October 15, 2025

Warrant canary added

I have added a canary to the bottom left corner of the homepage (desktop only). It is not just a pretty illustration, it is a signal that is accompanied by a timestamp in the head, called a warrant canary. I got the idea from this website.

The warrant canary is the digital equivalent of the canary coal miners take into the mine. As long as the canary is alive everything is okay. In this case the timestamp is the equivalent of the last time somebody checked the canary’s well-being. The canary implicitly inform visitors about being served with a government subpoena (forcing the delivery of PII and meta data to the government), despite legal prohibitions on revealing the existence of the subpoena. It basically tells you that there has NOT been a court-issued subpoena before the canary’s timestamp. The timestamp only updates when I publish to this website. If I ever get a subpoena I will simply stop publishing posts on this website. So… with every new post you will know the canary is still alive and our (and your) data has not been breached. Isn’t that great news?

I added the canary to be more transparent, but also (and more importantly) to raise awareness of the growing digital surveillance worldwide.

()  Joost van der Schee