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The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF.org) has a great Surveillance Selfe Defense Guide: https://ssd.eff.org/ The present tools and wrote up nice tutorials! The CCC has many local communities. I totally recommend to check out if there is one near your place http://www.ccc.de/de/regional There are really nice guys who love explaining stuff! I personally use the latest Firefox on Xubuntu with the addons mentioned above (Ghostery, µBlock, optional NoScript). The Tor Browser gets far too much in the way for everyday use, imo. I still use my 10year old mailaccounts at gmx.de, which is probably not the optimala solution, but so far I've been too lazy to find myself something else. My universities email account won't last much longer, therefore I'm not starting new conversations there. You might face the same problem at some point and want to look for an alternative sooner than later. For "mission cirtical" stuff we have our companies self-hosted email. For VPN it's pretty much the same.
If someone has generally applicable suggestions for (european/german) email providers, please tell us!
On March 18 2015 18:59 SixStrings wrote: Malware and Viruses have never been a problem for me in... 15 years of using Windows. Probably because I don't visit porn sites. Well, then that's a sign of generally good, cautious behaviour. And porn sites are not more problematic than any site which offers free downloads
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United Kingdom20157 Posts
Malware and Viruses have never been a problem for me in... 15 years of using Windows. Probably because I don't visit porn sites.
Porn sites are mostly fine AFAIK, shady porn sites are not fine
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I'm not really interested either way. Porn just doesn't do much for me. Not really the point though. :D
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On March 18 2015 18:59 SixStrings wrote:
Perhaps that sounds insane, but when I read about the extent of the NSA surveillance, about how they have hacked SIM-card-manufacturers, HDD firmware, battery firmware (I didn't even think about batteries HAVING firmware), I just get orwellian shivers running down my spine.
You're right about google. I was considering to move away from GMail and use the email provided by my university exlusively, but I don't know if I lose access to that once I leave. I don't use Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or Myspace, not because I'm paranoid, but because I'm just not interested in those.
Malware and Viruses have never been a problem for me in... 15 years of using Windows. Probably because I don't visit porn sites.
Which VPN should I use?
My internet connection is provided by my uni, and I use 'cisco anyconnect' to connect to them, as well as Tunnelblick Open VPN for OSX. Is your recommendation to ditch Safari for the TOR browser?
If there is one thing I can tell you is that; you just shouldn't worry about it too much. No-one is actively monitoring you. The more you look into the state of Software/Hardware protection, the more you come to the conclusion that the last 15 years have gone too fast in terms of tech-advancements. The last 15, maybe 20 years, have been in the theme of progressing IT Development and security has been an under shoveled child. To fix this gap on lack of security, we will need years before anything can be considered safe.. Especially things like NSA, the Iranian/North Korean/French&German intelligence agencies, are all light years ahead in terms of attacking capabilities. In this case, it's better to stay an uneducated simple user. Otherwise, it will be best to just go live under a rock, with a electromagnetic shield.
That said; Your university mail will most likely stop being active, after graduation.
Social media are indeed overrated
Most porn sites don't have issues with Mal/Adware as been said earlier.
VPN is a protocol, the program you use for establishing this protocol is just user-preference. I like VNC with PPTP most.. but yeahh... it's opion based and also depends on which type server you're connecting to.
I'd definitely ditch Safari, but that's because I have developed an intensive hate for Apple and their products.
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I don't get that last point at all. Safari on iOS is a pain and it's needlessly restrictive, but Safari on OSX is pure joy. It's light and fast, has great bookmark-management, doesn't get in the way, has features like Adblock without you even noticing it... I can't think of a single thing in Safari for OSX that I dislike.
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On March 18 2015 22:18 SixStrings wrote: I don't get that last point at all. Safari on iOS is a pain and it's needlessly restrictive, but Safari on OSX is pure joy. It's light and fast, has great bookmark-management, doesn't get in the way, has features like Adblock without you even noticing it... I can't think of a single thing in Safari for OSX that I dislike.
Yeah, the last point is purely based on a fixed perceptive on Apple products, it doesn't have anything to do with the functionality of Safari in general, since to be honest, I have never used Safari in the last 5 years..
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I recently ditched my Gmail and now use tutanota.de for my email. You might want a look at it. I can't really comment on the other stuff, since I wouldn't know what I was talking about.
Oh, and the Policeman-Plugin for Firefox is nice. It let's you see what your browser does and then apply rules, so you can nicely block out trackers. quidsup on youtube did a video about it.
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I don't know why people are so paranoid about government spying on you, if they want to get information about you, they will get it no matter how much you try to hide it. What are you trying to hide that is within their interests? Pirated movies and porn or architectural data of military equipment? People fall into scare tactics so easily.
I thought this would be mostly about trying to secure yourself in terms of accessing online banking and the norm.
edit: I also want to add that people unknowingly leave forensic evidence all over the internet and databases, so it is not going to be difficult to track you if a agency or individual is determined.
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got the Nokia s60 myself, SixString from Germany. I mean, NOT that, I've got the Samsung Chromebook 500c model.
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