TechXploreScience Alert — Australia and New ZealandThank you to all my avid readers for your unbridled adulation...
Glen Greenwald — October 31, 2013 — On leaving the Guardian
The Intercept - February 2014WikiLeaks home website
this from Leo—
Leo says how do I backup my Hotmail or Outlook mail
and this from Leo—
Leo says how to back up Gmail and also includes a link to download Thunderbird
and this from Leo—
Leo says here that he "would recommend you grab and run a scan with Malwarebytes. There's a free version from malwarebytes.org. That tool tends to catch a few things that many of the other anti-malware tools sometimes miss."
This is where I found to get the free version—
Malwarebytes Anti-Malware Free utilizes Malwarebytes powerful technology to detect and remove all traces of malware including worms, trojans, rootkits, rogues, dialers, spyware and more.
Why Do You Need Malwarebytes?
Actively protect against all forms of Malware
Improve your protection without changing your AV
Renowned protection and cleanup technologies
Tool most recommended by techs and super users
Installing software safely and with minimal impact
Leo says — Summary
I’ve presented a few recommendations when it comes to installing software to keep your machine running as clean and as fast as possible. Those are:
Don’t install software unless you actually know you need it.
When simply testing software for fit, try to do so on something other than your primary or most important machine.
Always choose the “Custom” or “Advanced” installation path so as to see all available options.
Uncheck options that you don’t want or need.
Uncheck options that are actually unrelated to the software that you are installing.
Think carefully about whether the software actually needs to start with Windows, if that’s an offered option.
Leo describes what I will call internet perspectivism which he calls confirmation bias and the echo chamber
THE HOW-TO GEEK GUIDE TO WINDOWS 8.1ScamBusters
Are you frustrated and overwhelmed by of all of the scams, spam and other junk you see every day on the Internet and in your email box? Do you wish you had a way to know — for sure — what's real and what's not? If so, you've come to the right place.
My name is Dr. Audri Lanford, and I'd like to welcome you to Scambusters.org, a public service website and email newsletter that has helped over 11 million people protect themselves from Internet scams, identity theft and spam since 1994.
You'll find lots of great free resources here on how to avoid the most popular scams, identity theft threats, and urban legends making the rounds.
SDelete v1.6
Even when you encrypt files, a file's original unencrypted file data is left on the disk after a new encrypted version of the file is created.
The only way to ensure that deleted files, as well as files that you encrypt with EFS, are safe from recovery is to use a secure delete application. Secure delete applications overwrite a deleted file's on-disk data using techiques that are shown to make disk data unrecoverable, even using recovery technology that can read patterns in magnetic media that reveal weakly deleted files. SDelete (Secure Delete) is such an application. You can use SDelete both to securely delete existing files, as well as to securely erase any file data that exists in the unallocated portions of a disk (including files that you have already deleted or encrypted). SDelete implements the Department of Defense clearing and sanitizing standard DOD 5220.22-M, to give you confidence that once deleted with SDelete, your file data is gone forever. Note that SDelete securely deletes file data, but not file names located in free disk space.
TOR — The Onion Router
Tor is free software and an open network that helps you defend against a form of network surveillance that threatens personal freedom and privacy, confidential business activities and relationships, and state security known as traffic analysis...
Why Anonymity Matters
Tor protects you by bouncing your communications around a distributed network of relays run by volunteers all around the world: it prevents somebody watching your Internet connection from learning what sites you visit, and it prevents the sites you visit from learning your physical location. Tor works with many of your existing applications, including web browsers, instant messaging clients, remote login, and other applications based on the TCP protocol...
The Pirate Bay
Swedish prosecutors filed charges on 31 January 2008 claiming the site facilitated other people's breach of copyright law.
On 1 February 2012, the Supreme Court of Sweden refused to hear an appeal in the case, prompting the site to change its official domain name to thepiratebay.se from thepiratebay.org. The move to a .se domain was claimed to prevent susceptibility to US laws from taking control of the site. .se is the Internet country code top-level domain (ccTLD) for Sweden (Sverige).
In the USA—
Facebook
After The Pirate Bay introduced a feature in March 2009 to easily share links to torrents on the popular social networking site Facebook, Wired found in May that Facebook had started blocking the links. On further inspection, they discovered that all messages containing links to The Pirate Bay in both public and in private messages, regardless of content, were being blocked. Electronic Frontier Foundation lawyers commented that Facebook might be working against the US Electronic Communications Privacy Act by intercepting user messages, but Facebook chief privacy officer Chris Kelly said that they have the right to use blocks on links where there is a "demonstrated disregard for intellectual property rights", following users' agreement on their terms of service. Links to other similar sites have not been blocked.
Microsoft
In March 2012 Microsoft blocked Windows Live Messenger messages if they contain links to The Pirate Bay. When a user sends an instant message that contains a link to The Pirate Bay, Windows live Messenger prompts a warning and claims "Blocked as it was reported unsafe." "We block instant messages if they contain malicious or spam URLs based on intelligence algorithms, third-party sources, and/or user complaints. Pirate Bay URLs were flagged by one or more of these and were consequently blocked", Redmond told The Register in an emailed statement.
I have not checked out the five sites here, and I don't know if this article is dated and any of them have been shut down... but I am posting the link to the article for any further research that might be needed—
5 Alternatives to The Pirate Bay
by Jorge A. Gonzalez
ZeroPaid
May 18, 2012
With all this activity surrounding the DDOS attacks and the blocking of Swedish BitTorrent website The Pirate Bay in some countries, we decided to look the 5 best alternatives to the The Pirate Bay...
The online disinhibition effect
Abstract
While online, some people self-disclose or act out more frequently or intensely than they would in person. This article explores six factors that interact with each other in creating this online disinhibition effect: dissociative anonymity, invisibility, asynchronicity, solipsistic introjection, dissociative imagination, and minimization of authority. Personality variables also will influence the extent of this disinhibition. Rather than thinking of disinhibition as the revealing of an underlying "true self," we can conceptualize it as a shift to a constellation within self-structure, involving clusters of affect and cognition that differ from the in-person constellation.
