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Set an auto reply on the gmail account directing senders to your new email acct. Don't reply via the gmail.Then close your gmail after a reasonable amount of time for the transition.
Let's Go Brandon! FJB
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10-4, good buddy.....
Couple of questions. I own my own domain name and use it's email service. Any reason to still go to a third party email provider?
Two: Browsers. Firefox OK? Or? What about the Firefox VPN service? Credible?
As far as a messenger, what's wrong with SMS, over?
Owning a domain does not give you email service. Your own domain allows you to receive/send email using the domain name(the part after the @ sign), but you still need to find mail servers which will receive and forward your mail. You can either pay someone to act as your mail servers or you can set up your own. It takes a lot of work and skill to set up your own so don't go that route, Protonmail supports custom domains(a domain you own, for example). Search on "protonmail custom domains". The reason protonmail is so good is because they use very strong encryption to encrypt your mail box, and any mail sent to/from another protonmail accounts is encrypted end to end. Some mail is not encrypted. See this link to see what is encrypted when and where. https://protonmail.com/support/knowledge-base/what-is-encrypted/
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Tag this for reference. Good info. I'm going to do all I can to migrate away from the fascist companies. I've got go ditch fascist book next.
Bb
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I would NEVER use Firefox's VPN. Ever.
It boils down to trust. A VPN is only as safe as the company who runs it is honest.
There is a very big debate in the online privacy community about VPNs. Serious professionals who really care about privacy don't trust any of them. I have a couple I use. Not all VPNs are created equal by a long shot. I don't use them for anonymity. I only use them to avoid doxing.
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It boils down to trust. A VPN is only as safe as the company who runs it is honest. This is true. Every person needs to decide for themselves what the level of trust is for the VPN provider. At a minimum it will make the local subnet more secure, like an airport hotspot. Our big tech companies in the US have shown their true colors. I personally have chosen to trust some companies under the EU more than our own companies here at home. It's sad, but that's a decision each person has to make for themselves.
Progressives are the most open minded, tolerant, and inclusive people on the planet, as long as you agree with everything they say, and do exactly as you're told.
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Me. I deal with IT security every day at work. I'm also a Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP). There are also other members that have similar background that I'm sure can speak their minds as well. I think Roger was asking in another thread about options for communicating securely. If you still want to stay online and have a smart phone, there are some suggestions that have been made by members. I'll just add my 2 cents here. Take it for what it's worth...
Get rid of Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft logons. If you need an explanation of why at this point, please do yourself a favor and start a thread calling Travis a homo and enjoy that for a while.
For me, getting rid of Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo and Microsoft logons was easy, I just ripped the Band-Aid off. Google is more complicated. My Gmail account is all over the place online. I need to scrub all my online accounts. Cancel all the ones that are stupid to keep, and then change my account email address for the rest. If you have an android phone, it's difficult to use without a Google account and still use the core services or fetch apps off the Google play store for instance. It isn't impossible but it would required way more expertise than many have. But you can go into your Google account details and turn off a bunch of features like location history, search history etc. Yeah they probably can dig that off their servers but it would take effort.
I am going to a secure email address and account. An organization called protonmail is out of Switzerland. It's secure, encrypted email, they don't have ads, and they don't keep logs of email. They claim that even they cannot read your email. They also have a real VPN app (not just a proxy server) that does end to end encryption from your device to the VPN server. That makes it impossible for your ISP to watch your activities. Both the email and the VPN have free options, without ads and without logging and with full encryption. The paid accounts offer more features and bandwidth like being able to secure multiple devices simultaneously, having multiple email alias accounts, more load balancing across multiple servers, more email storage, more bandwidth etc. They only make money if someone gets a paid account so you may want to consider that. As an example, I got a paid email and VPN bundle deal on Black Friday for $8/ month called their "plus" plan. I can try and find a link to that if anyone is interested if it's still active on their web site.
For a messenger, a lot of people use Facebook messenger. Again, at this point- stupid. Some folks use a messenger called Whatsapp. Well, Facebook bought them, so still stupid. I am researching a secure messenger called "Signal", which is open source, not owned by any of the douche bag tech companies, and offers end to end encryption. That's all I know for now. If anyone is interested in that as an option, I will check it out and reply to the thread. The challenging thing about a messenger, is that whoever you communicate with will likely need the same app or the end to end encryption is moot and you might as well just shout your secrets out the window at rush hour.
For online searches, please do not use Google, Yahoo, or Bing anymore. Some have suggested they use Duckduckgo. That's better but not best imo. Yes, you are not using the Google servers for your searches. But as OP mentioned in another thread, Duckduckgo does use an archive of Google's search database. Google may not be tracking your searches in real time, but the search results may be optimized by their AI algorithms to give you targeted results that THEY want to give people to steer humans' thinking in a certain direction. For example, if you were to search on "corrupt politicians", Google's AI may give you a bunch of targeted results referring to Trump first, instead of Biden or Hilary etc. And that bias may be archived in what Duckduckgo uses. As someone mentioned in another thread, I use Qwant for a search engine which is out of France.
Bottom line, when looking for ways to securely communicate online, there is no perfect solution, but some simple changes can make you a lot more obscure. When looking at secure email, messengers and search engines, it's sad to say but I tend to look at options under the European Union security laws. Their privacy laws are much more strict than ours in the States. Our tech companies are in on the agenda and they are in bed with some very bad people.
Take care and welcome to Amerika comrads.
Jake, or others, trying to shift over to Qwant on my iPhone. In my search engine choices for Safari I do not have an open selection option. I only have an option to select Google, Bing, Yahoo or DuckDuckGo. Help.
“When Tyranny becomes Law, Rebellion becomes Duty”
Colossians 3:17 (New King James Version)
"And whatever you do in word or deed, do all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through Him."
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The reason protonmail is so good is because they use very strong encryption to encrypt your mail box, and any mail sent to/from another protonmail accounts is encrypted end to end. Some mail is not encrypted. See this link to see what is encrypted when and where. https://protonmail.com/support/knowledge-base/what-is-encrypted/Most silly email, I don't care about securing. But if I want to email securely about sensitive information, yes between two protonmail users, there is end to end encryption. Otherwise, there has to be some kind of key exchange or shared password solution. I do this for a living and I know how everything works at work. But in my private life, I'm like a lot of you and I'm figuring a lot out as I go here. All I know is that I want an email service that 95% of the time is just informal email. But that last 5% I want something that can be secure. If that takes a little more effort and coordination between parties, I'm okay with that. Some may not want to think about it. I'm going to do a deeper dive into how the protonmail solution works and do some different scenarios. I'll let people know what I discover if you're interested. I have a friend that also signed up. I'll try experiments between two protonmail end points, between protonmail and non protonmail, and vice versa. Then I will see if there's a way for some kind of key or shared password to work between people etc.
Progressives are the most open minded, tolerant, and inclusive people on the planet, as long as you agree with everything they say, and do exactly as you're told.
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Jake, or others, trying to shift over to Qwant on my iPhone. In my search engine choices for Safari I do not have an open selection option. I only have an option to select Google, Bing, Yahoo or DuckDuckGo. Help. I would just make DuckDuckGo the default for the address bar searches. You can always just make a bookmark to it or make it a home page or something https://www.qwant.com
Progressives are the most open minded, tolerant, and inclusive people on the planet, as long as you agree with everything they say, and do exactly as you're told.
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Jake, or others, trying to shift over to Qwant on my iPhone. In my search engine choices for Safari I do not have an open selection option. I only have an option to select Google, Bing, Yahoo or DuckDuckGo. Help.
I don't have an iphone. I don't even have a phone. I did find this though. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/qwant/id924470452
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Jake, or others, trying to shift over to Qwant on my iPhone. In my search engine choices for Safari I do not have an open selection option. I only have an option to select Google, Bing, Yahoo or DuckDuckGo. Help. I would just make DuckDuckGo the default for the address bar searches. You can always just make a bookmark to it or make it a home page or something https://www.qwant.comKeep in mind DuckDuckGo is pretty good. At least Google isn't tracking everything you search on and probably selling the information. But DuckDuckGo does use Google search archives and they may have bias to them.
Progressives are the most open minded, tolerant, and inclusive people on the planet, as long as you agree with everything they say, and do exactly as you're told.
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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. Check this out. https://protonmail.com/support/knowledge-base/transitioning-from-gmail-to-protonmail/You can forward email from gmail to other providers. Both proton mail and gmail have good directions on how to do this. The idea is you tell gmail to forward all email to your destination mail servers, which are either POP3 or IMAP. Mail protocols are kind of complicated, but when you see the terms POP3 or IMAP it refers to receiving email, and when you see SMTP it refers to sending email. Email was one of the early technologies on the internet and in all honesty it is a cluster [bleep].
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Campfire 'Bwana
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Campfire 'Bwana
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Thanks for posting this! Given recent events, this should probably be a sticky.
What are your thought on Tor? 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. Thanks Jake, I'm a typical guy with limited knowledge about all this stuff you've been mentioning. So, a question or two if I may. Using a VPN, does that show up as an IP address in some other location? Or will it just route info/requests for location to my ISP and known location? Will these new browsers and things like protonmail still run on an old Win 7 machine? If I upgrade soon I'm thinking of getting a bare machine perhaps with Linux and not going the HP/Dell/Etc route with all the MS bs already installed, so will those browsers and such run easily? (in other words can a non-nerd install them and get them to work ? ) Its great for you to post all this in these times, but there's still the non tech oriented folks out there that some of this seems like gibberish to. I'm one of those that knows enough to get me i nto trouble.
The desert is a true treasure for him who seeks refuge from men and the evil of men.
In it is contentment
In it is death and all you seek
(Quoted from "The Bleeding of the Stone" Ibrahim Al-Koni)
member of the cabal of dysfunctional squirrels?
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Without getting into too many details, if you remember back, there was a thread about "flash militias". Basically, a group of like minded people in a community that could come together on short notice and defend their community. Well, this thread is based on that concept. What ways can country and community loving patriots communicate and organize without evil obstructing.
Progressives are the most open minded, tolerant, and inclusive people on the planet, as long as you agree with everything they say, and do exactly as you're told.
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Campfire Ranger
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Campfire Oracle
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I hooked up to the internet when it was still fairly young. Hardly anybody had a web page back then and the few bulletin boards were very basic.
Now look at what it is. People have to take precautions to keep it from complicating their lives.
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Thanks for posting this! Given recent events, this should probably be a sticky.
What are your thought on Tor? 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. Thanks Jake, I'm a typical guy with limited knowledge about all this stuff you've been mentioning. So, a question or two if I may. Using a VPN, does that show up as an IP address in some other location? Or will it just route info/requests for location to my ISP and known location? Will these new browsers and things like protonmail still run on an old Win 7 machine? If I upgrade soon I'm thinking of getting a bare machine perhaps with Linux and not going the HP/Dell/Etc route with all the MS bs already installed, so will those browsers and such run easily? (in other words can a non-nerd install them and get them to work ? ) Its great for you to post all this in these times, but there's still the non tech oriented folks out there that some of this seems like gibberish to. I'm one of those that knows enough to get me i nto trouble. Oh I get it. I used to shoot missiles in the Navy for a living. And I'm GenX and didn't use a personal computer until after graduating from college lol. On my last ship, we had no IT staff and no computer network (old destroyer) but the captain looked at me and said "Weaps" you have all the technical people onboard, I want you to install a computer network throughout the ship. I laughed for about 5 seconds and then wanted to cry. I found 3 basement hackers in my department and I read 800 page Microsoft manuals for 8 months and we got it done. Workstations, servers, firewalls, routers and fiber optics all the way to the desktops. It was hell but I learned a lot. We're talking about trying to secure everything. In a perfect world, that would be great. I'm hoping there are alternatives out there that are more secure than what we typically use today that aren't a royal PITA to use. There are some simple things that people can do to make a pretty good difference. Other things, I'm trying to figure out. I may come to the conclusion that there is no easy way to get rid of all the tools we use in our daily life. If that's the case, maybe a person chooses to use something like Gmail or the like for 95% of your garbage email. And for the sensitive email, you use a free protonmail account. As I mentioned in my previous post, we may find that we need to organize, just like the scumbags have. We may need to form groups in our community and share sensitive information. That mean that the whole group gets a free one address protonmail account. Or Maybe the whole group gets a Signal messenger account and everyone is on a group list that can receive short notice blast of time sensitive information. "Mob downtown burning shops show up behind the high school asap". You get the idea. So even though I hope there's a way to go all secure, you may have to have multiple tools. Maybe you blast to a group over regular email "Urgent alert check your protonmail..." And people log in and get the encrypted email message. Make sense? Sorry for the novel, just thinking out loud. You can login to a protonmail account from any browser. You just go to the web site and log in. There are also standalone apps if that's your thing. Like I said earlier, I'm also learning as I go.
Progressives are the most open minded, tolerant, and inclusive people on the planet, as long as you agree with everything they say, and do exactly as you're told.
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Using a VPN, does that show up as an IP address in some other location? Or will it just route info/requests for location to my ISP and known location? A VPN is like an encrypted tunnel to a proxy address. Think of all the traffic of all the people using the VPN as funneling through one server online, or one of a handful. So all those people will be masquerading as if they originated from that server address. You may live in Texas and you look like you're in Maine or Canada.
Progressives are the most open minded, tolerant, and inclusive people on the planet, as long as you agree with everything they say, and do exactly as you're told.
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Good post, might not serve most people here lol but good nonetheless. As far as android phones, you can get away from preinstalled apps, even some system apps. No one needs google playstore if they can learn to use alternatives like apkmirror, fdroid, etc. For folks with a little geek in them its easy to rip out apps from most android phones with android debug bridge. Tutorial here... https://www.xda-developers.com/disable-system-app-bloatware-android/Example, to "rip out" playstore the powershell command would be .\adb shell pm disable-user --user 0 com.android.vending It doesnt actually remove the playstore, just basically takes it out of use for that user. It can get funky and screw up a lot of schitt if you rip out the wrong stuff  I hate bloatware and apps I never use. Besides, most of the apps, even though theyre not in use, "call home" ...A LOT! On my home network I run pihole to block a lot of BS. But...its a never ending task to block most of these intrusive companies.
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Good post, might not serve most people here lol but good nonetheless. As far as android phones, you can get away from preinstalled apps, even some system apps. No one needs google playstore if they can learn to use alternatives like apkmirror, fdroid, etc. For folks with a little geek in them its easy to rip out apps from most android phones with android debug bridge. Tutorial here... https://www.xda-developers.com/disable-system-app-bloatware-android/Example, to "rip out" playstore the powershell command would be .\adb shell pm disable-user --user 0 com.android.vending It doesnt actually remove the playstore, just basically takes it out of use for that user. It can get funky and screw up a lot of schitt if you rip out the wrong stuff I hate bloatware and apps I never use. Besides, most of the apps, even though theyre not in use, "call home" ...A LOT! On my home network I run pihole to block a lot of BS. But...its a never ending task to block most of these intrusive companies. Yeah I have toyed with the idea of stripping most of Google off my Android phone. I use so few apps it wouldn't be hard. But I do use a multifactor authentication tool for secure access to my work network. And that tool will not work on a rooted phone.
Progressives are the most open minded, tolerant, and inclusive people on the planet, as long as you agree with everything they say, and do exactly as you're told.
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