When talking about privacy in the modern world, we are often faced with a common dismissive argument. Someone in the group always drags out the “I don’t have anything to hide, so it doesn’t bother me” argument. Privacy activists usually take offense to this, get agitated, or get flustered and go into a tirade about … Continue reading “Dismantling the “Nothing to Hide” Argument”
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OpenVPN is the old guard of the VPN world. It is powerful, stable, and it has a large and enthusiastic dev community backed by multiple commercial interests. A new dot release is scheduled to be released this year, with many new features that aim to make OpenVPN easier to use and resist censorship. Here is … Continue reading “OpenVPN 2.5.0 – What is Coming to OpenVPN in 2019”
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Without a strong passcode, everything on your mobile device is accessible by anyone. That includes thieves, random co-workers, and local law enforcement officers and the FBI. Even if you only keep your mobile device secure in your pocket or at home, imagine the damage your child could do once they access your Amazon account. Adding … Continue reading “How to Set a Strong Passcode on Your Mobile Device”
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Adware is software that displays advertisements, directs your browser to advertising websites, and collects information about your browsing habits so that advertisements can be shown to you based from your online activity. Advertisements displayed by adware are typically produced within an Internet Browser window; However, they can also be displayed in the user interface of … Continue reading “What is Adware?”
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The IOT is back in the news again this week. A judge has ordered Amazon to turn over audio data from an Alexa device related to a murder investigation. There’s a few interesting things raised by this warrant. The investigators believe that Alexa may have captured audio of the attack itself and uploaded it to … Continue reading “The Internet of Things is Surveillance”
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In doing my research around the impact of TLS 1.3 for Private Internet Access, I came across some peculiar items in the new standards. TLS 1.3 represents a relatively large shift in cryptography, so much so that it was debated whether it should be called TLS 2.0 rather than 1.3. It throws away a lot … Continue reading “SuperCooKey – A SuperCookie Built Into TLS 1.2 and 1.3”
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Everyone wants to be more secure. They want their browsing, their money, their utilities, and their lives to be as safe as possible. When you ask users of any service about security in a vacuum, they always want the best. Reality sets in when users see how complicated and tedious secure systems are, and this … Continue reading “The Security Usability Challenge”
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Back in our Firefox Hardening guide, we talked about installing the extension Firefox Lightbeam. What is Lightbeam? Lightbeam is an app that gives you a visual graph of what your browsing looks like from a network perspective. Lightbeam looks at all of the network connections that your browser makes, and turns them into a visual … Continue reading “Firefox Lightbeam – Visually Seeing the Benefits of Privacy in Real Time”
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Today we are going to talk about uMatrix, a more powerful cousin of the uBlock Origin ad-blocker. uMatrix adds Cookie, CSS, Media/Image, Script, XML Http Requests (XHR), Frame, and other types of blocking to your security and privacy arsenal, and it allows the user to fine tune each of these types of blocking to the … Continue reading “uMatrix – A Powerful Firefox Extension to Enhance Security and Privacy”
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Purpose: This guide shows a user in an easy-to-follow way how to improve the privacy and security settings of Firefox, which, when combined with a privacy VPN, gives a user a strong framework for protecting their information. This guide is broken down into sections, each addressing different areas of security and privacy settings within Firefox. … Continue reading “Firefox Hardening Guide 2018”
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