It seems you completely misinterpreted the intention of the article (willingly or ignorantly).
At Skiff, we take an authoritative position that PGP is no longer useful, long outdated by better encryption protocols, encumbered by unneeded complexity, and hard to use even from the start.
Except for “no longer useful” the rest is pretty much unanimously agreed upon within the community.
Well if the original comment said it makes it less likely to get doxxed I would have agreed. But that’s not what the comment said. I was replying to what was actually said which is when I pointed out that privacy and anonymity are not the same thing (in the context of being immune to doxxing). If you were anonymous on the internet then you would be immune to getting doxxed (however unrealistic that circumstance may be).
You just brought back an old memory. I used to use WordWeb dictionary and apparently it’s still around. According to the app listing it doesn’t collect any data and my memory of it was fully offline anyway. I haven’t verified anything myself but may be worth checking out. AFAIK they have apps on every platform.
Edit:
WordWeb (every platform)
Of course this is not a good thing. But to entirely prevent being “placed” at the scene of a crime you would never be able to carry a cell phone, drive a car, or even walk/cycle with your face visible. You’d have to leave and enter your house taking special care not to be seen by any cameras, etc
The point he was making is that if you want to entirely prevent any of these problems, the steps you have to tale are extreme otherwise you’re always leaving open a potential security hole.
It’s the fact that the intelligence agencies have proven themselves to be unable to responsibility use their powers, and instead find every sneaky way possible to infiltrate and spy on their own citizens while preventing nothing. That’s what has pushed the world to say enough is enough and we are going to encrypt everything we can. Now the global powers are crying poor about how they need access to stop terrorism, while being completely unable to point to a single instance where they stopped a terror attack and contrarily there’s plenty of terror attacks that were never stopped.
Just to be clear, are you saying Firefox with fingerprinting resistance used in conjunction with Arkenfox user.js provides fingerprint unification, similar to what Tor browser does? I’ll have to check that out.
I think both approaches are valid tbh. Having a unique fingerprint obviously uniquely identified you, but if it’s randomised then your browsing sessions can’t (in theory) be linked.
It’s probably a leading contender for one of the “best for privacy”, especially with their business model and even a warrant canary on their legal page. Their Privacy Policy also does a lot to explain things.
It is a slightly different claim to being a privacy first or privacy focused search engine. Privacy is more of a close 2nd priority then a 1st and foremost priority. The difference is small but real. For example, Kagi is incorporated in the USA and has to comply with USA laws. Not a country known for its outstanding track record.
There’s a lot of helpful comments here and being your age is a great time to start tinkering with computers! Just start by installing them into a VirtualBox because if you don’t have the knowledge it’s very easy to break things and anyone else that has to use the computer isn’t going to be very happy with you.
However, I want to point out something that actually address your concerns.
- If you are concerned about getting “caught” for torrenting then Windows vs any other OS makes zero difference.
- If you are concerned about viruses, Linux is more secure based on the fact that most viruses target Windows. However, this does not mean it is impossible. Learning basic security practices will help you on Windows and much as any other OS.
CORRECTION: It was pointed out to me that I was confusing userStyles.css with userChrome.css. I’m not aware of anyway that styling the UI outside of the DOM could be directly detectable. Theoretically, if you could resize some UI elements that would change the viewport size and therefore be detectable. I’m not informed enough on userChrome.css to make that call however. Original comment is below.
Yes. As CSS styles can be queried, any differences can be used as an identifiable data point used to form a fingerprint.
Funny (to me) story when I ran pi-hole in a house with housemates (all friends): I bought an rpi zero and installed pi-hole on it. I notified all housemates that I would be installing an adblocker on the network so if anyone has any problems with sites not working to just let me know.
Years go by and finally the rpi zero dies which makes the internet inaccessible as the router was pointing to it. I reconfigure the network back to default in the meantime. I didn’t have time to update everyone before one of my housemates made a funny comment.
He mentions that the internet is working again! And something else, he’s now able to click on Google search result ads!
Because I don’t use Google search I never realised Google ads links were being blocked, and even if I did I wouldn’t have realised how common it is for people to rely on the ads!
After some discussion with this housemate he confessed he actually likes seeing ads as it could show him stuff he wants to buy. Needless to say I didn’t bother putting pi-hole back on the network.
I used to have pi-hole setup and a housemate complained that he could no longer click on Google ads 🙄