Ask HN: Online Security Tips for Newbie Freedom Activists?

Post by Mz » Mon, Jan 30, 2017, 2:05 AM UTC

tokenadult wrote: post #90

Mz wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since you have a lot of women, I will suggest that you explicitly instruct them to be careful about talking about other people in their lives in identifiable terms. Men tend to invest their identity in their work. Women tend to invest their identity in their relationships. Telling anecdotes about "My sister/boss/mother/daughter/son/husband" is potentially putting those people at risk. Encourage them to use vaguer ter…

Maybe some of the onlookers don't know that you have long identified yourself as a woman here. As I recall, we (you and I) eventually figured out that we first "met" on an online community before Hacker News was founded.

Post by nostrademons » Mon, Jan 30, 2017, 2:25 AM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #15

These answers are unlikely to make much of HN happy, but they are the correct answers. 1. Get an iPhone and use it in preference to your computer. 2. Enable "code-generating" or "authenticator app" 2FA on all your accounts, particularly email (this is called "TOTP"). 3. Disable SMS 2FA on any account wherever you're using real 2FA. 4. Switch to Google Chrome, which is significantly more resilient against vulnerabilit…

Post by Jaepa » Mon, Jan 30, 2017, 2:26 AM UTC

Buge wrote: post #81

karyon wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

notes/questions: 4. a citation why chrome would be "safer" than firefox (or edge) would be appreciated. in terms of privacy, i wouldn't trust chrome as much as i'd trust firefox. 7 and 10: as others have noted, where is the security risk in storing the encrypted vault in the cloud? actually, choosing user-friendly solutions has a security benefit in itself because it doesn't make you switch to less secure alternative…

The FBI has repeatedly found and exploited Firefox vulnerabilities. Chrome does all the dangerous bug-prone stuff (parsing) in a separate process that is sandboxed, so vulnerabilities are harder to exploit.

Post by kjsthree » Mon, Jan 30, 2017, 2:37 AM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #41

jdormit wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is Wire less secure than Signal?

The right way to think about secure messaging software is this: You want to be using a messenger based on Signal Protocol, no matter what. Nobody has thought more carefully about cryptographic messaging protocols than Trevor Perrin and Moxie. It's good to have two secure messengers, one that favors usability and has a large user base, and one that can function as a laboratory for strictly secure UX. The very secure m…

Post by hackuser » Mon, Jan 30, 2017, 2:45 AM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #35

hackuser wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> FDE handles almost exclusively a single threat: the physical threat of your unattended computer. For most FDE solutions, doesn't the computer have to be off or possibly in hibernation (suspend to disk)? Does sleep mode (effectively suspend to memory?) activate the FDE? IME, most people's computers are almost always on or asleep. EDIT: File-level encryption seems better: All files are encrypted except when open. But…

A decent middle ground is encrypted disk images. You're getting inferior encryption (it'll be sector-level wide-block unauthenticated encryption), but at least you'll have to unlock and lock things as you use them. There used to be an OS X tool called Vault that managed these with a simple, pretty UI. Unfortunately, it was discontinued. We may put something like it together, but we suck at UI. Stuff like this, by the…