Tag Archives: firefox

Ed Sez – Tips from Edward Snowden on Foiling the Snoopers

Posted on by

At the recent SXSW conference, Edward Snowden supplied people with tips to complicate the lives, if not totally block, those that stick their noses in your online business.

Not to be confused with trying to ruin the chances of the NSA averting a nuclear strike by terrorists on my own country, I do feel there are some well-reasoned limits to what the US government should be doing, especially when it comes to figuring out ways to undermine secure Internet protocols. After all, when, as purported by Snowden, the NSA begins devising backdoor hacks into our web browsers, you can be certain that this only makes it easier for others (perhaps dangerous) individuals from doing the same.

In other words, in the name of the War on Terror, the NSA might actually be planting the seeds for the death of the Internet…or at least a 9/11 style assault on the world’s computer infrastructure. Students of the origins of Bin Laden and his connections with the US War on Communism might be right to feel a little déjà vu.

A related threat, of course, is that criminals might stand on the shoulders of the NSA’s good work and do some very bad work against you and your bank account and your identity.

Anyway, that’ my soap box speech on this.

But back to my recent spat of blogs on privacy and how to cover your virtual butts. Snowden did hand out a few treats for the kids at SXSW: two browser plugins that he regards as good ways to enhance your privacy against NSA or NSA-inspired hackers.

The first is Ghostery, which allows you to view what web services are collecting data on you when you visit a given web page. It goes further by letting you (Ad Block style) block, pause or allow such collection.

I’ve been using it for a few days and have found it fascinating just how many scripts are gathering info on me when I land on a given page. Right now, I have everything turned off, so that should take care of that.

I did experience one problem watching an embedded video on a website. In these cases, you can pause all of Ghostery or try to figure out which one of the dozen or so scripts it’s blocking is the required one for the video and then decide if it’s worth it.

The other plugin is called NoScript, which simply shuts down all scripts, including JavaScript, Flash, etc. I haven’t tried this out, but I’m expecting it be something I will only use sparingly given the amount of jQuery and other useful bits embedded in many web interfaces.

 

Back to Firefox – Update on Sync

Posted on by

This goes out to all you paraoid netizens out there, and if you’re not one, you should be…

As a follow-up to my last post on moving off Chrome and back to Firefox for privacy and security reasons, I wanted to document that I gave Firefox Sync a closer look.

Mozilla, the folks that develop Firefox, has a very detailed information page on Firefox Sync, but to sum up, this feature allows one to share add-ons, bookmarks, passwords, preferences, history and tabs across all your computers and other devices.

Firefox Sync PreferencesDouble-plus-good: you can decide what to sync and what not to. Because I’m trying to be extra careful with my data, I opted for syncing only my add-ons, bookmarks and preferences. One important note on syncing add-ons, this will install your add-ons across your devices, but not necessarily configure them, so you might have to do that part manually.

If you opt to sync your history, it will do so up to 60 days.

Reading over the security details of Firefox Sync, it seems like you’re in pretty good hands since sync uses an encryption key. I consider passwords and history going beyond my tolerance threshold, but these are likely pretty secure for most folks. My rule is to assume that hackers access my sync data: What can I live with leaking out to the public?

Add-ons? okay
Bookmarks? I guess so.
History? Not really
Passwords? Are you kidding?

When I set up sync, I also added Firefox as my default phone browser which I find no problems with yet and it’s nice to know that I’m surfing as privately on Android as on OSX.

A Technophiles Journey Off the Grid

Posted on by
Cookie Monster freaks out over cookies on his computer

Image by Surian Soosay

Okay, so it is likely impossible to actually “use” the Internet without it “using” you back. I get that. Terms of service get changed without clear explanation, cookies get saved, NSA snoops do what NSA snoops do. The whole business model of the Interwebs is set up to trade your info for access.

I’m under no illusions.

But, after the Great Target Hack and Edward Snowden’s revelations regarding the NSA (I think we were all waiting for these things to happen), I’m finding myself rethinking the trade offs I made concerning privacy and online anonymity for online convenience (and laziness).

There was a time, when I used to block cookies and obsess over terms of service agreements. Hell, I even used Tor from time to time.

But, after awhile, it just became easier to stop worrying and learn to accept a level of personally sanctioned data breach. But now with all the stories of identity theft, commercialization of your personal info and multi-governmental and corporate sweeps of such data…it’s time for a little reflection…and retreat.

So, I’ve decided to experiment with reducing my digital footprint and I’ll post updates from time to time on how’s it going, in addition to my occasional posts on library projects.

Among my experiments, I’m planning on moving out of Googlelandia as much as possible, starting with changing the default search in my browser and moving back to Firefox. I’ll cover the Firefox post next time, but for now, let’s look at life without Google Search.

Most people online probably don’t remember a world before Google and those that do, don’t want to remember. Needless to say, Google’s initial search algorithm was so good, that it rapidly conquered the search market to the point that Yahoo! handed over its search to Microsoft and the dozens of smaller search engines were quickly forgotten. Anyone remember Web Crawler? Exactly!

Screen Shot 2014-02-13 at 12.52.53 PMAside from Bing (hack!) and the Bing-lite Yahoo! search, there really aren’t many alternatives worth turning to when one needs anonymity. That is, except for DuckDuckGo, a search engine that uses secure HTTPS, does not use cookies by default and generally does not collect any data linked to you (see their privacy statement for more info).

And the search results are not that bad.

But they aren’t great.

Life on DuckDuckGo will be very reminiscent of the best old-school search tools from the pre-Google 90s. Gone will be the kinds of results that require an analysis of your personal search history, online social habits and analysis of your cookies. Often you’ll get exactly what you’re after, but just as often, you’ll get it a few results lower on the page, just below some commercial sites that are using keyword tricks to rise to the top.

For example, I’m thinking about what color scheme I want to go with for my new flat and used DuckDuckGo to find sites that could help me with that. So I did a search for something like: “paint interior design color tools.” The first result led to a 404 page. The second result was not too bad, a Benjamin Moore paint selecting tool for professional painters. Other results were somewhere between these two extremes, with many of them going to pages that were slightly relevant but failed in the “authoritative” category.

Google expends a lot of effort at weeding out, or drowning out, pages with low street cred, and you’ll probably hardly ever get to a 404 page thanks to their very busy and persistent robots. Something else that will be hard to find in Google is nothing. In Google, the dreaded “Sorry. No results were found” message would be an amazing and rare feat of your talents for obscurity. Not so in DuckDuckGo…these come up from time to time.

DuckDuckGo also lacks an image and video search functionality. For this, they provide a dropdown that lets you search via Google or Bing.

I’d also add, that I’m using DuckDuckGo in a Firefox omnibar plugin, so as I type, I get suggested hits. These are also not as accurate or relevant as the Google version, but I’ve also limited it by not preserving any search history in Firefox.

After a few days of trying this out, I do like DuckDuckGo enough to keep using it, but I have had several lapses of risky searches on Google. This is especially true for professional work, where Google knows my work interests quite well and serves up exactly what I need. But for general searches, DuckDuckGo is a good tradeoff for privacy wonks.

Stay tuned for more journeys off the grid including my return to Firefox and experiments with thumb drive applications…