To celebrate Quantum release, let's share your must have add-ons for your browser(s).

Mine :
- bitwarden,
- ublock origin,
- jsonovich,
- feedbro
- rested
- error indicator
That's all.

Screenshot and pocket are already included with Firefox and work great. Chrome needs extensions for those though. I used to have disconnect and ghostry in past.

10 YouTube videos == 557 blocked ads. 👌

Google cripples ad and tracking blockers: In January, Chromium will switch to Manifest V3 which removes an essential API in favour of an inferior one. As usually, Google is being deceitful and touts security concerns as pretext.

That hits all Chromium based browser, such as my beloved Vivaldi. The team argues with their own browser internal blocker, but that's far worse than uBlock Origin. One of Vivaldi's core promises was privacy, and that will go out of the window. The team simply doesn't react to people pointing that out. They're fucked, and they know it.

So what now? Well, going back to Firefox because that will include the crippled new API for extension compatibility, but also keep the powerful old one specifically so that ad and tracking blockers will keep working. Google has just handed Mozilla a major unique selling point, and miraculously, Mozilla didn't fuck it up.

So, today for my SO's father who is already over 70 and wants to try Linux. However, he doesn't want Linux on his main PC for now, rather on the old one so that he can take his time to get familiar, which is a reasonable plan.

But holy crap, what a machine! Intel Core2 Duo 4400, 2 GB DDR2(!) RAM, 250 GB IDE(!) HDD, DVD RW drive. Graphics, sound and LAN integrated on the mobo chipset. It's half a miracle that it doesn't run on steam. The machine had been delivered with Vista and has always been painfully slow.

It doesn't even support booting from USB, but I had prepared a DVD just in case. Surprise: it booted from DVD without issues and with full HW support!

Partitioned and installed, deleted Vista in the process (felt good). I went with the full blown Mint 20 Cinnamon edition because XFCE isn't as beautiful. Also, having XFCE now and then Cinnamon looking different on the other PC would be confusing.

Installation took some time, but worked. Cinnamon's RAM usage is at 750 MB idle, and at 1.1 GB with Firefox started. Once the PC is booted, it runs pretty OK with reduced swappiness and noatime on all file systems, plus unnecessary startup applications disabled. Updates took long, but ran through successfully. Installed LibreOffice and some small games, Firefox got uBlock Origin, Youtube worked OOTB.

That PC somehow had escaped disposal several times - and now has a proper OS for the first time in its miserable existence. It runs so much better than it ever has. Just wow, a "big" Linux desktop from 2020 blows a contemporary Vista out of the water on such an old machine!

On my personal journey to better privacy!

Wanted to change to Qubes, but since I wind down with games, that won't happen sadly and it seems windows still doesn't support proper gpu passthrough either, so might eventually change to linux host and windows guest or create a VM I use for everything else that isn't gaming, since I still really love the idea of having a snapshot backup system.

So since that isn't quite in my timeframe right now though: first move was to move to firefox, already done the change on mobile (love having dark reader and ublock on mobile!), now setting it all up on desktop, pleasant surprise was for sure that firefox finally seems to have chromes devtools pretty much mirrored, even the mobile suite of tools.

Loading of pages is also finally fast and much snappier than chrome from the first testing I could do (on desktop, on mobile it still kind of sucks in comparison, but I can deal with that).

Please suggest me all sort of privacy tools you got, especially with firefox in mind, but also host tools, be it windows or linux (e.g. some sort of traffic obfuscator that visits random pages that are SFW but make automatic traffic filtering hard, could probably make my own, but if there's something like that already, why not), I'll save all I can use.

Fuck youtube ads. Thz ublock Origin

Damn these pihole stats... more than half of all requests are ads or otherwise unwanted. Mind you I've only had this running for about a week now but still god damn!
Also I use ublock origin on my main pc

Is it justified to be angry at websites that break because of extensions like Ghostery or uBlock Origin?

'Cause I fucking hate it when their fucking website breaks because I don't want to have trackers on my pc

Ublock orgin the improved version of adblock, access less RAM and filters better than adblock.

Reason I'm posting this, is that I saw a post about adblock and how some people really don't like it anymore as it doesn't block all of the ads like it used to.

Just hoping to save some people from malicious popups/annoying ads.

I fucking hate how much content I need to block with ublock to make websites less shit. Fuck your banners. Fuck your surveys, fuck your newsletters/mailing lists. And fuck your fucking shit website designs.

Can't be the only one who sits there individually blocking all annoying elements on sites with uBlock. Many hours 'wasted' for the sake of making everything a bit less shit

Edit:tags

Some blocker like uBlock origin should come pre-installed by now. I mean at least the malicious stuff could get blocked and the online world could be a bit more safe. Legit, not-in-the-face ads are still okay at times, I guess :/

Lol!

Mistakenly clicked on some old link in my bookmarks, fell on this. I still don't know what to think!

(Eat some JPEG, by the way :))

Because I am very interested in cyber security and plan on doing my masters in it security I always try to stay up to date with the latest news and tools. However sometimes its a good idea to ask similar-minded people on how they approach these things, - and maybe I can learn a couple of things. So maybe people like @linuxxx have some advice :D Let's discuss :D

1) What's your goto OS? I currently use Antergos x64 and a Win10 Dualboot. Most likely you guys will recommend Linux, but if so what ditro, and why? I know that people like Snowden use QubesOS. What makes it much better then other distro? Would you use it for everyday tasks or is it overkill? What about Kali or Parrot-OS?

2) Your go-to privacy/security tools? Personally, I am always conencted to a VPN with openvpn (Killswitch on). In my browser (Firefox) I use UBlock and HttpsEverywhere. Used NoScript for a while but had more trouble then actual use with it (blocked too much). Search engine is DDG. All of my data is stored in VeraCrypt containers, so even if the system is compromised nobody is able to access any private data. Passwords are stored in KeePass. What other tools would you recommend?

3) What websites are you browsing for competent news reports in the it security scene? What websites can you recommend to find academic writeups/white papers about certain topics?

4) Google. Yeah a hate-love relationship, but its hard to completely avoid it. I do actually have a Google-Home device (dont kill me), which I use for calender entries, timers, alarms, reminders, and weather updates as well as IOT stuff such as turning my LED lights on and off. I wouldn"t mind switching to an open source solution which is equally good, however so far I couldnt find anything that would a good option. Suggestions?

5) What actions do you take to secure your phone and prevent things such as being tracked/spyed? Personally so far I havent really done much except for installing AdAway on my rooted device aswell as the same Firefox plugins I use on my desktop PC.

6) Are there ways to create mirror images of my entire linux system? Every now and then stuff breaks, that is tedious to fix and reinstalling the system takes a couple of hours. I remember from Windows that software such as Acronis or Paragon can create a full image of your system that you can backup and restore at any point to get a stable, healthy system back (without the need to install everything by hand).

7) Would you encrypt the boot partition of your system, even tho all data is already stored in encrypted containers?

8) Any other advice you can give :P ?

I plainly told the manager responsible for programming that we all use web extensions and there's just no way to effectively prevent programmers from running whatever software they deem necessary, so I'm suggesting to allow them in Windows group policy purely as a matter of efficiency.

It has only just occurred me how much I'm relying on his better judgment not to try and crack down on this.

Wish me and my team luck.

You should just switch off your adblocker for one day....

... and see what blatant ads are available these days. 😡

Does anyone know a good way to use adblock/ublock but configure it to allow ads only on my fav/selected youtube channels?

Because some youtubers deserve it!

...And I‘m too lazy to manually disable my adblock everytime Iwatch some videos of creators I like :/

uBlock Origin hides the ++ buttons because they have a class of `plusone` and plus one is a tracking company. sigh...

!dev
I had a fun experience today.
Updated my system, got plenty of unsuspecting dpkg errors. Couldn't figure out how to solve them (all relating to something python-*). Next issue was Firefox, which wouldn't even start.
Uninstall, reinstall.
And it won't even start up without immediately giving me some XML error related to... chrome? Whatever.
Start it from the terminal, mostly to see if it gives me the error in more detail. Ublock Origin does not like when Firefox gets reinstalled apparently. Spend more time than I'd like to admit getting a Firefox to start in safe mode with all extensions disabled. Apparently it's 'firefox -safe-mode' (yes I didn't try the obvious because I wasn't thinking). Uninstall all my extensions then Install them again, problem solved.

Now to solve those damn dpkg errors...

Is it just me or does the youtube frontpage take like ~12 seconds to load until you can click and interact with it recently?

I have the same happening on my laptop if I login to youtube (with literally only ublock installed on it and not logged into chrome, so it won't just sync random plugins or something from my PC).

what is wrong with Firefox? Just within the last 7 days, I got probably 5+ updates. Its like every other day firefox gets an update! & most updates keep breaking things. Ublock origin used to work perfectly, now that keeps on breaking. Other extensions became buggy! Whats wrong with firefox? -_-

spotify webplayer you're a piece of shit (ublock origin is bae for helping block ads though) that can't recognize i'm online, this is why i'm going back to youtube and searching for random songs i want to listen to

your help articles are also a piece of shit

i can't afford (don't want to pay) premium so i ain't paying for that shit either

if i had the skills and an offer for spotify i'd still take it though

Fun Fact: Did you know that ublock origin specifically hides the global store notice banner in WooCommerce by CSS? I found out tonight after fiddling with that shite for almost an hour.
Haha, fuck you.

Sigh, when you realise your bank is using depracated dojo.js (uncompressed with console warnings) and it wont proceed unless you turn ublock origin off ...