On Saturday 24 April 2021 19:14:54 Michael via tde-users wrote:
On Saturday 24 April 2021 07:33:12 pm William Morder
via tde-users wrote:
When I tried out Whonix before (about 2 or 3
years ago?), I used Qubes.
It seemed too much trouble for what I want;
Aye! Qubes is a way of life, and (while not having used it myself) does
seem like it’d need a good 20 hours of up front time to get it to work.
and besides, it seemed like I
couldn't use it for ordinary stuff like email, banking, buying stuff
online ... where you generally need a direct connection.
I don't know if
you get round that by changing your apparent location, etc., but that is
an issue for me. I do sometimes have to connect to the outside world for
business.
For doing stuff as ‘you’ (banking/email/whatnot) you’d install a VM (AppVM
1 w/ Devuan etc. in that pic) that has direct network access.
https://www.whonix.org/wiki/Qubes
And now, my biggest objection is that Whonix is
Debian, thus systemd, and
that violates a core tenet of my religion. A non-systemd version of
Whonix, and I would definitely give it a try.
Yeah, I don't see that. It'd basically whack fingerprint anonymity.
I seem to recall yourself recommending a
Raspberry Pi (or some such?) as
a device to route all my traffic
Probably (if I did I’ve dropped the idea since). I’ve been noodling on how
to separate my business self from my personal self on the internet for ~20
years(clients are completely arbitrary over what will trigger their
bigotries). A Pi or dedicated router to tor your whole network would work,
but it’d be basically the same as using Whonix for everything (and a lot
more work).
; I believe the question in that earlier
thread was how to send email over a proxy connection? something like
that?
Not sure? I send my email through a SSH tunnel direct into my mail server
using raw IP addresses. Makes it pretty hard for anyone to man in the
middle me, plus you’re petty sure your mail isn’t read by your ISP.
I suspect that my ISP may somehow be blocking the
use of privoxy - by
blocking port 8118, perhaps?
I’d guess that’s not accurate?
Yeah, I didn't think that was right, either, but I couldn't imagine how else
it could happen.
I skimmed Privoxy’s FAQ, and it just looks
like it’s a local service on your own machine filtering/intercepting your
own box’s traffic and then forwarding the traffic on to your regular ISP
modem/router. Port 8118 is used on your box only, so this sounds more like
a Privoxy config issue (maybe you’ve got a wrong value somewhere?
hostname? toggle?).
https://www.privoxy.org/user-manual/config.html
I already went through my config; I have the old config files, which worked
fine up until a few days ago, and the new config files that were generated by
a fresh installation of Tor, Tork, Privoxy, etc., and I cannot see any
appreciable difference.
The reason I
don't quite trust my ISP is that they have recently created
a Tor exit node for themselves. Even if I trusted that they were kindly
trying to protect their users, it seems inherently insecure to use a Tor
exit node that is run by my ISP, so I have blocked their Tor server. And
now I cannot get privoxy to start up, no matter how I've gone about it.
Okay, your ISP setting up a tor exit node (should!) have zero to do with
any of their customer’s connections (to tor or otherwise). The tor
software on your computer picks a random entry node (first hop). I do
agree though with blocking the first hop connecting to your own ISP’s tor
node, and blocking its use as an exit node probably makes good sense too,
so yeah, just block its use completely... It’s been a long time since I
dug through tor’s config options, but there was a way to block the first
hop from using a country (e.g. if you’re in the USA, block all ECHELON
countries from being the first hop).
By the way, I use my smartphone for Internet for one thing only, which is to
listen to online radio on headphones while I'm walking round or doing other
stuff, and don't want to be confined to one room. And when I do this, for
example most of today, I run it over Tor using Orbot. I've had no problems
using Tor on my smartphone; although, after setting it up, I have not dug
into the config to investigate. I look at the messages in Orbot's shell, and
everything looks good, so I trust that I am okay, but I know far less about
smartphones; at least with a desktop or laptop computer, I know enough to
solve most of my own problems, though sometimes (like now) I need to get some
help.
At the point you’re at, I’d try getting Privoxy to
work without adding any
of the tor layers and turning off all of its [actions?] (I’m guessing at
that, whatever ‘stuff’ it’s filtering so to speak).
I do keep trying to restart privoxy. I've also tried polipo, and it doesn't
start up, either.
No paranoia
here! Just good wholesome fun. Clean living and clean
thoughts: there's the key!
It’s all fun and games until those guys in black suits and mirrored
sunglasses knock on your door. ;) Seriously though, like you I’ve got zip
all to hide, it’s just the level of ‘big brother’ watching everything is
revolting, so doing ‘my part’ to mitigate some of it seems reasonable.
Case in point.
A month or so back, me and the misses saw a chain store we hadn’t been in,
in 20 odd years, so for nostalgia we wandered in, browsed around and left
without buying anything. Approximately six days later she started getting
ads for that store on her Facebook page. My best guess (since she uses
gmail, uhg!) is the big G tracked her phone going into the store,
shared/sold the data to FB, and ‘targeted’ ads for her... So f-ing
creepy...
laters,
Michael
Thanks for all the commentary. It will give me some things to think about.
Myself, I believe that if anybody is seriously watching me, they must be very
disappointed, because I am worse than watching paint dry. Unless one is
deeply interested in my own subjects - I pretty much live between my books
and my music, with occasional stops for food and drink and sleep, bathing and
hygiene - then I can't imagine why anybody would care what I do. If I had a
cat or dog, that would make me more interesting.
I can only guess that I must be marked on somebody's list as a potential
thought criminal; but like the story goes, one can be guilty of thought
crimes and not even know it. I avoided Twitter, FB, Google, social networks,
etc., etc., right from the start, and only engage with technology when it
suits me.
As it happens, the MIBs really *did* show up at my door one evening; weirdest
effin thing in recent memory, although I've actually had more than a few of
these over the past 20 years, and it would take a lot longer to tell. But
this was only maybe a month or two ago. It had been a long day, so I went to
bed early, sometime about 8:30 p.m., I believe. About 9:15 or 9:30, suddenly
there's a loud pounding on my door, and somebody's shouting "SFPD, open the
door NOW!" So (only semi-clothed) I open up, and there are (really!) about
half a dozen guys, all dressed in black, with black woollen skullcaps, no
badges or anything, and they show me a key and demand to know if it's mine.
(It has the same door number as mine; they say it was some guy who is wanted
for something.) But I show them my own key, hanging right there beside the
door; and the one they have doesn't fit. Then they disappear as fast as they
came. So I went downstairs and asked the desk clerk what that was all about,
and he and another guy who was there both said that they showed up in an
unmarked black van, came inside, refused to sign in or identify themselves,
and just forced their way upstairs and went to my door. Well, so maybe it was
all just an honest mistake, and they were looking for somebody else, and not
really trying to spook me; but the unmarked black van and themselves all
dressed like MIBs? Too much strangeness for my simple mind to grasp.
As I write this, I am downloading the Whonix ova file, and will give that a
try. It runs in a VM, right? And if I want to connect to the Internet
directly, that would also use another VM? I think for now that is probably my
best option. Also, I see that Qubes requires 64-bit, and I am running a
Frankenstein self-built computer with a 32-bit motherboard. (I know, I
know ... but it was what was available when I was scrounging. I hear that it
could actually be made to work for 64-bit, but I would have to do some work
on that.) Anyway, if I can get Whonix to run in a VM on my present Devuan box
without systemd, then that will be okay.
I may need some help getting Whonix to run, and figuring out VMs. If I run
into problems (which seems likely, as I am a VM virgin, and have only minimal
experience with Whonix), then I will start a new thread.
Thanks much, and keep thinking those good clean thoughts. "To the pure, all
things are pure."
Bill