Meeque.de is the personal website of Michael Riedel, from Munich, Germany.
This site is not used for business or commercial purposes, so it is my understanding that it does not require a full imprint. Nevertheless, I want to share some information about me and my site.
Contact
You can reach me through some of the common email-addresses (RFC 2142) of my registrable domain (eTLD+1). In particular, try webmaster or postmaster.
You can also reach me through any of the email addresses listed in my PGP key-ring AA3FBEFBE3D75E3B (fingerprint: 956F 3271 E9B2 8A45 A03C 35F1 AA3F BEFB E3D7 5E3B). You’re welcome to encrypt your messages to this key. And you may expect a valid signature, when receiving emails from these addresses. Also see my PGP key announcement.
Note that all email goes through the registrable domain (meeque.de). None of the subdomains are set up to send or receive email.
Privacy & Intellectual Property
This site attempts to respect other people’s privacy. I’m trying to keep my contents free of other people’s personal data (including photos). In rare cases, when I do publish personal data, I’m asking for consent beforehand.
This site also attempts to respect other people’s and organizations’ intellectual property (what an ugly word though). When using 3rd-party materials, I’m trying to stick to Creative Commons licenses and ensure proper attribution. I’m publishing some of my own materials (in particular photos) under a CC license, too. See the embedded metadata (e.g. exif) of individual media files for details.
If you find the above principles violated, I’d likely consider this an error. Please do contact me, and I’ll try to address legitimate complaints.
Cookie and Tracking Policy
This website makes use of cookies as sparsely as possible.
It attempts to stay clear of 3rd-party cookies altogether. To achieve this, this site avoids dynamic loading of 3rd-party web resources, incl. frame contents, ajax requests, scripts, style-sheets, media, fonts, etc.
This website uses browser storage APIs as sparsely as possible, too. It does not employ techniques like browser-fingerprinting or super-cookies.
This website does use some cookies that it considers technically necessary. This includes session cookies that are needed to sign-in to my WordPress and Nextcloud. Currently only I have user accounts for these web applications. To stay clear of cookies, simply stay clear of these sign-in forms!
My Nextcloud server may also set technically necessary cookies when you follow a link to a shared resource. To stay clear of such cookies, do not follow links that point to cloud.meeque.de!
My XSS Demo App (xss.meeque.de, yss.meeque.de, announcement) may employ cookies, but only at the discretion of individual users. This educational web applications enables users to exploit XSS vulnerabilities and to run arbitrary JavaScript code. Naturally, this can be used to set arbitrary cookies and storage items, and to include arbitrary 3rd-party resources. By design, users of the XSS Demo App can only access cookies in their own browser (similar of what they could do with typical browser development tools). Users do not need to fear that other users of the XSS Demo App could access cookies stored in their own browser.
If you find the above principles violated, I’d likely consider this a bug or a vulnerability. Please do contact me, and I’ll try to fix it!
Hosting of this Site
Currently, most of this site is hosted on AWS infrastructure in Europe and the United States.
This WordPress blog and my Nextcloud server are hosted in the AWS eu-central-1 data-center in Frankfurt, Germany. I intent to keep it this way.
Mail servers (MX) are located in AWS data-centers eu-central-1 and us-east-2 (United States). Most incoming email traffic is forwarded to mailboxes hosted by German email-provider GMX. If you’re worried about any of this, please encrypt your messages to the PGP key mentioned in the contact section above;)
Auxiliary systems (e.g. the XSS Demo App or Prometheus monitoring) are hosted in us-east-2 or other AWS data-centers around the world.
This site attempts to use TLS comprehensively, both for web contents and email traffic. It uses certificates issued by Let’s Encrypt, which I can highly recommend. If you encounter a plain http resources on meeque.de, be very suspicious!
What does Meeque mean?
I’ve been called many variations of my given name over the years. My German friends and colleagues call me Michael or Michi. My Czech friends and relatives call me Michal, Miki, Míša, or even Mišík (or the respective vocative form). English-speaking people call me Michael, Mike, and rarely Mikey. I’ve also been called the French Michel, the Spanish/Portuguese Miguel, or similar.
Meeque is just another variation of my name. It is derived as follows:
- Take the English nickname “Mike”.
- Pronounce “Mike” in the way this sequence of letters would be pronounced in German.
- Transcribe this pronunciation into a hypothetical spelling system inspired by English (“mee”) and French (“que”).
Therefore, the preferred pronunciation of Meeque is [miːˈkɛˑ]. At least, according to my limited understanding of IPA. So, the last part is pronounced more like the first part of “Québec”, less like the French word “que”.
I think, I first started using meeque as my character/player name in computer games. Maybe on LAN-parties in the late nineties and early two-thousands. For lack of a more creative nickname, it somehow stuck. I started using it in email addresses and user account names. And finally in my DNS domain name meeque.de, which I have owned since around 2010. Over time, close friends have come to recognize me under this name. They even greet me as Meeque in real life — with an ironic undertone.
A quick web-search reveals that there are others, who are using the name meeque for all sorts of things. I’m not affiliated to most of these.