December 15, 2022

In today's world, privacy and anonymity are more important than ever. With the proliferation of technology and the increasing amount of personal information available online, it's crucial that we protect our privacy and maintain our anonymity whenever possible.

One of the biggest reasons for this is the potential for identity theft. When our personal information is readily available online, it becomes much easier for criminals to access and use it for their own gain. This can lead to financial losses, ruined credit, and a host of other problems.

But the importance of privacy and anonymity extends beyond the realm of identity theft. In many cases, having the ability to remain anonymous online can be a matter of personal safety. For example, people who live in oppressive regimes may use anonymity to avoid persecution for their political beliefs. Others may use it to protect themselves from stalking or harassment.

In addition to protecting ourselves, maintaining anonymity can also be important for the greater good. Whistleblowers, for example, often need to remain anonymous in order to expose corruption or wrongdoing without fear of retribution. And in some cases, anonymity can even be a form of political protest, allowing people to speak out against injustice without fear of reprisal.

Of course, there are also those who would abuse anonymity for nefarious purposes, such as cyberbullying or spreading misinformation. But this doesn't negate the importance of privacy and anonymity in general. Instead, it highlights the need for responsible use of these tools.

In conclusion, privacy and anonymity are crucial for protecting ourselves and others in the digital age. Whether we're trying to prevent identity theft, safeguard our personal safety, or speak out against injustice, the ability to remain anonymous online is more important than ever.

September 24, 2022

This was originally posted on our old blog, archived here.

What is a machine-id, and why should you randomize it? From the machine-id man pages, it is defined as:

This ID uniquely identifies the host. It should be considered “confidential”, and must not be exposed in untrusted environments, in particular on the network. If a stable unique identifier that is tied to the machine is needed for some application, the machine ID or any part of it must not be used directly.

https://www.man7.org/linux/man-pages/man5/machine-id.5.html

In an effort to promote privacy, having a unique and unchanging identifier tied to your device seems like the wrong approach. It’s quite possible that poorly coded or even maliciously coded software could fetch this ID from your system. Let’s make sure that even if that does happen, that the value is constantly changing so that your device can not be uniquely identified as your device.

This is an incredibly simple and quick adjustment to your default Linux system. What we’re doing is showing you how to either adjust this value manually by hand, or by running a cronjob to change this value every minute with a new, randomized value.

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August 18, 2022

This is an important notice that details some changes that will impact your service. Read below to learn about: Expected / planned downtime, IP address changes, more.

What is happening?

We are migrating all existing Netherlands VPSes to accommodate network changes.

How will this impact my service?

Each VM will be migrated to a new host node. This will cause temporary downtime during the migration process. Additionally, each VM will be assigned new IP addresses (both V4 and V6). We’ll be assigning customers IPs from newer subnets from our own ASN.

With the existing setup, we are using our own IPv4 and a leased subnet of IPv6 which are announced under our upstream’s ASN instead of our own. This update will allow us to use our own IPv4, our own IPv6, and our own ASN. The geographic location, datacenter, network, features, hardware specs of host nodes, etc will all remain the same.

I don’t want to change my IP, can I keep my current one?

Unfortunately it is not possible to migrate these servers with the IPs intact. Sometime after this mass migration is completed, we can then re-announce the subnet that your IP comes from with this new network setup and then can re-assign whatever IP you had originally if needed, but this will be done by request only and only after all VMs have been migrated.

Can you tell me what my new IP will be before you complete this change?

Unfortunately this will not be known by us until after the migration for your individual VM has started. We do not have the option to choose what IP specifically will be assigned to your new VM. As soon as the VM is migrated, you will receive a new welcome email with your new IP.

Why are you doing this?

This is to better accommodate our growth as a business and to ensure public network information accurately depicts IncogNET as being the ISP behind our IP space. Additionally, this new setup will allow us to better accommodate our growth and to increase our presence in this location.

When will this begin?

We hope to start migrations next week. We’ll begin with some of our internal and personal servers to make sure our work flow for migrating customer servers is as optimized as possible.

Where can I get additional updates?

We’ll make updates available from the IncogNet client portal. Wider, more general announcements will be posted on Twitter and Mastodon

UPDATE:If you are on, "summer.nl.incogvps.com" then this does not apply to you. You are already on the new network.

March 9, 2022

While citizens of Russia wake up daily to learn of new sanctions placed upon them by global corporations, more and more companies are jumping on the bandwagon to virtue signal that, they too, stand with Ukraine.

Our desire to provide a platform that allows users from around the world to access and publish information greatly outweighs our desire to "stick it to Putin" by denying Russian citizens the ability to use our services. We want you to be able to access and publish information about what is happening in the world. The great majority of sanctions imposed upon Russia only negatively impact the citizens who are of no fault of their geographic location in this world or the government who serves them.

We have Russian friends. We have Ukrainian friends. Like anywhere else on earth, most people are good hearted people who are just trying to live their life. We wish every citizen the best.

TL;DR: We're still providing service to Russia and will continue to do so unless it becomes illegal to do so under US Law.

January 23, 2022

It's been a busy month for us, but that hasn't prevented us from addressing some areas where we could improve our CloudLinux Shared Hosting service. One of the things we really strive for as a business is to be able to reflect upon our service offerings and improve them in areas where customers may have submitted suggestions, to match current market trends in feature sets, and to correct any annoyances that we ourselves may have as users of our own service. In fact, this very blog is hosted on our Dallas, Texas based Shared Hosting service and we host some of our own personal projects on both our shared hosting and KVM Virtual Servers.

Find out what we added or changed by reading more.

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January 23, 2022

Well, we’re back with a blog. When we first started, we ran a short-lived Wordpress blog that had gained some traction, but ultimately decided to replace it with a simple flat-file, bash-based blog ( BashBlog! ), but  decided to ditch it after the novelty of managing a bash-based blog wore off and the chore of updating it settled in.

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