Before You Start Using a VPN, Read This

Use of VPNs has exploded in the last few years, pushed by increasing awareness of privacy issues among citizens as well as governments and corporations doubling down on their censorship and surveillance efforts. Now that we have AI capable of building frighteningly accurate psychological profiles of people based on their browsing habits, using a VPN …

My Top 5 Favorite Browser Add-Ons

Browser extensions and add-ons are an interesting concept, because they're basically application programs that treat the browser as an operating system. We can have programs that run on top of programs running on top of other programs, all the way down to the hardware. I've tried out a number of browser add-ons over the years, …

Up and Running: Using the TunnelBear VPN Service Through OpenVPN

In this article I want to talk about one of my tech adventures from shortly after I went on vacation, which is that of getting OpenVPN up and running and using it to contact the TunnelBear servers. TunnelBear is a paid VPN service that provides both end-to-end VPN encryption and anonymous proxying, using AES-256 encryption …

Escaping from the Matrix with the Van Eck Tinfoil Hat

I spend a lot of time thinking about how to become invisible on the Internet. Because I'm not going to lie; I am one of those paranoid types who thinks the CIA is out to get me. Sometimes I believe it, sometimes I don't. I still have an inkling suspicion that my dentist embedded a …

How to Block Websites and Prevent DNS Leaks Using Your hosts File

The hosts file is an entity that is present in every major operating system, including MacOS, Windows, and Linux. In Unix-based systems like Linux and MacOS its filepath is /etc/hosts. In Windows its filepath is C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts. Although largely a relic of the past, this oft-ignored configuration file can be surprisingly useful even in the modern …