Featured Articles

Continuous Documentation: Hosting Read the Docs on GitHub Pages (2/2)
Crowdfunding on Crowd Supply (Review of my experience)
Introducing BusKill: A Kill Cord for your Laptop
Nightmare on Lemmy Street (A Fediverse GDPR Horror Story)
Hardening Guide for phpList
Trusted Boot (Anti-Evil-Maid, Heads, and PureBoot)
WordPress Multisite on the Darknet (Mercator .onion alias)
WordPress Profiling with XHProf (Debugging & Optimizing Speed)
Detecting (Malicious) Unicode in GitHub PRs
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Nightmare on Lemmy Street (A Fediverse GDPR Horror Story)

Nightmare on Lemmy "A Fediverse GDPR Horror Story"

This article will describe how lemmy instance admins can purge images from pict-rs (click here if you just want to know how).

This is (also) a horror story about accidentally uploading very sensitive data to Lemmy, and the (surprisingly) difficult task of deleting it.

Intro

tl;dr I (accidentally) uploaded a photo of my State-issued ID to Lemmy, and I couldn't delete it.

Friends don't let friends compose jerboa comments in bed before coffee (@theyshane)

A few weeks ago I woke up to my 06:00 AM alarm, snoozed my phone, rubbed my eyes, and started reading /c/worldnews (on Lemmy).

Still half-asleep, I was typing a comment when my thumb accidentally hit the "upload media" button. Up popped a gallery of images. I tried to click the back button, but I missed. I tapped on a photo. The photo that I tapped-on was a KYC selfie image (that I took the previous day for a service that has no business having such PII anyway).

That was all it took -- two consecutive mis-taps while half-asleep in bed, and my dumb-ass just inadvertently uploaded a KYC selfie onto the public internet. And thanks to archaic State authentication systems, anyone with
. . . → Read More: Nightmare on Lemmy Street (A Fediverse GDPR Horror Story)

Ephemeral Firefox as a Site-Specific Browser (3/3)

Site-Specific Ephemeral Firefox featured image showing a firewall between the facebook and firefox icons

This article is a part 3/3 of a series describing how to setup an Ephemeral Firefox session as a Site-Specific Browser. The ultimate goal is to be able to have a self-destructing browsing session that can only access a single company's services, such as Google or Facebook.

Part 1/3: Ephemeral Firefox in Ubuntu Part 2/3: Ephemeral Firefox with Extensions Part 3/3: Ephemeral Firefox as a Site-Specific Browser

After setting up the Site-Specific Ephemeral Firefox Browser, you can then blacklist services designated to your Site-Specific browser(s) (such as Google or Facebook) from your main browser. This significantly improves your ability to browse the internet without your activity being tracked by these companies -- leaving your sensitive data vulnerable to being stolen by hackers.

Michael Altfield

Hi, I’m Michael Altfield. I write articles about opsec, privacy, and devops ➡

About Michael


. . . → Read More: Ephemeral Firefox as a Site-Specific Browser (3/3)

Ephemeral Firefox with Extensions (2/3)

icon of ephemeral firefox with icons of popular extensions below it

I recently posted about how to create a sandboxed firefox profile to compartmentalize (and shred) your firefox browsing history in an Ephemeral Firefox session. But so far I've only covered how to create a simple vanilla firefox profile. What if you want your Ephemeral Firefox to include a few basic extensions?

This post will cover how to add extensions to your Ephemeral Firefox profile.

Part 1/3: Ephemeral Firefox in Ubuntu Part 2/3: Ephemeral Firefox with Extensions Part 3/3: Ephemeral Firefox as a Site-Specific Browser Michael Altfield

Hi, I’m Michael Altfield. I write articles about opsec, privacy, and devops ➡

About Michael


. . . → Read More: Ephemeral Firefox with Extensions (2/3)

Ephemeral Firefox in Ubuntu (1/3)

ephemeral firefox

This post will describe how to create an Ephemeral Firefox session. The ultimate goal of an Ephemeral Firefox session is to unlink your browsing sessions day-to-day and reduce tracking via fingerprinting.

Part 1/3: Ephemeral Firefox in Ubuntu Part 2/3: Ephemeral Firefox with Extensions Part 3/3: Ephemeral Firefox as a Site-Specific Browser

This technique can also be used to compartmentalize your internet activity by using the Ephemeral Firefox session as a Site Specific Browser. This can be especially useful for websites that are infamous for tracking users across the internet and selling the data they collect. For example, you can blacklist all facebook domains in your main browser and only use Ephemeral Firefox sessions that have been whitelisted exclusively for facebook domains--effectively compartmentalizing your facebook activity from the rest of your internet activity.

Another great use-case for an Ephemeral Firefox is for public access computers such as those at libraries, hotels, and printing shops.

Michael Altfield

Hi, I’m Michael Altfield. I write articles about opsec, privacy, and devops ➡

About Michael


. . . → Read More: Ephemeral Firefox in Ubuntu (1/3)

How to check Whonix version in Qubes

Whonix 14 just came out last month. I went to update, but I couldn't figure out what version I was currently running. The documentation said to run this command, but the output didn't make sense when I ran it on my whonix-gw TemplateVM.

Michael Altfield

Hi, I’m Michael Altfield. I write articles about opsec, privacy, and devops ➡

About Michael


. . . → Read More: How to check Whonix version in Qubes

Using uBlock Origin to Whitelist

As some mega websites deploy APIs that are used nearly ubiquitously on most of the Internet's websites (I'm looking at you Facebook & Google), I've begun to compartmentalize my browsers to "jail" specific website usage to a single, sandboxed browser (profile). This is sometimes referred to as a Site-Specific Browser (SSB).

Besides making sure that your SSB is isolated in that it cannot access your regular browser's data (a configuration I plan to document in the future), it's essential to block all network traffic from/to your SSB and all websites, except a whitelist. Unfortunately, getting block-all-then-whitelist functionality in uBlock Origin was annoyingly not documented, so I decided to publish it.

If you want uBlock Origin to block all traffic, add the following line to the textbox in your "My filters" tab of uBlock's Dashboard.

*.* Michael Altfield

Hi, I’m Michael Altfield. I write articles about opsec, privacy, and devops ➡

About Michael


. . . → Read More: Using uBlock Origin to Whitelist