half of the stream here that we've got.
It is going to be pretty familiar with any other app that you've done.
They have a Mac app.
They have an iOS app.
They are working on Android and other stuff.
In fact, let's go here really quick.
Because they don't monetize your user data, they have, you know, it says we're a self-funded enterprise.
I'm not doing an advertisement for them.
I'm just telling you there is a way to pay them if you want to.
And what that comes with, I saw it somewhere.
Oh, here it was.
Okay.
What that means is that other apps are coming.
Where did it say Android?
Okay, I've looked at a lot of things, and apparently I'm missing the one that I saw before.
But Android is coming, as well as Linux, Windows, other platforms.
Okay, we're going to download from Mac.
All right, and we're going to do the Orion Mac installer.
I could go straight to an older system.
They actually support a lot of really old systems, which is commendable.
It's really difficult to do because you have to make sure that you're plugging vulnerabilities along the way.
And then they have it for iPhone as well.
Let's just grab this, download it.
Okay.
Pop it open here.
Stick it in the applications folder.
This is still, to me, such an odd.
It's both odd, but I also appreciate it.
The way that Mac apps are installed is you just get this thing and you drag it in there.
Sometimes it's nice just to have an install button that does it for you.
But at the same time, I know exactly where it's going.
I know that it's sandboxed and contained.
It's not installing a bunch of extra stuff.
So I've come to really enjoy that install experience, but it's very foreign to people who aren't used to it.
Alright, so now let's launch Orion.
Boom, there it is.
Do we want to launch it? Yes.
Now, it would be nice if they had, like, a checksum on here.
I know the browser already does a checksum,
but sometimes I still like just comparing to make sure that I got the right thing.
Okay, so now, well, now it's doing that install stuff.
Do you want to play an intro video, huh?
Let's do it, but then we'll probably just jump out of it.
Ooh, look how fancy this is.
We're flying through space.
All right, escape.
Humanize the web.
Cool, cool.
Okay.
Now, dock tile extension added.
Added one dock tile extension.
You can manage extensions.
Okay, I'll go check that out later.
So here we are.
They talk about speed.
They talk about privacy by design from the beginning.
It supports normal web extensions, and it's a native application,
so it can run faster.
A bunch of other features.
Hit next.
Now I can customize it.
I'm just going to stay with the default search engine.
They don't get paid by Google to make Google the default search engine.
You know who does?
Firefox.
Firefox gets paid a lot of money by Google, allegedly.
I don't know if it's official, but this is the word on the street.
Get paid a lot of money.
So, you know, it is what it is.
But I'm going to use Kagi as a search engine.
I don't know if it'll work because I'm not logged in or anything.
Synchronize my tabs.
So Orion uses iCloud to sync your data.
This is interesting.
So you can use iCloud to sync data,
and you can do it in a way that is private for the user
with end-to-end encryption stuff.
Not every app does it correctly.
Some apps don't encrypt things correctly,
but iCloud makes that easy.
However, if we're going to start using Android,
it becomes more difficult to synchronize them across,
and I'm guessing that's actually one reason
why they don't have Android support yet,
because when you're inside the Apple ecosystem,
It's really easy to use iCloud as your encryption mechanism.
Now, this is a great place to plug.
We build one.
It's called OpenSecret.
OpenSecretCloud.
Let me pull it up.
OpenSecret.Cloud.
We build an encryption synchronization platform that is like iCloud but works for all the platforms.
So you write it once, and it works on iOS, Mac OS, Android, Linux, Windows, you name it.
Web as well, obviously.
You name it, you get that across all of them.
And our first app is Maple that's built on top of this.
It's using that technology.
So if you're listening, Kagi, feel free to hit us up.
Okay, it looks like I lost what I was looking at.
Oh, well.
Okay.
I don't know what happened to that.
That's funny.
I lost my little like welcome thing. Can I bring it back?
Ooh, what happened? There we go. Nope. Can't bring it back.
Let's go to settings maybe. No. Okay. So we're going to, um,
well, we already pulled up a website, right? I pulled up open secret cloud,
but let's look at some of the preferences. So I'm going to open this up here.
Now, if you've used Safari,
this is very similar because they are using WebKit.
so they get a lot of similar things to Safari.
But let's jump over to the Privacy tab here.
So Remove Tracker from URLs for Private Browsing Only.
I can turn that on to All Browsing if I want to.
It's automatically set to remove history items after three months,
so they have some defaults in here to try and protect people who just download and run.
I could set that to more if I want to.
It's manually going to delete cookies right now,
so it's not going to delete them automatically for me.
but I could adjust these as I want to.
Just watching the chat here and make sure that things are good.
Okay.
And this is the user agent.
I can customize it if I want to.
It's funny that it's using this as the user agent.
It's been a long time since I messed around with user agents.
I used to be a lot more in the know on that.
All right, content blocker.
So it's got its own content blocker that it does.
It has a filter list that it uses,
and I can add my own if I want to.
So that's pretty cool.
Obviously search, I've set up to use Keggy.
This is for plus users.
I'll have to look into that later.
Okay.
But a lot of the standard stuff that you would expect, Safari and WebKit that it's based off of,
have a lot of great privacy things built in already.
So here's the encryption thing we're talking about.
So the Orion keychain, they're using their own.
I can use a third-party provider.
So this is something that I like about Orion is that,
and this will dovetail into the warden,
but most browsers just use their own password manager.
And so if I am, I use, I don't know about you,
but I use a lot of browsers, right?
I'm using Safari, Chrome, Brave, Orion.
I'm going to start adding Vivaldi in the mix.
I use a lot of different browsers.
And passwords get saved all over the place.
And they always wanted me to use their password manager.
And I just hit no because I've got my own password manager.
and so I appreciate that this one just lets me pick a third party and do that.
So that's nice. But you know it talks about Orion keychain is synced over
iCloud. Disable this option to only use system keychain passwords.
Yeah, password saving Orion's keychain can also be used in macOS iOS Safari
because it's using iCloud. Okay, that seems like a cool thing. Again, I think
they probably are having difficulty. They're having to build an entire
solution that also works for Android and that can have cross cross platform
capabilities, which is a lot of work. That's what we're trying to solve with
Open Secret. Okay, well this is a web browser and here we are. I mean there's
not much else to do other than start browsing the web, right? We could do that. I don't think you
want to browse the web with me, but Orion is nothing too scary to use. Let's look at this.
This reminds me of Brave where we've got this shield here, right? So privacy report, one request
was blocked. Let's see what OpenSecret was doing. Okay, so OpenSecret is hosted on CloudFlare.
Our marketing page is hosted on CloudFlare. So it tried to make a call out to the static.cloudflareinsights.com
and to grab a beacon.min.js.
Well, thank you for reporting that to us
because at OpenSecret,
we don't want to have telemetry on our users.
We don't do any web analytics or any of that crap.
So I'm going to take a screenshot of this.
Actually, I'm not going to,
but I'll just make a note of this.
And after the stream is over,
we're going to figure out why that's being called
so that we can make sure we're not doing this
because we don't want to be tracking people unnecessarily.
So cool.
Let me pull up Try Maple and see what it does there.
We are doing live auditing, privacy auditing of my own tools here on the stream.
Okay, another one.
Same thing.
So both of our marketing pages are using Cloudflare,
and so they're both having that same minified JS that's being downloaded.
So I'll have to go back and explore that.
Great.
Well, thank you, Kagi.
Thank you, Orion, for alerting me to that.
That's really kind of it today.
Go check out Orion.
It's super easy to download and get going.
And I do not have my iPhone pulled up here on the screen,
or we can play around with the iPhone app.
But I've given you a taste of a new browser that you can try out,
a privacy-aware browser that's got this cool shield thing that other browsers have.
But what I really love is they have these claims of not tracking, right?
They block first-party ads by default.
They block first-party trackers by default.
Hello, we just saw that happen.
Blocking third-party ads by default.
Brave also does that.
And then blocking third-party trackers by default, which other people have as well.
So Safari claims to be one of the most private browsers out there by Apple,
but as you can see, they only go so far.
They are trying to push the boundaries a little bit,
but there's a lot more they could be doing.
Brave's a little bit better.
Chrome, not so much.
In fact, today there is news that Yahoo is trying to buy Chrome.
So that's pretty funny.
I wonder if that's because of the government trying to break up Google,
and so now people are looking at the table scraps.
What can they scoop up?
Man, that would be hilarious if Yahoo bought Chrome.
What a poetic thing to have happen.
All right.
Well, thank you, everybody, for joining me.
I'm going to stop sharing the screen.
If you need private LLM, really, everybody should be using a private LLM.
Add it to your toolbox, right?
maple add this to your toolbox i'm not telling you to replace chat gpt and grok and others
with it but make it one of your things because for a lot of things you need confidentiality you
need privacy and this is your private option for an llm try maple.ai okay go check it out
and thank you for joining me this week on freedom tech weekend have fun playing around with orion
this weekend. Tell me what you find, what you like about it, what you don't like about it.
If you have a better option out there that's more private, hit me up, let me know, and I would love
to check that out. We've got 14 people on the stream right now. I wasn't watching that number
to see if it got any higher during the stream, but thank you for joining me, you 14 individuals.
Y'all are awesome. And then next week, we will be back at our regular time of 1530 UTC, and we will
be talking about Bitwarden, Vaultwarden, how do you get your passwords under control,
are you using the system password manager, are you using your browser password manager,
are you using one that's from a corporation that you don't actually, you can't see the source code,
is it encrypted, we're going to go over all sorts of things, so it's really going to be a password
manager show, but focusing on Vaultwarden, Bitwarden, and Vaultwarden. Okay, great, well,
Thank you, everybody. Have a great weekend.
And every week we're going to try and move ourselves one step away from using proprietary and closed systems.
All right. Later.
Thank you.