My Privacy Toolkit

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            ^^"-------------"^    

These are some notes on technology I use to improve my daily security and privacy, inspired by a page on [1]Supernova's capsule.

Goals

Stay away from services that reap benefits from using my personal data

• Make my communications private
• Avoid location tracking
• Prevent my ISP or others on wireless networks from sniffing my traffic
• Use encryption whenever reasonably possible
• Prevent any form of tracking by advertisers and governments

For an exhaustive list of my [2]recommended software, see below:

General technology used on multiple devices

[3]ProtonVPN, the best free and privacy-respecting VPN. Based in Switzerland.

[4]Bitwarden password manager, using the EU-based servers.

[5]Mozilla Thunderbird, an email client that just works.

[6]LibreWolf, a Firefox fork with privacy enhancements. Let's topple the Blink empire!

[7]ProtonMail, one of the best free and privacy-respecting email providers. Based in Switzerland.

[8]Codeberg, easily the best git hosting out there. Based in Germany.

[9]NextDNS, which lets me block ads, trackers, and even TLDs (such as .ru). Based in USA, but I configured my account to store its logs in Switzerland.

[10]SearXNG, a distributed metasearch engine that I have used happily for a long time, excluding a period of about a year when Google's antics made Searx, SearXNG, Startpage, LibreX, and LibreY unusable.

[11]Filen, which provides large-capacity cloud storage for very reasonable prices; including a free tier and the option to pay once for a lifetime subscription. Based in Germany.

iOS Devices

ALRIGHT! I know Apple sucks. Stop telling me to get an Android! It'll happen eventually! Just shut up for a bit!

[12]2FAS Auth, which is quite reminiscent of Raivo (which was my go-to MFA solution until its mysterious sale to a shady company).

[13]Ice Cubes, a pretty neat Mastodon client

[14]NetNewsWire, the only decent RSS reader on iOS by miles! (Except for the generic RSS Reader app I was using beforehand, which was alright)

[15]Onion Browser, the closest thing to Tor Browser we'll get until Apple allows Gecko on iPhones.

[16]WireGuard, which lets me use ProtonVPN and NextDNS at the same time

[17]iSH, which is essentially an x86 emulator running Alpine Linux

[18]a-Shell, a lighter and less versatile shell app, which just runs a shell on top of the Darwin kernel that iOS is based on. Package management is done mainly through pip.

Linux

As you should be able to see at the bottom of my front page, I have four laptops running different Linux distributions.

Firefox Extensions

[19]Bitwarden, as mentioned before, is a password manager that I use with the EU servers.

[20]Flagfox is a simple extension that shows the nationality of whichever website you're on. It turns out that Repology, a popular software version tracking service, is hosted in Russia!

[21]I still don't care about cookies is simply a cookie notice blocker. It was forked from the original "I don't care about cookies" after it was sold to Avast.

[22]NoScript is a script blocker, which can make browsing a little clunky, but considerably faster, more secure, and less bloated.

[23]Redirector is an extension that redirects you from specific websites to other sites, depending on your config. I use it to automatically send me to privacy-respecting proxies and alternative frontends of popular sites. E.g. YouTube -> CloudTube, Xitter -> Nitter, Medium -> Scribe, etc.

[24]ToS;DR is an organisation that reads the privacy policies and terms of service of various websites, then gives them a privacy grade. This extension places the grade in the address bar, next to Flagfox, where I can see it.

[25]uBlock origin is, to me, the most essential browser extension. It blocks ads and trackers with superb speed and with minimal resource usage.

EDIT 22/02/2024: I thought the dev behind one of the projects above was dead. Either he's a zombie now, or that was a Mandela effect. Either way, I've corrected it.