First off – if you’ve done anything illegal, go to the authorities now.
For the rest of us, read onwards if you’re simply looking to stay safe online away from prying eyes; whether from hackers, crackers, or invasive privacy measures such as that pyramid-like named legislation you may have heard about.
It’s from these latest concerns which website PRISM-break.org is born, showing the best – generally open source – alternatives to all the most popular applications which track your usage and store user data which can potentially be accessed or intercepted.
In this article we’ll take a look at the more intriguing categories on the website.
Starting with the most important aspect of any computer, the operating system; the most popular choices are Windows, Mac, or Chrome OS. Unsurprisingly the creator suggests using Linux-based alternatives including Debian and Fedora.
Notably the most popular Linux distro, Ubuntu, is left off the list – I reached out for comment from the author on Twitter who replied: “Ubuntu sends your desktop search results to Amazon,” pointing me towards this detailed article on the subject which calls the OS ‘spyware’.
Web search is also where things get interesting; one of the recommendations is search engine DuckDuckGo. After PRISM was leaked the search engine reported 2.35 million direct searches, whilst nothing up to Google, it represents a 26 percent over the previous week.
Online transactions has been a popular subject recently, you can probably imagine which decentralised service gets the only mention, Bitcoin.
Something which is certainly worth looking into, especially for businesses wishing to protect their data, is cloud-based storage systems. Tahoe-LAFS offers a fantastic solution that can be hosted on shared storage helping to prevent unauthorised third party inspection.
It really is an extremely comprehensive list, even going as far to recommend aftermarket Android distributions such as the (brilliant) CyanogenMod. If you’re looking to bolster your privacy it’s definitely worth a full read.
What do you think of PRISM-break’s suggestions? Would you add or not trust any? Is it as worrying a problem as the media would make out?
