Securing your internet travels

Have any tips or tricks for secure internet surfing?

Here are a few ideas I have found:
http://www.sovereignman.com/personal-privacy/five-privacy-tools-10859/
http://www.howtovanish.com/privacy-tools-and-resources/privacy-software/

I use Startpage.com. They assure browsing privacy, even though my computers are audited pretty regularly, my footprints are not very deep.

If you need privacy, a good proxy service is a useful tool.

Also using a VPN service is very good. Living in China, I need to get around the firefall (even to come to this site!).

Anonymous proxy FTW...

Use the Tor browser bundle: https://www.torproject.org/download/download

ah so mazztech

we know you here

why you come to China if you want internet ?

Don't know why it took me so long to check out Firefox, but I downloaded it a couple days ago and have been playing with it. It has some excellent features for security. There is a plug in system with a ton of available plug-ins. One of them is called "no script" and it kicks ass. It effectively stops javascript at the most granular level - letting you decide which scripts you want to allow to run. Very nice feature for stopping malware from running AND from preventing those Facebook et. al. scripts from tracking you.

Of course, any of this is like waving a big red flag at NSA, who even admits that if they can't figure out where either end is (instantly, from packet inspection, not eventually with actual work) - or there's any encryption, they keep that data, period - and dig when they have time to find out what it was.

There's a theory that we could ddos them in this sense if everyone started using GPG or something, but there's just not enough adoption.

Tor is well known to have been broken with ease when they want to. They even admit it publicly.
Who knows if that's a double-think statement or not, but a determined (state especially) adversary can take something like that to pieces easily.

"When I want to keep a secret, I talk as much as normally, just abut something else. Going around with your hand over your mouth tells everyone you've got a secret."
Isaac Asimov, Foundation series.

Knowing that someone can access everything you are doing on the Internet has taken most of the fun out of using it. This site is a rare exception for me because after I innocently posted a review on Golmart (just trying to be helpful) I was apparently instantly recognized by the NSA (news to me) and grouped together with all the other people here. I won't ever be able to get off the list now no matter what I do or say. So what the heck. At that point I figured I had nothing to lose by continuing to post until they come and arrest me for "associating with known and suspected coin collectors and investors who are also worried about an economic collapse, nuclear accidents, and have bad backs". :shrug:

Doesn't take the fun out of it for me. I'm a good guy, working the correct side of the street, and everyone who knows me knows that. If they can't take a joke - well to hell with them - I'll go to the gallows smiling and telling the truth as I see it all the way. I've already had more life and fun than most people ever will - it's all bonus now. And hey, it can be fun to know you're messing with their heads.

I've been called a troll for telling people (some, maybe most) of the things I've done (I was asked on G+ by someone), without embellishment, or at least no more than normal. Bothered me for about 10 seconds. Then I realized is what I'd done is make them feel bad for not getting off their own butts and having as much life as I've had, even though they had about the same starting abilities/advantages as I.

F**k them if they can't take a joke! Every once in awhile, you just have to have that attitude or lose your soul. I'm kinda fond of mine, thanks.

I'm free - in the same sense as Paul (who I also often disagree with) in the bible. You can lock my body up, but not me.

I've found you get 3 reactions to that (from my rock and roll days). One is fear - people think that since you're free (eg you don't give a damn what they think, taking away any power they have over you) - you'd do what they'd do if they were free, not realizing that you can't be free with that s**t rolling around in your psyche.

Then you get the ones who want you to do the crazy stuff rock and roll guys are famous for - drugs, groupies, wild parties, crazy driving etc etc so they can live vicariously through you - even though it'll kill you - they don't care about that part - they'll just latch onto the next sucker. Glad I wised up in time.

Then there's the third type, the one I'm always scouting for - their reaction is "oh, another one of us".
Those are my true friends - anytime, anyplace, anything. There are more of us than most think.
We keep it low in self-defence. This place seems to have an above-average % of such, which is why I'm here too.

Speaking of G+, here's my profile link (under my real name) https://plus.google.com/u/0/118269538514558647824/posts/p/pub
Call me anytime - if I don't answer, I'm just busy or too tired to chat.

Tor is utterly broken - http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/09/01/tor_correlation_follows_the_breadcrumbs_back_to_the_users/

Hate to say, toldya. If you make traffic, they gotcha. We're talking about an advances, persistent adversary here. Same is about to be true for most crypto with "reasonable" key lengths.
I seem to "guess" these kind of things a bit before they get into the MSM.

I second DCF. In my professional opinion, trying to vanish from the web, makes you trip many trip wires, that will draw attention to you, rather than making your stuff "private". No such thing like privacy in the net. As for the encryption, hehe... When the DES was announced winner of NSA's competition for crypto-solution, if my memory serves me well, they said "yes, but...." and requested seemingly immaterial changes to some aspects of it. Funny enough, these "seemingly negligible" changes, proved to make DES resistant to new methods of deciphering that were officially "discovered" by mainstream civilian use/crypto-pros, some twenty years later. Pure coincidence, no doubts...

SEcondly, there are numerous leaks from major crypto-providers, both software, and hardware - things that basically mean "yes children, you can play with the cryptography all that you want, but in case we want to sniff at you, you must provide us backdoors" - which they implement, to comply with "regulations" and be allowed to do business on your soil...

A few suggestions which may help:

Firefox (because it's open source)

These plug-ins (for FF)

No Script

Ghostery

Https Everywhere

A Payed VPN (must check/do research, find one out of country/doesn't keep logs)

A separate payed proxy (JonDom)

Change your DNS gateway!
(For windows on run line enter CMD and run it /w admin priv. Type "ipconfig /all" look for "DNS gateway", 99% chance it will be "8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4" this is googles' DNS- which means everything goes thru their servers/recorded)

How to change?

Free program called DNSJUMPER others "dns change" etc.

They change DNS gateway- but you must choose anonymous DNS gateways-

Look up (on duck duck/startpage "anonymous DNS gateways"

Examples are advantage/comodo secure, and others.

Enter the IP address's by clicking on ipv4 (under adapter properties) and manually enter

or

use DNSJUMPER (as it has preloaded list)

If your really concerned, d/l true crypt and create a virtual machine (2)...there are extensive guides how to do that.

With the Utah center "having fires" and such+the failing infrastructure, I don't see super-worry (when we have Fukushima/post Keynesian madness upon us).

One thing that lets me (well, pretend sleep) and I realize this maybe no option for some...

I opted out of google/yahoo/Facebook/gmail/eBay/PayPal etc years ago.

Of course I don't expect privacy- but I am blown away a bit- how many people are still using 2-4 passwords such as "747733(phone number)zer0b" etc.

There are as a result of the unprecedented privacy "not", many upstarts developing some very novel encryption/crypto technologies- it's big $$$.

Also- nothing beats pen and paper. I have no contact lists and am a bit obsessive when it comes to scrubbing exif data.

It used to freak me out big time...the big one was/is "gracefully" exiting el-banko system.

I'm a firm believer that what really will draw attention are things $$$ related (ObamacrapUncare/having no bank account).

But seeing how unaware so many are- that's a lot for gubermints/jpm co. to "bail-in".

Ugh...

Use Linux. It came out recently that Microsoft puts back doors in everything for the government. Even the German government put out a memo that they'll no longer be buying PCs with Windows because of this.

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* bump *

Newer versions of Chrome, Safari, and Opera will no longer allow you to disable hyperlink auditing, which is a concern for those seeking maximum privacy. While some of these browsers previously allowed you to disable this feature, newer versions are going in the opposite direction.

Hyperlink auditing is an HTML standard that can be used to track clicks on web site links. This is done by creating special links that ping back to a specified URL when they are clicked on. These pings are done in the form of a POST request to the specified web page, which can then examine the request headers to see what page the click came from.
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Of all the browsers I tested, only Brave and Firefox currently disable it by default and do not appear to have any plans on enabling it in the future.
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When we first published the article, some of the comments were that this feature is not used that often compared to other tracking methods such as JS and redirects.

It turns out that Google uses hyperlink auditing in their search result pages. Every time you click on a search result link, your browser will also send HTTPS POST request back to a Google url in order to track the click.

Click to expand...

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/ne...ent-disabling-of-click-tracking-privacy-risk/

Had an issue this morning where Privacy Badger stopped working on my Firefox browser. Disabled it, removed it, could NOT reinstall it. Thought I might have contracted the computer AIDS, so ran malware checks and everything came back clean. Did some searching and looks like there is a bug that Mozilla developers are working to fix:

https://www.windowslatest.com/2019/...that-disables-all-firefox-add-ons-extensions/

Thought I'd mention it in case any of you peeps were stressing over a similar situation.