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Reply to: What are your softcore preps? Posted 3 weeks ago

Gottcha! What you should do is just browse through the settings and toggle off anything you don’t want/need/or think is creepy. Most settings are very user friendly and you should be able to tell what they all are. Many settings are very personal though so I can’t recommend everything to you because what I like is different from what you like. You may want app and message notifications to show up on your lock screen for convenience but then again if you have a tendency to leave your phone laying around, that could allow anyone to pick it up and read what you have going on. Here are some simple toggles you can do, but again if it interferes with your productivity or stress then don’t do it. Turn off your WiFi when you are out of the house. (Just made a whole forum post about this, but that’s the basic summary) Turn off Bluetooth when you don’t need it. Turn off location services when you aren’t using an app that needs it. Change your network’s DNS. (I made another forum post about that but might be a bit beyond what you want to do today) Here’s a simple little step-by-step walkthrough to change the DNS on your iphone to one that is more secure, MUCH faster, and more private -Go to Settings > WiFi.-Select the ‘i’ icon next to the WiFi network you are connected to.-Scroll down and select Configure DNS.-Change the configuration from Automatic to Manual.-Select Add Server.– Type in the following servers: 1.1.1.1 1.0.0.1 On macOS — -Go to System Preferences. You can find it by pressing Command + Space on your keyboard and typing System Preferences.-Click on the Network icon > Advanced.-Select the DNS tab.– IPv4 section enter in: 1.1.1.1 1.0.0.1 -If there is a section for IPv6 enter in: 2606:4700:4700::1111 2606:4700:4700::1001 -Click OK > Apply. On macOS, make sure your computer is encrypted. That way no one can get into any of your files unless they have your password. System Preferences>Security&Privacy>FileVault and follow the prompts. Here’s a pretty simple and decent macOS guide that might help with various other settings https://www.bejarano.io/hardening-macos/

Reply to: What are your softcore preps? Posted 3 weeks ago

150% don’t move over or try and move others over to other messaging platforms if it is detrimental to your mental health and stress. That comes first and stick with what you like and what works for you. That was a smart and very “hygienic” move to set up your new devices from scratch. Great job! Just to clarify, the project you are going to be looking on TP for and are asking if I have any guides on is making sure settings are toggled correctly and your VPN is installed? Just want to make sure I give you the advice you are looking for. If so, what devices would you be doing this on? eg Apple iPhone, Windows laptop, …

Turn off your WiFi when you don’t need it, and other tips on how to prevent hacking and tracking

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Posted 3 weeks ago

Reply to: What are your softcore preps? Posted 3 weeks ago

@pnwsarah — Great job using DuckDuckGo and a password manager, you already have more digital hygiene than most people. Would you like some homework/a challenge in that space? You mention still having a lot of work to do in that area. Pick either or both of these to implement: Look through your phone and computer and delete old applications and files that you no longer need or use. Try getting family and friends to use a more secure messaging service like Signal with you. This was hard for me to get my family converted over and took probably three attempts over multiple years. Finally I said to them all the only thing I want for my birthday is for you all to use this app to call or text me, and they did it. Hopefully your family will be more receptive or are already using it. It’s nice to know that whatever I say between myself and my spouse is 100% only visible between us, where a normal text message can be seen by my cell provider, logged for 2 years, and could possibly be stored by the government as well.

Reply to: What are your softcore preps? Posted 3 weeks ago

@Renata T — Do you find that many sites either add additional captchas or block your connection when you use TOR? I haven’t used that browser very much but have heard it can be a chore to use at times.

Reply to: What to do about a personal data leak or breach – Before and After Posted 1 month ago

I use and highly recommend privacy.com as well. Everyone should check it out and feel free to ask us if you have any questions about it because it is just a no-brainer privacy and security solution to your money once you understand how it works. If the shopping site you buy things at gets breached and you are worried they now have your card number, no worries! Just click a single button on the app and that card is burned and you can create a new one. No having to call your credit card company, changing your card number on every site, and waiting the three business days to receive your new one. These temporary and burner cards have saved my bacon more than once.

Reply to: What to do about a personal data leak or breach – Before and After Posted 1 month ago

This is an area where many people only do something about it after the fact. Like the person who thinks about food storage after the hurricane is announced and the store shelves are already empty. It’s already too late. So for you to give some proactive tips on things we can do before is a better way to look at things. It won’t be as organized, but here are some of my random ramblings on what you can do before: Know that whatever information you provide to a doctor, store, or even government, as we are seeing here, will be leaked at some point. Don’t lie on important forms, but maybe don’t, put in your personal email address. So create some alternative email accounts that you can pass out like one for shopping and another for just junk. I have created an alias name, phone number, and email that I use for things that don’t really matter. Does my grocery store rewards card really need my true name, phone number, email, or address? No. Can you change your name in which you receive items from Amazon? Yes. Maybe my real name is James Gentry but I receive packages to my house in the name of Harry Yonker. I still get my packages but Amazon and the different people and companies shipping out my stuff don’t know my real name. Little things like that will lower your attack surface and who cares if it leaks online someday, it will show that Harry Yonker lives at my address instead of me and people trying to target me will have a bit harder time doing so. Can I offer another service in addition to the very well recommended and free encrypted messenger Signal? There is another app called MySudo. It’s a very organized and easy way to set up some of these aliases or different compartmentalized areas of your life. You can get 1-9 additional phone numbers and email addresses that then can be given out to places instead of your personal number and email. So maybe you give out one phone number and email to all government organizations, another is used only for banking, and another is just for absolute junk and can be used on all those dumb websites that need an email address to continue viewing the site. It’s a very cheap and easy way to protect different areas of your life. I wrote a post about how to view your credit report and place a freeze on it. I wouldn’t pay money for a credit or identity theft protection. Placing a freeze on your credit, and enabling good practices such as password manager, 2FA, shredding documents with your info on them, etc.. will probably do more good than any of these services. Your homeowners or renters insurance might even cover expenses incurred if you are the victim of identity theft, mine does. When you are involved in a leak or breach, because it will happen, here are some tips I have on what to do (AFTER). Take a breather and know that it will be okay. It’s too late to change the past, but lets keep a calm head for the future damage control and cleanup we have to do. As soon as you become aware of the leak or breach, go into that account and access the damage. If everything they have on you was included, what would the damage be? Maybe only phone numbers were leaked, but it usually takes some time before the organization themselves knows the full extent of the damages. Still, the first thing that I do is go into the online account and change my password, even if the company says passwords weren’t included in the breach. I’ve seen before that they later come out and say that passwords were included after all. You should be using a unique password for every site, see brownfox-ff’s tip on password managers, but if you didn’t, you will need to change your password on every site in which you used that ‘recycled’ password. Be aware of phishing scams following a breach. Tmobile has had many breaches over the past few years of data being stolen. And by being aware of that breach allows me to put up my guard that if I receive a call from Tmobile in the coming months asking me to confirm information, then I know it could be a scammer taking that breach data and then calling everyone and getting more info from them. In this case I would politely say to them “What is this call about? Okay, well I’ve been scammed by receiving calls like this in the past (even though I haven’t) and I will call the main corporate number or go into a local Tmobile store and talk with them about the issue.” I then hang up.

Reply to: News roundup for Fri, Jul 01, 2022 Posted 1 month ago

Much of the media is calling the database exposure of California gun information a breach. The article you linked to called it by the correct name of a leak. A breach is when someone illegally breaks into a system and steals information. In this case the information was publicly available on their website due to poor security. California created a map on their website in which people could type in a county and see how many registered gun owners there were in that area. The thing though is this database that served and generated the map pulled from the actual database with people’s reals names, addresses, etc… So if you knew how to read that data being transmitted you could download the entire database. This leak includes information such as name, race, address, date of birth, and what type of concealed carry permit they have (I.e. civilian, law enforcement, judge, etc…) You see how valuable that information is to a bad guy or someone wanting to target a particular demographic like all African Americans, judges, or law enforcement? What can we do about it? Well your address, name, and date of birth are already pretty much everywhere on various people search sites and in county tax records, so although it stings and feels like a privacy violation (it sure is) it might not be that big of an impact. I’m sure there will be many people who will say “Eh, I have nothing to hide.” or “I don’t care if they know I have a gun, let someone come at me and I’ll show them who’s boss!” For operational security purposes, though it might be damaging if you would rather not tell the world that you own a firearm. Criminals now know that your house contains a firearm that they could steal and use to commit crimes. But even if you don’t own a gun and aren’t included in this leak, people now know that your house doesn’t have a registered weapon and your house might be a bigger target for a home invasion. And even a minor consequence might be that gun magazines or rights organizations will take this database and serve ads to your house in the future. There is no good benefit of this information being out there, even if it is just a minor stress. We all have enough stress as it is and don’t need someone leaving harassing voicemails after the next mass shooting calling you a child killer just because you own a gun.

Reply to: A review of NextDNS. Stop unwanted content from ever reaching your internet connected device Posted 2 months ago

I’m sure people would love to see a pi-hole guide, I would. The nice thing about pi-hole is that you aren’t trusting a third party for your DNS and can keep it all local. The downside is more tinkering, and if your device leaves that home network you are unprotected. So I still like NextDNS for on-the-go devices like your smart phone. I do think that NextDNS is very simple and easy to set up for the average person. The only thing the newbie might get caught up on is how to add a site to the Allowlist or how to identify which part of the site is being blocked. For example, site A might load fine but so many websites also talk to other sites and have imbedded plugins to function how the web designer intended. An easy enough fix and one that I do, is if I load a site and it looks weird, I go into the log section of NextDNS, then try loading the site again and the new inquery will show up at the top and you can see which part is being blocked. Just copy and paste that to the Allowlist and you are good to go. I’ve only had to do this once so far this week, which means that the filters don’t have many false positives for my use case. Right now I am at 19,125 queries, 4,108 of those have been blocked, which means 21.48% of my traffic is stuff I don’t want even coming to my device. Almost 1/4! I definitely like using this. And it’s not just full sites that are being blocked, that would only be like 0.5%, most of what is being blocked is the back end of websites, plugins, and other creepy trackers. A project I am going to be working on this week is to have NextDNS loaded on my laptop, boot up my other computer and watch all the queries come in from Windows trying to call home. I imagine there should be a lot. I then can notate all those addresses and add to my Denylist. Do I trust NextDNS? For my threat model, yes. They have a very short, clean, and impressive privacy policy and give users control over their data. Once I am done playing with them and know I want to stick with this service for a while, I will probably turn off logging for some additional privacy. One thing I would have liked to see implemented is 2FA on the user’s account.

Reply to: A review of NextDNS. Stop unwanted content from ever reaching your internet connected device Posted 2 months ago

All you will see is your web browser’s default “site will not load” message. It will be a quicker response than if you were trying to load some other page because nothing is being downloaded and your quick millisecond short DNS query is coming back and saying not to load anything.

A review of NextDNS. Stop unwanted content from ever reaching your internet connected device

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Reply to: Tech security question, having critical docs online safely Posted 2 months ago

The documents should be encrypted if you upload them into the password manager, so you shouldn’t have to worry about LastPass being able to see them. The only security risk I can see is that if someone does crack your master password, they have access to your passwords AND critical docs, but even if you compartmentalize and store those critical docs in a different cloud service, you probably would store that password to that cloud service in your password manager that just got cracked. I think you are good. If at any time you become famous and have a higher threat model you can change things up then.

Reply to: Dealing with documents/important info when SHTF Posted 2 months ago

You’ve done a great job! Not only are you more resistant to identity theft and normal theft, but the steps you enabled gave you other benefits, that I wasn’t even aware of, such as not purchasing as much and opening endless credit cards.

Reply to: Tech security question, having critical docs online safely Posted 2 months ago

That is nice to be able to attach a photocopy of your drivers license, medical insurance card, or another important PDF.

Reply to: Dealing with documents/important info when SHTF Posted 2 months ago

Being able to just pass off your password manager’s username and password is so smooth and nice for family members when doing estate planning. For my master password, I like to do a pass-sentence. Typing out a sentence makes it long and complex and also very easy to remember and type out. Something like: “I love to eat popsicles all summer long”

Reply to: News roundup for Fri, Jun 03, 2022 Posted 2 months ago

I hope what you are saying is true and is not a sign that electric vehicle demand is going down. I hope that we can move that way as a society in time because it will reduce our dependence on gasoline hopefully. Wouldn’t that be great if one day every home had solar panels on their roofs and electric vehicles powered by said panels and everyone can drive around practically for free? I think that would be pretty neat to see.

Reply to: Tech security question, having critical docs online safely Posted 2 months ago

In a previous post here I gave some prices for Proton Drive that have recently changed so I wanted to update for everyone here. If you sign up for 2 year subscription, a Proton Unlimited plan is $7.99/month. That gives you an upgraded Proton Mail, Proton VPN’s highest speeds, and 500GB of encrypted Proton Drive cloud storage. Definitely an incredible steal! If you don’t need all that, you can still get a great deal at $3.99/month which gives upgraded mail, medium speed VPN, and 15GB of cloud storage. For more info, check out https://proton.me/pricing (I’m not affiliated with Proton, I just like their stuff)

Reply to: Dealing with documents/important info when SHTF Posted 2 months ago

Welcome to prepping and the forum! Here’s another forum thread I previously commented on with a list of which documents to carry. Now to answer a few of your questions. These are my opinions, so don’t take it as what you should do, but do what makes sense for you. I do think you should duplicate important documents in each family member’s bag. If they get separated then they will have all the valuable info they need still. USB flash drives are cheap and it’s easy to just copy and paste your important documents. You may not want to have the full load out of paper docs in each bag, but at least do digital. In the parent’s bags, have a copy of everything. All of your info, your spouses’ info, and that of your kids. But your kids don’t necessarily need to have all your documents. If you encrypt the documents on a flash drive then there is no worry if it gets stolen because they can’t access it without the password. And it should be a password that you will remember and store in a password manager. But I do see your concern with paper documents getting stolen. But they could get stolen in your house at any time if someone were to break in anyways right? I strongly recommend looking into a password manager if you are worried about forgetting passwords and how to store account numbers. In my password manager, I have all my banking info, username, password, account numbers, etc… plus all the accounts for utilities, mortgage, Facebook, and every online account I have. It’s a great place to store all your info under one strong master password that you won’t forget. If you are interested, I recommend checking out Bitwarden.

Reply to: News roundup for Fri, Apr 29, 2022 Posted April 29, 2022

Surprised that I haven’t seen any electric police vehicles. Could easily sneak up on the bad guy with it’s quiet engine, very fast acceleration to hurry to a scene, less pollution from idling. Some reasons why they aren’t doing so yet are because police cars are sometimes ran 24/7, as one officer in a car gets off their shift they pass it onto the next guy. Hard to charge a car when it’s always getting used. Maintenance may be more complicated than what the department’s mechanic is used to. Requires new infrastructure like charging stations, etc…

Reply to: News roundup for Fri, Apr 29, 2022 Posted April 29, 2022

Hardened is right, if your personal info is on example.com, Google will not remove that info from that site. After a removal request however, they will remove your personal info from example.com showing up in a Google search result. It’s always best to contact the main site (example.com) and ask for the information to be removed from there. After they remove it, it will take a few days for Google to reindex that site and not show your personal info in the search results. So try that first to be more thorough and not bog down Google’s team there, but if example.com is being a pain and will not remove it, then go through the Google link and at least make it slightly more difficult for people to just Google search that info.

Turn off your WiFi when you don’t need it, and other tips on how to prevent hacking and tracking

A review of NextDNS. Stop unwanted content from ever reaching your internet connected device

Turn off your WiFi when you don’t need it, and other tips on how to prevent hacking and tracking

A review of NextDNS. Stop unwanted content from ever reaching your internet connected device

List of 3D Printing files for preppers

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