A privacy review of Tribler, the onion-routed BitTorrent app
An in-depth privacy and security review of Tribler, a more private BitTorrent client backed by an onion/layered encryption proxy relay network. Is it anonymous?
Privacy
I’m an advocate of digital privacy rights. I blog about regulatory and technical solutions to improve people’s online privacy.
Jellyfin and metadata privacy
The Jellyfin media server can enrich your media collection with metadata from online sources. The price may be free, but the cost is metadata for metadata.
How to get Microsoft Edge back into your Windows Timeline
The new Microsoft Edge doesn’t currently support Windows Timeline. Here’s an extension that reintegrates the browser with Windows Timeline/Task View.
Promote your Onion site with the Onion-Location HTTP header
A new HTTP header enables websites to redirect their visitors using the Tor Browser to their more secure Onion site.
How to block web browser-based localhost port-scans
Websites are port-scanning your localhost. Here’s how to stop random websites from knowing what services are running on your device.
First impressions of the Scroll news subscription service
Scroll wants to be your one-stop subscription service for news published all over the web. How does it work? and can one subscription save journalism?
Bluetooth privacy and the FreeStyle Libre 2 glucose monitoring system
The FreeStyle Libre 2 can push critical glucose level alerts to your phone. Great for managing diabetes, but it also makes you trackable out in the world.
How to test if your Bluetooth devices support BLE Privacy
Some Bluetooth Low-energy (BLE) devices support the BLE Privacy extension that makes their location harder to track. How to test if your devices support it.
Google should auto-delete aging user data by default
Users can now opt-in to have some of their personal data be deleted after some months. The GDPR says this should be the default, however.
Safari’s Beacon API problems
You must implement the Beacon API the way WebKit deems to be “the right way” to make it work on iOS, Safari, and WebKit browsers.
My thoughts on Firefox blocking tracking/ad cookies by default
A small Google AdSense publishers’ perspective on Firefox’s new cookie-blocking policy change. It can be good for the open web ecosystem in the long run.
Goodbye FastMail
The Australian government’s new privacy-unfriendly anti-encryption interception and surveillance law succeeds in undermining trust in Australian tech companies.
New browser extension lets you opt-out of Google AMP
A new browser extension for Firefox and Chrome that gives people the choice to opt-out of Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) in favor of the open web.
Extension enhances privacy of all embedded YouTube videos
Ensure better privacy for YouTube videos embedded around the web with this new Firefox browser extension.
Windows Timeline browser add-on raises few privacy concerns
New browser extension integrates Firefox and Chrome browser histories with Windows Timeline. Well-received by the press despite negatively impacting user privacy.
Personal data should be auto-delete after a few months by default
The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) makes it clear that apps and services must delete their customers’ data when it’s no longer useful.
How to detect Brave despite it not having a unique User-Agent
Brave browser pretends to be Google Chrome to avoid being blocked. You can, however, still detect it by analyzing its uniqueness.
GDPR in Practice: Flattr now deletes your history within 3 months
Flattr improves customer privacy protections by automatically deleting collected data when its no longer needed for its core service.
I’d welcome usage reporting in Fedora Linux
Debian and Ubuntu have benefitted from good package reporting and analytics. It’s time Fedora Linux started collecting some more usage metrics.