Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Secure Communications Options (from an IT security professional)

Mozilla (Firefox) has very recently advocated deplatforming any group or application allowing Trump to communicate for what that's worth.

JFC

Excellent information. Im not very computer savvy but would like some advice on what my options might be. Currently I use gmail and have for a long time. I run my own business so its on our website, magazine adds and numerous other places. Changing it on the website would be easy, but the other places would pose some real problems. Is there some way to have gmail forward messages to say Proton ? I have switched to Dissenter and duck duck go, but would love to ditch all the commie tech companies.

There lies the big issue with sticking it to these companies. Let's take Facebook for instance. I had like 100 friends on there. My inner circle of family and friends know how to find me but when I pulled the plug, that's it. A lot of people hate Facebook but don't want to cut off all those people. So they put up with unacceptable behavior so they can have the social media crack. This is just my own opinion, but I think in times like these and what may come, it's important to think hard about who you can trust and who is really important to you. All those other 2nd and 3rd level associations imo are just social clutter in my life that needs to take a back seat to acting on principles. If I really wanted to find one of those "friends" on Facebook because I'm visiting that part of the country or whatever, I can find them through another avenue.

Good info, thanks Jake. I’ve been using Opera for several years but I need to look into tightening up on the email.
I closed my never used Twitter account and seldom used Instagram yesterday, so I got that going for me.
This site is pretty much my social media.

I took a closer look at the Signal Messenger app specs. The way they do things, even the people at Signal would not be able to view or listen to your messages or calls. They also claim, no ads, no tracking, no logging of any of your correspondence and no selling or sharing of any of your information. The minimum information for an account appears to be a phone number. And it's free.

In a bitter twist of irony, probably because it's a dated endorsement, one of there quotes on the web site for how good the product is was from Jack Dorsey, dipschit CEO of Twitter. Probably how he and his commie friends communicate securely.

FyI iridium lists a "portable version download now

Edit.
This may mean you put it in a thumb drive and go from computer to computer.
They say "The Imodium portable version works out of the box. We recommend to create a shortcut using the (--user-data-dir=/IridiumUserData) configuration option to store the user data to a preferred location (like a USB stick, etc.)"

Would be a good thread to keep live made a sticky.

Imodium???
I’ll be steering clear of that one.

LOL

This prompted me to give the Brave browser a try and it kicks FireFox's ass for speed and resource.

I pretty much figure everything is being seen but Mozillas statement pissed me off and I do like the Brave much better.

Maybe it's less monitored but how would I know?

Damn sure faster.

JB,

Thanks for the post & info dump.

I have a couple of questions:

1. If using ProtonMail, how secure is it if the recipient is not using it also?

2. I'm using Epic Browser with a VPN that lest you move around the world to different servers & I know it works for various websites as they have not been able to track me & when I check my IP location, it's where Epic says I am....................do you have any knowledge about Epic & comments, good or bad?

Thanks,

MM

Sorry auto correct telling us what it thinks of MSM news I'm afraid.

Great info. Top

Thanks for posting this! Given recent events, this should probably be a sticky.

What are your thought on Tor?

Agreed, especially as things morph over time.

Good stuff, Jake and many thanks.

I have no issue with ditching facebook, my issue is if I change my email from gmail to another email like one of the ones you mentioned, then all of the advertising we have out there will have the wrong email address on it. Is there anyway to fix that ?

Tor + VPN is probably about as good as most people can do. Check the details of the VPN though to make sure it works with Tor.

Just another bit of info on VPNs...

In case people are saying WTF is a VPN? It's a virtual private network. Oh great, much clearer. Okay, it's an encrypted tunnel from your device to a server on the Internet. Everything that gets transferred between those points cannot be spied upon. There are two types of VPNs, a device level VPN and a browser extension basically. If your browser has a built-in VPN, that means the traffic going from your BROWSER to that endpoint server online is all encrypted. If you have a device level VPN, like a standalone app that is separate from the browser, it will encrypt traffic going from the COMPUTER to that endpoint server online, which would also include the browser traffic. But it covers everything else leaving the computer as well. That's one of the reason I was using the Opera browser with it's built-in VPN and went with the ProtonVPN mentioned in the OP. The latter is a standalone app. Just something to consider.

A VPN is not 100% security though. Yes everything going from your computer to the VPN endpoint server is secure. But what about from there to the destination web site? Yep, it open again. So a VPN cannot protect your from yourself if you go to stupid web sites. So why even use a VPN then? Well, everything from you to the VPN endpoint will be hidden and that may be something that's important to you. Even your ISP that handles all your Internet access cannot see it. Or what if you are "in the wild" like at an airport WIFI hotspot or something like that? Then it's important because it secures the Internet entryway traffic.

Signal is about as secure as a common guy can get right now I think.