user.js

th back-ported bug and security fixes. I intentionally left out Gentoo and LinuxFromScratch as those are for people that love tinkering and troubleshooting. - Not dialing home is devolving by the day but Alpine, Alma, Arch, Debian, CentOS, Qubues, Rocky, Void are not chatty. Fedora recently started dialing home quite heavily for desktop users and even mimic some Microsoft behavior in the latest Beta. Hopefully they will turn this off after Beta because blocking it breaks the desktop. Ubuntu had a few mis-steps in this area in the past but I do not know if Canonical curtailed the dialing home, this was some time ago. Something to keep an eye on in this area is systemd-resolvd as this is evolving and has the potential to get leaky but that is a topic in and of itself. - Arch has incredible documentation. They are an outlier in this area. Behind them I would place Debian, CentOS, Fedora and Ubuntu. The others have hit-or-miss documentation that sometimes requires a search engine to fill the gaps, especially as it pertains to real world examples. - Easiest to configure would be Ubuntu as it had heavy adoption early on by many developers, followed by Fedora. Both have a myriad of example configurations in their documentation and endless examples on StackExchange, Serverfault, etc... Again, just my own opinions. I tried to not be biased. I am a pragmatic minimalist and do not like shiny or trendy things. I personally prefer Void and Qubes for desktop and Alpine for VM's, Routers, Firewalls, etc... Qubes should have a decent amount of memory, maybe 32GB+. Both have some minor annoyances that would frustrate people new to Linux. All of the popular distributions can be locked down to be less chatty using outbound firewall rules with the iptables "owner" module with exception to Fedora's Beta. If you want to go beyond user-based+port-based rules then there is an open source project called OpenSnitch that mimics the behavior of LittleSnitch (mac). [1] Blocking the chatty behavior of Fedora will break it, especially their admin sub-domain. It is equivalent to Microsofts access sub-domain used heavily be the Home edition. Beyond the basic hardening of an OS if one wanted to really lock things down and assuming they understand Linux networking principals, then QubesOS + a custom Firewall VM clone + Custom Whonix VM clone has the potential to leak the least data but this assumes that one already greatly understands networking, linux, all the internet services. There are no turn-key solutions for this that fill knowledge gaps, despite there being several that claim to do so. If going down this path, I suggest using a spare machine that you would not mind blowing away and re-configuring VM's as a matter of a learning exercise. Reducing chatty'ness of user-space applications like Firefox would be user.js [2] and controlling what those applications can see or not see would be firejail available in some distro repos. [3] Additional hardening can be implemented using one of the five security modules in the Linux kernel, with the most common being AppArmor and SELinux but one must really learn how these work to get the most out of them. Most applications in a Linux distro have existing MAC rules. Custom applications would need custom MAC rules to secure them. The default rules in AppArmor and SELinux are designed for a balance of security and usability rather than security+privacy. All of the distributions can be stripped down to be as lean as you want. [1] - https://github.com/evilsocket/opensnitch [2] - https://github.com/arkenfox/user.js [3] - https://github.com/netblue30/firejail

.org/wiki/Device_fingerprint#Browser_fin... - https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/chromium-extensio... > Addons also have exploitable bugs in them, and also having multiple 'privacy addons' can mean some overlap in functionality where the tracking protection is redundant since it's covered by another addon. Like who really needs Privacy Badger, DuckDuckGo privacy essentials, and then uBlock running all together? Which is why common methodology now is very conservative. If you look at the research Arkenfox has done https://github.com/arkenfox/user.js/wiki/4.1-Extensions they recommend very few extensions. > And with browsers shipping with fingerprinting mitigation, and having the option to surf strictly HTTPS sites, some addons are becoming redundant, like HTTPS Everywhere & 'useragent spoofing' addons which can actually make you stand out (privacy.resistFingerprinting:true in Firefox FTW). The trick is to blend in with a useragent, not stand out. RFP does more than just adjust the user agent. User agent spoofing does *not* work. As soon as you allow javascript there are dozens of metrics that can be used to profile you and to determine exactly what browser you have.

d managers https://github.com/privacyguides/privacyguides.org/pull/323, https://tonyarcieri.com/4-fatal-flaws-in-deterministic-passw... - AndOTP: Uses PBKDF2 and a heap of rounds that is unbelievably slow when you have a number of OTPs. Aegis uses Argon, which doesn't have this problem, and we think it's code is developed by someone who is security conscientious. - Qwant: https://github.com/privacyguides/privacyguides.org/pull/342#..., we removed due to "due to bad privacy policies data is collected and shared with third parties" - Silence: Unmaintained, uses SS7 network, should never be recommended. - Off-The-Record: Doesn't cover group chats or other side channels, such as status updates, VOIP. In general XMPP isn't particularly "privacy friendly" https://web.archive.org/web/20211215132539/https://infosec-h... - PGP: NO. It has no forward secrecy, it's a terrible way to encrypt real time communication. - Matrix + Riot client: Seriously, it's been "Element" for ages now, makes me think the author really isn't up to date with current events. - Ricochet: Unmaintained, (2016) domain dead, Only supported .onion HSv2 - Tox + qTox: Developed wrong. They developed the software then decided to write the spec afterwards. There's also https://github.com/TokTok/c-toxcore/issues/426 - Mailfence: Last email I sent to them they don't use any kind of disk encryption - CriptText, these things really don't help, they are walled, in that everyone has to be on a centralized service to get the benefit. E2EE that comes with web-apps can often be dangerous as it can change, have vulnerabilities introduced after an audit etc. - TorBirdy: Unmaintained - Mumble: Not really private - Linphone: Not really private - Rocket Chat: Experimental E2EE - Browser Extensions: NO JUST NO. https://blog.privacyguides.org/2021/12/01/firefox-privacy-20... https://github.com/arkenfox/user.js/wiki/4.1-Extensions - Video Platforms: These are not private - RSS Clients: There are better options - Mobile Operating Systems: Options without Verified Boot. NO. https://source.android.com/security/verifiedboot - Linux recommendations: Those are also awful and don't have any threat model in mind. I'm going to stop now, it's basically every bad thing that was ever on PTIO, that we removed. Basically there are terrible recommendations with a few good ones sprinkled in. This list is *not* maintained!