Oct 25, 2024

Harrison and Cindy chat with the Lincoln County Library District's hardworking cataloger/integrated library system (ILS) administrator, Christopher Davis, to learn about internet privacy and boldly imbibe a baffling beverage.

Below is Christopher's fantastic resource list, with his own annotations:

Background information:

• https://libguides.up.edu/dpc For those of you who like to research- many articles on how to keep your personal information private- thank you Univ. of Portland
• https://calyxinstitute.org/about Institute for educating the public on how to keep their personal information private
• https://securityinabox.org/en/ Treasure trove of tips and hacks for your devices to reduce 3rd party surveillance and hacking of your information
• https://ssd.eff.org/en/module-categories/tool-guides Tools and guides to reduce computer and internet risks
• https://www.igolder.com/pgp/ How to use GPG and PGP certificates to encrypt your email (very geeky)
• https://www.lifewire.com/google-privacy-policy-ai-training-data-7557365 "Your Private Data Is Going to Train Chatbots—Here's Why You Should Care"
• https://jcls.org/2021/10/20/password-managers/ (mildly-geeky) A blog I wrote regarding selecting and using password managers
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YubiKey (medium-geeky) Encyclopedia article on how great YubiKeys and FIDO authentication devices are at protecting your systems
• https://stackoverflow.blog/2021/08/24/podcast-369-passwords-are-dead-long-live-the-new-authentication-flows/ Convenient solution to those who don't want to use passwords- deep dive into passwordless authentication methods that some big tech companies have implemented
• https://youtu.be/7U-RbOKanYs?si=ejCiS9y7XgeTTOsG&t=684 I really don't like using scare tactics, but if you want to see just how fast someone 8 years ago could crack your current password, then this is a great video to watch. The link is to about half way through the 20-min video

Useful tools:

• Explain GDPR- the banner that displays at the bottom of the webpage notifying you that the website uses cookies, there is usually an, "Accept" button and sometimes there is a button adjacent to that one that is labeled, "Options," "Learn more," "Reasons," or with some other language indicating an alternative. so to reject the use of unnecessary cookies (illustration- https://i0.wp.com/www.cssscript.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Stylish-Multilingual-GDPR-Cookie-Consent-Popup.png?fit=1400%2C850&ssl=1)
• https://duckduckgo.com (also https://duck.com & https://ddg.gg) Google tracks you all around the internet; a great Google alternative is DuckDuckGo search engine
• https://www.ghostery.com/ Suite of internet tools designed to stop tracking and unwanted ads, notify you when a company you use has a security breach, and offers a privacy-themed newsletter
• https://proton.me Suite of privacy-by-design (PBD), end-to-end (e2e) encrypted email, calendaring, online storage of photos, documents, and files, file sharing, word processing, password manager, and crypto wallet
• https://standardnotes.com/ e2e encrypted online note-taking with iOS, Android, Windows, Mac, and Linux apps
• https://venice.ai Ask ANYTHING using PBD AI chatbots & image generators w/out the fear of anyone storing (or connecting to you) your questions & the AI's replies
• https://www.usbcondom.org/faq/ Nothing to do with sex, this is a novel idea to prevent someone from "juicejacking" or secretly downloading a malware to your device when you use that open USB device-charging port at the airport, library, or school
• https://murena.com (for the non-geeky) & https://e.foundation (for the uber-geeky) PBD alternative to Apple & Android phones that run software called /e/OS. Cloud-based back-end features and support which are similar to what Google products do for Android smartphones (free email, could storage, calendaring, contacts/address book, documents, photo storage, sharing, & more. (advanced users)
• https://github.com/PartialVolume/shredos.x86_64 Giving away or disposing of your old PC? Use ShredOS to SECURELY delete your personal files by blanking the whole drive by means of automatically writing random data to the hard drive or solid state drive several times.