Okay so I thought I thought it might be useful for us to discuss our internet security experiences/measures.

Starting with browsers... over the past few years the browser that has consistently let the most "viruses" go though to be blocked by my antivirus is Google Chrome. True enough that I lowered the security for unknown files, but that's still no excuse. On the other hand I've never once had this happen with Maxthon, and so I may go back to exclusively using Maxthon as my browser as I used to do.

For the last few years I've not bothered with adblock I only used the mvps.org hosts file. With my new PC this has changed. I've gotten sick of seeing Youtube ads, and the broken image/page content where ads should be so now I'll use both. I haven't clicked a single ad for at least 5 years while browsing the internet anyway so I hardly see the point in them being there, at least on my PC.

Privacy... As some of you may know, the Australian government wants to pass a bill requiring that ISP's store "metadata" for two years. This really is not that different from storing phone call logs, and for a balanced news article read this where it is revelead that ASIO boss David Irvine sees it as "absolutely crucial" for Australian security.

But, that doesn't mean that I or anyone for that matter has to simply allow our content to be logged. VPN's already get completely around this, you could in principle get your ISP to sign an NDA which should take priority over such a proposed data retention law, or as I've done, simply switch to a different DNS provider (OpenDNS) and then there's nothing to log (without spying). -edit- *I should note that while my router is configured to use OpenDNS, my PC is configured to use the Canberra CloudNS server which exclusively serves through DNSCrypt (ie it doesn't serve regular non-encrypted DNS enquires).

Lately I've been using google directly much less, and mostly using startpage. I've also set startpage as my default search engine as opposed to what it was on my last PC (thepiratebay.se). Opera used to be my favourite browser - but now you cannot even change the default search to ThePirateBay, or StartPage, or any other search other than the 5 built-in. Talk about selling-out. IE11 requires manually putting it in the registry, but at least it does work. It annoys me to no-end that "modern browsers" are so inflexible with customization (eg. toolbar customization), and Max's cluttered toolbar is one giant put-off and the complete opposite to how the original operated.

In all my bowers I've altered the user agent to remove reference to my actual OS (most at the moment are replaced with Windows NT 5.01 which is Windows 2000 SP1).

I use VPN's for netflix and often leave them on by accident. Although I think the invasion of privacy is bullshit I don't go out of my way to protect myself. Perhaps I should, but I just don't feel I need to yet.

I have adblock because the ad's on youtube actually broke youtube for me. Only the ad's would load and the video would just stay black screened.

(August 16, 2014 at 6:45 am)Insanity Wrote: I have adblock because the ad's on youtube actually broke youtube for me. Only the ad's would load and the video would just stay black screened.

I haven't had that problem on yt, but I've had similar issues with other services (eg https://au.tv.yahoo.com/).

[offtopic]Fuck my net is fast, takes less than a minute to download 100 MB!

Oh I forgot to note why I use startpage more now - it's much more reliable than it was a year or two ago when connecting to it could be a bit problematic from time to time.

(August 16, 2014 at 7:55 am)Aractus Wrote: [quote='Insanity' pid='731294' dateline='1408185917']

[offtopic]Fuck my net is fast, takes less than a minute to download 100 MB

That's nice, takes me on average about 8 second, around 80sec for a gb. :-)

Edit: just realised this could be sarcasm

Search Engines ...

You know, although Startpage has been my favourite search engine, I do quite like Duckduckgo's approach as well as others, so let me go through the ones that do offer excellent privacy:

• Ixquick/Startpage - and is certified by a third party. Importantly, it also includes access to their own fully anonymous proxy to view results, if you want.
  
• Blekko - I am impressed by their privacy policy. Also, as mentioned on this blog post, they respect your "do not track" setting by default. This is good because I have this option set on all my browsers (and I'll note that as far as I know only Maxthon has it set by default). It isn't 100% perfect - it does hotlink images from other websites when it should be routing them through a proxy and serving them over the SSL connection.
  
• Duckduckgo - I quite like their search engine it has a slightly different approach than Google's and works well. You do have to manually set some of the privacy features that should be enabled by default (eg POST requests not GET)

And some of the ones that do NOT:

• Google - enough said.
• Gigablast - although their Privacy Policy claims otherwise, yours searches are 100% transparent to everyone - your ISP, the servers your search travels though, the websites you click, everyone. This could be improved if they started using SSL, however as they claim one thing but do another I wouldn't trust them even if they did change.
• Yippy - on their privacy policy... "Yippy is intended to be an anonymous service. We do collect limited non-personally identifying information that your browser makes available. This log information includes your Internet Protocol address, browser type, browser language, referral data, the date and time of your query and one or more cookies (described below) that may uniquely identify your browser. International users only (defined as those outside the continental United States of America) are subject to minimal tracking, cookies and other government required protocols as required by the appropriate US Government Agencies such as the FBI, NSA or CIA. Yippy will not track a US citizen for any reason, unless such information is required to comply with court orders or subpoenas or when required to do so by law."
  
  What the FUCK? Two-tiered privacy, really? Anyway it doesn't really matter since they don't support SSL either so their privacy policy means nothing anyway.
  
• Bing - worse than Google as it doesn't use SSL (by default).

AVAST... I fucking hate AVAST. As a virus scanner it's OK, but its browser plugins are obtrusive, invasive and downright wrong. They should at the very least enable the same level of privacy that is set in AVAST but they don't, instead they default to a. submit data to AVAST, b. SafePrice adware, c. other settings. Anyway I thought I'd mention this as I disable it because I hate it.