Asýlon is a place to be safe from technology. It derives from the Greek word sanctuary: It combines the prefix a, without; and sŷlon, right of seizure. It means all which can not be seized or plundered. This century has given us technology that makes our life better, but in many instances it has come at a cost, our own inner sanctuary. The root cause of this invasion comes in the form of surveillance capitalism: a market driven process where the commodity for sale is your personal data and behavioural data, and where the acquisition is done with surveillance through internet and personal devices.

This website, Asýlon.org has three goals:

• Educate users on issues pertaining to surveillance capitalism.
• Promote and provide access to technology that ameliorates the problems caused by surveillance capitalism.
• Where possible, change business and government practices regarding surveillance capitalism, with a focus on New Zealand.

In particular the emphasis will be to find practical solutions while keeping the hand waving to a minimum. Anyone can find a problem, but my hope is that solutions can be found to all issues addressed here.

The inspiration (including the name of this site) came from Shoshana Zubroff book: Age of Capital Surveillance written in 2019. This book is highly recommended. Asýlon is a personal project started by Mark von Nagy (https://vonnagy.com). All comments, suggestions, corrections, and complaints are taken aboard, please see the contact page.

Other bits and bobs:

This blog was imported from  the domain Asylon.org into my wordpress site during September of 2020; the site was active during December 2019 to March 2020. The domain Asylon.org will remain online, but may repurposed for other privacy uses.

• This is a lo-fi website: This site does not use any tracking scripts nor place any cookies. It does not contain any JavaScript or Canvas tags.
• This site was generated by Luapress and is composed of static html.
• The symbol of Asýlon is the kina or sea urchin. Its spines protect against those that may want to seize it.

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• Go private, go blockchain, or roll your own email (3/14/2020) - Email is an interesting beast. Many people, even those with considerable technical abilities shy away using anything but a big tech email provider. The majority people use Google – which its a classic gmail address, or with touch more configuration, set up their custom domain with Google. There are still more than a handful that […]
• Freeing your Mobile: GrapheneOS / Pixel 3a XL review (3/13/2020) - Until recently, there hasn’t been any variety to mobile phone operating systems; you either in the Apple IOS camp or Android. Android is heavily spying on everything you do on your mobile. A simple bike ride while you are on your mobile my land you in trouble with the law. IOS unfortunately doesn’t fare much better. […]
• Realme.govt.nz and Capital Surveillance (3/4/2020) - Realme is an NZ government project sponsored by the New Zealand government. While the initiative deserves credit, it has fallen short protections for complete privacy. In short, Realme.govt.nz doesn’t track your online habits, but by using Google’s doubleclick and Google Fonts, it provides your online habits to Google and make you more track-able. This may […]
• New Zealand teenagers: We know what you do, we know what you feel. (2/17/2020) - For those do not believe surveillance capitalism is a problem in our part of the world, listen to what Shoshanna Zuboff has to say. Shoshana Zuboff..We know about a Facebook document that was leaked to the press in Australia written by Facebook executives to their Australian and New Zealand business customers. And what do they sell in […]
• Understanding browser fingerprinting (2/7/2020) - ClientVariations proto; for (const VariationIDEntry& entry : all_variation_ids_set) { switch (entry.second) { case GOOGLE_WEB_PROPERTIES_SIGNED_IN: if (is_signed_in) proto.add_variation_id(entry.first); break; case GOOGLE_WEB_PROPERTIES: proto.add_variation_id(entry.first); break; case GOOGLE_WEB_PROPERTIES_TRIGGER: proto.add_trigger_variation_id(entry.first); break; case ID_COLLECTION_COUNT: // This case included to get full enum coverage for switch, so that // new enums introduce compiler warnings. Nothing to do for this. break; }   […]
• reCaptcha knows when you contact the IRD (2/3/2020) - Last December, I had to set up an account with BC Hydro in Canada, which is provincial government’s energy company. While going through the process of setting it up online – there was a reCAPTCHA message at the bottom. But unlike most, this one had some fine print: Prior to using the following validation process […]
• Reconsidering Lastpass for password storage (1/22/2020) - I recently found out that 3rd party password manager, LastPass, was sold to = for 4.3 Billion USD. This certainly opened my eyes, since I have been a long time user. I have recommended it in past, but with the recent sale I have reconsidered. Here’s why. The first thought is the magnitude of the sale […]
• All your passwords belong to us. (1/16/2020) - Why did I have to learn about Google’s password collection by surprise? Last year, I found out about Google’s tracking of our purchase history. Yesterday, after reinstalling my email client, my Gmail account was blocked because it was considered an ‘unsafe’ app. * In turn I had to dive deeply into the issue, and found out […]
• Do know evil – New Zealand in the age of Capital Surveillance. (12/27/2019) - About 15 years ago, I was both an avid amateur photographer and web developer. This naturally led me to build a website showing off my best photographs. It was a simple website that I cobbled together in part from an open source shopping cart system. The cart system had a ‘share this product’ feature which […]