Privacy
Tech Dirt notes that Trump’s Internet Brigades Are Shocked To Realize The Government Just Sold Them Out On Privacy. They just found out that he is more interested in what’s best for corporations than poor schlubs like them.
If you would like some privacy, you could use the Tor Browser, but that wouldn’t be a lot of help. The next step up would be a Tor-Powered Raspberry Pi HotSpot. This would provide you much more protection at a minimal cost.
A bit more expensive would be the Invizbox Go, which provides the ability to connect via Tor or a VPN with minimum fuss. It is about the size of a SmartPhone and battery powered, so you can take it with you and use it with free HotSpots or your home WiFi. The device looks interesting.
Keep in mind that most of these techniques are going to slow things down.
Next up Trump sets his sights on net neutrality – anything to deflect people from the ‘Moscow Connection’.
3 comments
One of the reasons I bought the ASUS DSL-AC68U modem/router was that it could be flashed to use DD-WRT or Tomato. I have DD-WRT currently & have been wanting to try Tomato for a while. Just waiting for the next update. I also use Ghostscript VPN & occasionally TOR.
That Pi HotSpot is a good idea. Maybe you can make them on order & make a few bucks Brian. 😉 🙂 Too bad the Anonabox turned out to be a big con! *sigh*
Something people should always do on their router at a minimum to enhance their security (though it will only do a little for privacy) is (where possible):
* Change the default administrator username & password. Use a good long password (>10 mixed case characters/numbers/symbols),
* If you don’t use WiFi on the router, disable it (most allow you to turn it off). Safest way to connect to the router is via Ethernet cable.
* If you do use WiFi, change the SSID (or name of your wireless network) & set it to “hidden”,
* Set the wireless security mode to WPA2 & again choose a good, long password (>10 mixed characters),
* Disable WPS (Wi-Fi Protected Setup)! The word “protected” is at best a bad joke!
There are other things you can do, but they are mainly dependent on the router/modem.
Kryten, I have the same basic router, but without the DSL modem part. Unfortunately most of my devices like my Roku box or my Android tablet connect to the router via WiFi. I use LastPass to generate my passwords, they’re nice and long with reasonable entropy but I do chop them up a bit to make them easier to enter on device “keyboards”. Usually I’m on the wired network though. Especially since I scored a 10 gigabit switch for cheap off of eBay and made my NAS and my Windows desktop use it :).
The user name is ‘admin’ and the password is either nothing or ‘admin’ and some brands won’t let you change the user name.
The Pi thing is simply a matter of creating an SD card. I can pull the ubuntu-Mate card out and put in the Tor card. Not a lot of profit potential in programming and selling SD cards. 🙂 I might give the Invizbox a try depending on how annoying Cox gets.