All services and products from big monopolies like these:
Apple
Microsoft
Google, Youtube, Gmail etc
Facebook & Whatsapp
Amazon
Twitter
etc..
The internet has become colonized with a small number of companies
controlling the flow of information and explioting its users.
Their ideologies are centerend around greed and control.
Governments also cant keep them accountable for their actions for a few
reasons, one being large corporations control the governments through
money and they work hand in hand together.
Things to do
Educate yourself. Darkness is suffocating the world due to ignorance. See the education section.
Promote and use open source technologies, privacy first software and decentralisation.
Illuminate the mind, body and spirit.
Search engines
Google alternatives
DuckDuckGo - Search engine that doesn't track you.
StartPage - Search engine that returns google results
Riot - Feature rich, encrypted chat messenger for phone and pc
Keybase - Feature rich, encrypted chat messenger for phone and pc
Semaphor - Feature rich, encrypted chat messenger for phone and pc
Youtube alternatives
Youtube does not support freespeech and may remove your videos if they dont like
it.
These dont have ads nor algorithms to suppress or promote information
Email is not secure ! Avoid email if possible. If it cant be avoided use
OpenPGP to encrypt your emails, but even OpenPGP is still vulnerable to some hacks.
The follow can also help prevent some hacks:
Be careful with attachments
Disable HTML
decrypt and encypt emails outside of the mailclient
Don't cite text in reply
Use mutt or neomutt email client
I would recommend
posteo.de or mailbox.org (1 Euro / month).
Never take an American, Australian, Canadian, British or New Zealandish provider.
European online privacy laws are the best at the moment. The Netherlands are
doing a good job in enforcing them. Germany isn't bad either. But the whole
climate in Europe is changing. Law enforcement agencies in Europe want direct
access to e-mail providers; we are not there yet.
Create an alias or temporary alias for every website (like takealot.co.za) you
create a new account. I know, this is cumbersome, but there is no other way
around.
Privacy Badger Privacy Badger blocks spying ads and invisible trackers.
HTTPS Everywhere HTTPS Everywhere is a Firefox, Chrome, and Opera extension that encrypts your communications with many major websites, making your browsing more secure.
uBlock Origin :star2: An efficient blocker for Chromium and Firefox. Fast and lean.
Click&Clean - Private data cleaner for Chrome and Firefox.
Mega - Not highly recommended but still better than Dropbox, googledrive, onedrive, etc.
VPN
You want to use a VPN, always!
And also as always, you can not trust VPN providers, but I trust Internet service
provicers (ISPs), like Vodacom, MTN, Telkom, etc, even less.
But back to "always". If your VPN is offline all of your traffic should not make
it through. There are ways of doing this. I mainly use SOCKS5 proxies.
It works like this. If your VPN is online it also provides a SOCKS5 proxy on a
port on your machine. You can now redirect your browsers traffic (for instance
with the addon switchyOmega) through that proxy. If the VPN dies, your browser
won't be able to send requests. You want this for your whole system and all
applications. Read about this or ask me.
I really like mullvad.net. Besides openVPN they offer
wireguard (this deserves a whole section) c) really good support
Don't trust free services.
If you can, use Tor instead of a VPN, its much more secure and private, tho it
is slower
Veracrypt - disk encryption software for Windows, Mac OSX and Linux.
Cryptomator - encrypt backups before sending it to the cloud for Linux, MacOS and Windows
LibremOne - paid for secure chat, email, vpn, social media, etc.
Hardware
https://www.pine64.org/ - Opensource phones, laptops, smartwatches, IOT, IP camera, etc
The PinePhone aims to be fully open source in its drivers and bootloader. Despite this, due to the scarcity of open source components for cellular and wireless connectivity, the firmware for the Realtek RTL8723CS WiFi/Bluetooth, as well as the optional auto-focus firmware for the OmniVision OV6540 back camera, remain proprietary software. In order to mitigate potential threats to privacy, these components communicate with the rest of the system only over serial protocols, such as USB 2.0, I2S and SDIO, which do not allow direct memory access (DMA). Use of these protocols also permits them to be physically disconnected via kill switches.
https://shop.puri.sm/ - Servers, Laptops, phones, etc. Almost no proprietary software. Kill switches are also available on some units
Laptops - At the firmware level, we utilize Coreboot instead of a proprietary BIOS/UEFI, a huge advancement for current high-end laptops. Within coreboot there are still some binaries though.
We are “as close to free software foundations respects your freedom as possible with current Intel CPUs” but are spending real money to advance that toward complete binary freedom.
netcat - arbitrary TCP and UDP connections and listens
You want your cache to be a tmpfs which means it lives in RAM -> faster and
deletes itself at reboot.
## Delete your cache
rm -r $HOME/.cache/*
# put this in your /etc/fstab (change <your user name>)
tmpfs /home/<your user name>/.cache tmpfs noatime,nodev,nosuid,size=1G
# mount the tmpfs sudo mount -a