Privacy and Security

Bye bye Dropbox

2019-10-13

This week I did a bunch of work on cleaning up my digital life. Earlier this year I picked up a Network Attached Storage (NAS) device along with a battery backup to give myself highly reliable local storage. I’ve also take the time to set up multiple encrypted backup locations, with versioning, so I’ve got high data integrity and strong disaster recovery. I’ve slowly been organizing my decades old backups and I think I’ve got everything pulled together in one organized location.…

Browser options are shrinking

2019-09-20

uBlock Origin is an ad-block, web security, and privacy tool, one that I have recommended for a long time. I was dismayed to see this article today. I encourage you to read that, but here’s the first line: Very quick tl;dr: uBO will no longer with Safari, use Firefox or a new “content blocker” app (see below for good replacements). If you read the article you’ll notice that Chrome is also essentially disabling support for uBlock Origin.…

Another reminder about MS and Privacy

2019-07-22

Bleeping computer’s Lawrence Abrams writes about a good reminder about why I avoid Microsoft products. There are good reasons why they collect this data, but there are equally good reasons to resent them for doing so. I choose not to share my information with them. I choose to use Linux.

Secure Messaging

2019-06-13

Dieter Bohn seems like a kindred spirit. You should read his article here about secure-by-default messaging.

Chrome is taking over

2019-05-29

Here is a good article about what kind of shennanigans that Google has been up to with chrome. A couple of months back I moved back to using Firefox as my primary browser for reasons not mentioned in that article. Several good points have been made about the state of browsers, and it’s important to keep Firefox relevant at this time or there won’t be ANY meaningful competition in the browser market in the future.…

Reduce the use of the big data companies

2018-10-09

With Facebook the simplest thing you can do is delete the apps from your phone (all facebook properties). Only use the web browser interface. For Google, switch your default search engine to Duckduckgo and consider finding a paid email provider who has your privacy in mind.