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Dear Google

bek is part of my real name. I am currently running under the assumption that it was either my initials (of my real surname) or my handle (ryivhnn, which I use on Youtube, Artician, deviantART and as a username on the Diaspora pod I’m on, though the display name there is bek) that triggered WASPobot as I hope your code isn’t so defective that you would ping me for a string that was entirely your construction (all I did was choose that particular display).

fyn's guide to paranoid internet computering

Update 20180202: I didn’t realise this was still coming up in search results, but it’s been brought to my attention from a couple of sources that TrueCrypt seems to now be defunct and a lot of the Firefox add-ons now won’t work with the most recent versions of Firefox. So please keep this in mind if you’re reading this now.

For good results do levels 1 and 2. I highly recommend level 3. 4 is optional extra and 5 if you’re extra paranoid. In a section after level 5 I also include some slight modifications to the installation guide for Ubuntu because I believe making the switch to Linux is really worthwhile if you don’t need a program (or suite of programs) that doesn’t have a Linux version. If you find any of “free”, “secure” and “probably ethical” (I think) desirable in an operating system (all at once even!) hit up the Got Linux? section first and then come back to top. It’s at the bottom because I was building up from pretty-easy-to-do to requires-a-bit-of-effort.

Full disk encryption and "large files" - a loose experiment

So apparently full disk encryption is not the best idea for people who work with “large” files (where “large” was loosely defined as “multi-megabyte” in one of the threads I skimmed through). I couldn’t find anything informative never mind definitive on how full disk encryption would affect 3d and large digital painting work, so decided to run some experiments particular to my usage. These are not benchmarks in any way, shape or form, I was entirely too lazy to do things properly.

Sharing is...

…privacy concerning if you’re one of those people that object to things like tracking you around the internet, and not a big deal if you’re not.

It bugs me a little bit (especially as I realised recently that I’d forgotten to mention tracking cookies and scripts etc that would have been coming from the share module I was using in my privacy thing) so in the event it bugs anyone who happens to drop by I’ve replaced the module I was using for sharing with [Social Share Privacy](Social Share Privacy). Anywhere you see +1/Like/Pin/Tweet/etc buttons on a website, it’s set scripts and cookies and things in your browser already (unless you have a Fortified Firefox). What this module does is load the button image for the socnet in question but doesn’t set the cookie or the scripts etc. Your first click will activate the button so it can plant its cookies and scripts and do its little tracking thing. Your second click will launch the sharing thing.