/tech/ - Technology★

the #1 most likely thing that will happen to you re: internet security is you'll be scared shitless and go insane. that's actually one of the defense mechanisms around caring about internet security. you have to keep a cool head and just remember that being paranoid IS the threat. once you're no longer paranoid, you're neo. then you can start to focus on security and have fun with it.

>>1041590

yes, give up goy. you won't win this fight, goy.

>>1041599

did you even try reading my post? or learn what sage actually does?

>>1041599

>>1041605

to actually answer op too since nobody else will (as a newfag at /tech/ but experienced from /pol/):

you want to use an open-source operating system so that you know everything that's happening. if you want gaming you're going to want a popular linux distro, though you're more likely to have malware targeted at your particular distribution if it's more popular. if you trust steam, you can play steam games with linux support. otherwise it's the world of open source gaming which has zero advertising so it's hard to find gems in the mounds of rough. (personally i suggest minetest as being pretty good and there's a port of quake iii arena you can play too that are both open source). if you don't even know what open source software is, it's software where it's very easy to tell (as a developer) what's happening since you can just go and look at annotated (commented) source code. compare this to windows which has 20gb of giant blobs full of who knows what the fuck is happening, all developed by a corporation. open source operating systems are contributed to by the community, though they may also have corporate backing (yet you can still see their code)

you should be fine re: your political beliefs unless you're doing something illegal. it's really not that complicated. google really doesnt care and will just youtube suggest you neo-nazi propaganda. if you want to know the absolute most harmful thing that will ever happen to you, it's gaslighting, and it's one of the most rare things i've ever seen in my history on the internet (only one event i've ever witnessed had gaslighting).

you can use irc instead of discord (you should stop using discord just because it supports a massive chinese corporation tencent, they own it). youtube you're on your own. you can pirate music if you don't seed but your IP is visible, so you should use a VPN (ask someone else).

no idea what you mean but in theory tor browser creates unique traffic to your internet service provider (ISP) rather than normal html calls so it might be a bit worse than using a regular browser in terms of picking up suspicion. however they still can't tell what you're looking at unless tor is backdoored (which is where you put on the /pol/ tinfoil and say of course it fucking is retard, but then you put on the second layer and ask "who could even do that" and the answer is probably the military and what the fuck is the military going to do, kick down your door? no.)

mobile devices are fucked afaik, you need to get an old flipphone with no gps if you want a phone. google always knows your location. in reality will they do anything with it, no, but if you like being secure there's not much you can do. you can start by turning off gps if you care though.

google says they'll remove anything if you ask in their TOC last i read the summary (years ago), so you should be able to go to your account preferences and wipe everything (that includes search history).

you need to ask another anon for research material about tech security.

now if you're going to go insane about every camera in history you're pretty much already dead. (again, when i say this, i mean that if you think about life like super mario bros, as soon as you start freaking out about every camera on every street corner, you've fallen in a pit and died. refer >>1041590 ) if you really really really care you can make a hat that produces uv light to block cameras from seeing your face. you can learn how to make one from this video: http://www.metacafe.com/watch/1392382/invisible_mask/

nobody will do anything to you if you switch your computer around. unless you were doing something highly illegal, then switched operating systems and entered some weird information confirming it's you while the police are watching your internet connection with a warrant, so that they know that you as an individual are both a) the owner and b) the user of the computer when something illegal happened, you'll be perfectly fine. even being caught doing something illegal is already improbable since there's so many people using normal http requests on the internet every single day.

>>1041612

i had a coherent thought here with my posts talking about sanity and gaslighting, but let me finish the thought (trust me, you're fine).

let's play out an extremely unlikely (0.0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001%) scenario.

let's say your whole country hates you, as in, not a corporation but an actual intelligence agency has a file on you. not a corporation that just sells your information for ad money or keeps it for heuristics. i mean, you've actually done something so insanely stupid (or brave) which you would KNOW you did forever that the CIA for americans is watching you. not talking about searching "guns" on youtube, i mean something really atrociously unique. they wont kick your door down if you didn't do anything outwardly wrong morally or illegal. they'll try and drive you insane. again, i've only seen this actually happen to a targeted individual one time. they won't kick your door down, they won't bother your life. in fact they won't do anything else at all. they'll just scare you into never trying it again then leave you alone. that's it. so in the absolute, million% worst case, the secret is just to keep your head together. they'll just give up. not even joking.

only on some big or shitty sites. the internet works fine without google and cloudflare

>what operating system should I use? (preferably one that can run games)

install gentoo

>will they do anything to me over my political beliefs or asking this question?

I doubt it other than being put on a bad goy list in which people can advertise to.

>any alternatives to popular websites like jewtube, discord, spotify, ect.. I don't want to autistically scrounge for music links

<jewtube

idk. I just use RSS feeds instead of subscriptions and open videos in mpv.

<discord

Use matrix

<spotify

Just torrent your music and use a music player

>i use tor browser now, will anything happen if i make the tab larger?

What do you mean by that? I use tor browser for practically all my browsing so probably nothing bad will happen.

>any way to protect mobile devices? currently using samsung s7

Mobile devices are botnet. I'm waiting on something like the Librem 5 to use for a mobile device.

>is there any way to remove my personal stored by Google, or at least reduce it?

Yes, they'll even let you download it all I think. Due to the GDPR, they will let you delete your stuff.

>how do i hide myself physically? i may be able to protect myself online but what about security cameras and hospitals? How much of a threat are cameras and public services?

Almost impossible. Focus more on keeping your real life identity separate.

>what operating system should I use? (preferably one that can run games)

Ubuntu for games. Tails for browsing. Read Tails user manual before doing anything stupid like logging into your Facebook account.

>will they do anything to me over my political beliefs or asking this question?

No. Lots of normies who will never be a threat to powers that be ask this question daily.

>any alternatives to popular websites like jewtube, discord, spotify, ect.. I don't want to autistically scrounge for music links

Indivous, IRC and Soulseek.

>i use tor browser now, will anything happen if i make the tab larger?

yes. your browser will be fingerprintable by window size. leave tor browser as it is aside from configuring the security slider.

>any way to protect mobile devices? currently using samsung s7

Assume your mobile device is compromised. False sense of security is more dangerous than no security at all.

>is there any way to remove my personal stored by Google, or at least reduce it?

Stop using Google. You are already using TBB so Google can't track you across different websites anyway.

>anything i should read or research, perhaps a PDF?

Read Tor Browser documentation and Tails user manual.

>how do i hide myself physically? i may be able to protect myself online but what about security cameras and hospitals? How much of a threat are cameras and public services?

There is nothing you can do about these. Try to avoid heavily surveilled areas as much as possible. Move next to Uncle Ted as a last resort.

>Can you escape Google?

Yes, don't use their services (don't serve them).

>what operating system should I use? (preferably one that can run games)

GNU/Linux, you're a noob, so start with Linux(GNU/Linux) Mint, then switch to GuixSD.

Also games are botnet, don't use them, but if you must, run them in a virtual machine, sandbox etc. without network connection.

>any alternatives to popular websites like jewtube, discord, spotify, ect.. I don't want to autistically scrounge for music links

>jewtube

Anything, but not google. Selfhosting with GNU Mediagoblin.

>discord

GNU Jami, toxchat, matrix(don't know much about it)

>spotify

That one is problematic, because music industry is highly proprietary. Music creators often don't know about free software, so they use botnets. But do not use spotify at all, it uses DRM, which restricts the way you interact with your computer and media.

More about DRM:

https://www.defectivebydesign.org/

If you don't have an ethical choice, just use the lesser evil, or do not use unethical thing at all. For example I sometimes use soundcloud, even though it is botnet, because there isn't DRM and I can download music files for free as in beer.

>i use tor browser now, will anything happen if i make the tab larger?

Better listen what the browser says. The web wasn't designed to be safe nor private.

>any way to protect mobile devices?

Mobile devices are backdoored and controlled by google or apple. You should pick one, that runs free software, for example:

https://replicant.us/supported-devices.php

https://puri.sm/products/librem-5/

And one day, there will be mobile devices with Libre Risc-V processor.

https://www.crowdsupply.com/libre-risc-v/m-class

>is there any way to remove my personal stored by Google, or at least reduce it?

If you live in the EU, yes(no), don't know anything about different places on the Earth. Well even if they say, that they protect your data, and will remove it, they won't. They make money out of it. Also every government probably has a database of private data.

example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_(surveillance_program)

>anything i should read or research, perhaps a PDF?

Read about free (as in freedom) software,

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/philosophy.html

Intel ME, AMD PSP, etc - even "your" hardware can't be trusted,

https://www.fsf.org/blogs/sysadmin/the-management-engine-an-attack-on-computer-users-freedom

>how do i hide myself physically? i may be able to protect myself online but what about security cameras and hospitals? How much of a threat are cameras and public services?

You can't hide, the botnet is always watching. You could become a security cracker and crack all cameras in the city to be invisible, but that's unlikely. Move out to always cloudy (so satelites can't see you) and abandoned place on the Earth.

>will the big spyware companies do anything to me if i try to switch?

They are not so powerfull yet

Good to see, some people do care, thanks anon, you gave me the feels.

Also after reading all this shit, tell your friends or normies. Make them say "GNU/Linux" instead of "Linux" as I did to my normies.

I shove the first process I as main user log in with into a "no network" namespace (just consists of a lo interface) so no program spawned from there (which is everything my main user account runs) can access the internet or even local network as they can't break out of that namespace. I move processes that I want to have network connectivity with netns into the appropriate namespace, usually running under their own, non-privileged user account. Have one set up for spawning a tor namespace instance, another for a VPN in which openvpn continually provides network access, then an alias to put programs into the normal ethernet namespace PID 1 is in (runit-init). As the two tor and vpn namespaces just give access to openvpn or a tor instance, there's no possibility of IP leakage. The programs in them cannot access or even see the normal ethernet interface from that scope.

It's a pretty low-overhead and simple setup. Namespaces are neat. I do this in gentoo.

>>1041718

to clarify, programs in the vpn and tor namespaces do not have access to the local network either, nor do they have access to loopback of the other namespaces (each namespace runs it's "own 127.0.0.1") so that means I can access the internet via tor with my browser, but not a webserver that runs locally in the nonet namespace or on my LAN, as there's no way to route to it.

You can also further lock down processes with MAC in the kernel. I use Tomoyo as it's easy to understand. (not a friend of SELinux, because it's needlessly complicated and documentation also often tells you to "just use the defaults for now if you don't get it" which is not good security practice) My browser for example, even if it's compromised, cannot spawn for example a bash instance or network tools as it is not allowed to do so. Even with custom injected code, it cannot do anything interesting on my LAN or via my non-anonymous network connection as it's still trapped inside it's own network namespace.

Locking down your networking is a major part in staying reasonably anonymous. If you don't have the basic opsec down, everything on top of it is pointless.

>>1041625

pirating is illegal