mind your privacy
Signal adds new blur tools to its app to help you hide faces and other Identifiable info in the photos you share.
We’ve mentioned Signal Messenger before in quite a few guides. Signal is a free and open source, cross-platform encrypted messaging service developed by the Signal Foundation and Signal Messenger LLC.
It uses the Internet to send one-to-one and group messages, which can include files, voice notes, images and videos. Its mobile apps can also make one-to-one voice and video calls, and the Android version can optionally function as an SMS app.
Website publishers now can advertise their onion service to Tor users
The latest update of the Tor Browser, v9.5, introduced a new opt-in feature that allows desktop users to automatically select the .onion version of a website if that website has one available.
Website publishers now can advertise their onion service to Tor users by adding an HTTP header. When visiting a website that has both an .onion address and Onion Location enabled via Tor Browser, users will be prompted about the onion service version of the site and will be asked to opt-in to upgrade to the onion service on their first use.
The feature can also be turned on or off in the Privacy & Security tab of the browser’s settings page.
To learn more about these new features and everything that’s new in Tor 9.5 check out the official announcement page.
a friendlier page that loads faster, provides downloadable images, eliminates ads, generates RSS feeds, and doesn’t urge you to sign up.
Bibliogram is an alternative front-end for Instagram that takes data from Instagram’s public profile views and puts it into a friendlier page that loads faster, provides downloadable images, eliminates ads, generates RSS feeds, and doesn’t urge you to sign up.
However, Bibliogram will not allow you to anonymously post, like, comment, follow, or view private profiles. It also does not preserve deleted posts.
Continue reading “Bibliogram: An Alternative Instagram Front-End”
There’s no reason why you should be the product and use Twitter and Instagram the way they want you to do it.
I probably don’t need to go on and on why you shouldn’t use Twitter ( if you need to, at least use the web version and delete cookies and cache and everything when you’re done ), and especially Instagram and Facebook.
But that doesen’t mean you should isolate yourself ( stupid joke ) and don’t keep up with your favorite people, creators and brands. There are ways to follow any everybody on these platforms without even having an account.
Continue reading “HOW TO: Follow People on Twitter and Instagram Without an Account”
the easiest and quickest way to audit and fix macOS’ security settings
Every once in a while, everybody is publishing the same old new content with steps you need to take in order to harden your macOS installation. And you follow along and ask yourself if there isn’t a simpler way to do this. After all this is a Mac, everything just works, and everything happens on the fly, and macOS is the most advanced OS in the world and all that bullshit.
Luckily, there is a simpler way to do this, with minimal interaction. But you’ll have to use the terminal. Don’t worry, it’s pretty painless. Check it out below…
Continue reading “HOW TO: Easily Audit and Fix macOS Security Settings”
the easiest way to remove metadata from files you upload online
When you upload a file online, you might upload more than what you’re willing to share with the world. This is valid for all types of file, being it a photo, a video or audio file, PDF etc.
The two most common file types shared online today are photos and videos. And both file types have one thing in common that can give away a lot more information than you might think. That’s metadata.
Besides what’s visible in the photo itself, metadata can reveal when and where the photo was taken, the device that was used to take the photo and other unique characteristics that can fingerprint you across the web. By not removing metadata, a hacker or OSINT researcher can easily find out where you live, where you work, your preferences and habits etc, just by extracting the Exif data hidden inside the photos you post online.
We previously covered why and how to remove metadata from a file before uploading it online, using an amazing tool called ExifTool.
If you find ExifTool too complicated to use or if it’s an overkill for your needs, here’s another free, open source and cross-platform GUI tool that’s built on top of ExifTool library: ExifCleaner.
ExifCleaner works with all file formats supported by ExifTool and allows you to process tens, hundreds, or even thousands of files at once by dragging and dropping those files onto the app window.
Also, the program automatically detects your operating system’s dark mode setting to reduce eye strain. It will change back to day mode when your computer does.
You can get ExifCleaner on Linux, macOS and Windows or build it from the source code. Linux users can download ExifCleaner as an .AppImage or .deb file.
Plasma Bigscreen is the free open-source user interface experience for “dumb” TVs
Smart TVs are everywhere these days. Most of them are based on Android and they collect a whole bunch of data from you. Some of them are even spying on you. Vizio was busted for using 11 million TVs to spy on its customers.
So what to do? You can:
1. If you already own a smart TV ( or don’t want to bother with option #2 ), consider using Pi-Hole and avoid smart TV with incorporated webcams and mics or remote with incporporated mics.
2. Take a look at KDE’s Plasma Bigscreen project.
Joplin adds experimental WYSIWYG editor
Joplin is a free, open source, cross platform ( Linux, macOS, Windows, Android and iOS ), end-to-end encrypted note taking and to-do application with synchronisation capabilities. The notes are searchable, can be tagged and images or other resources can be attached to them. The notes can be synchronised with various cloud services including Nextcloud, Dropbox, OneDrive or any WebDAV server.
Over the weekend Joplin was updated to add a new experimental WYSIWYG editor. However, the keyword here is “experimental” and the devs warn us not to use it for important notes as we may lose the content of the note, or it might get corrupted.
Other changes:
This tool Scrapes Instagram public and private profiles, hashtags, stories, feeds, saved media, and their metadata
If you want to backup your Instagram account but don’t want to request a backup from facebook or you’re just looking for a good Instagram scraping OSINT tool, you should take a look at Instaloader.
Continue reading “Instaloader: Download Photos and Videos with Captions and Metadata from Instagram”
improve your security and privacy by blocking ads, tracking and malware domains.
Welcome to the internet, it’s full of advertisers trying to sell you stuff you don’t need, trackers trying to steal and sell your data and malicious content waiting to hijack your device.
There are a few steps you can take to minimise these threats. Like taking advantage of the built in hosts file on your computer and a browser ad-blocker like uBlock Origin .
