Silk Road forums
Discussion => Newbie discussion => Topic started by: tg00 on August 08, 2013, 02:47 pm
-
1.Devices
2.PGP
3.Properly configuring TorBrowser
4.Operating Systems
Devices:
Basically any cellphone can be a bug for the NSA or FBI, There are known backdoors in Android iOS and other mobile operating systems, You should really avoid using these devices because the government has the ability to remotely activate the mic and listen in on your conversations, In addition to being a audio recording/monitoring device they are also location monitoring devices, Cell phones can be tracked even without GPS by using the cell towers to ping the device which can be used to triangulate its position.
PGP Messaging:
For windows users you will need to download GPG4win which is a bundle that includes many different programs, By default the bundle does not install GPA (GNU Privacy Assistant) this is what you need because it is the most fully featured and easiest to use, Make sure to tick the box to install GPA during installation.
After you have it installed you need to create a PGP key pair, This is going to be your PGP key that consists of 2 parts, One part is your private key (which you always keep to yourself) and the other is your public key which you give to whoever you want to communicate with.
After you have created your key, You will want to export your public key, TO do this just select the key you want to export and click export key, Make sure to save it as a .txt file so you can easily read it and copy it without getting confused.
Now on to creating messages, To create an encrypted message you need to open up the cliboard in GPA, Click on clipboard and type your message in there, After you have typed your message you will want to select a public key to encrypt the message with, This is who you will send the message to, Once you encrypt the message with your recipients key only they will be able to decrypt it.
The encrypted message will look something like this below -
---BEGIN PGP MESSAGE---
RASDFKASLDKFLAKFA2323423N4K
234234234234234234234234234
2WEFLSKMFLKSMFDLKSMDFLKMSFD
---END PGP MESSAGE---
Properly Configuring TorBrowser:
You should use the TBB (Tor browser bundle) because it already has the apps installed and is configured to work with tor out of the box.
How to disable javascript:
Go into preferences > content tab > untick "enable javascript" box
How to disable applets and flash:
Click on the noscript S icon > click on options > embeddings tab > Forbid java,flash silverlight, and other plugins.
This will eliminate some of the most common attack vectors.
Operating Systems:
Safe operating systems - LINUX, BSD, TAILS
Unsafe operating systems - Windows OSX iOS (These are closed source operating systems with known backdoors) Android is opensource but contains many preinstalled apps that could potentially spy on you.
Safe mobile operating systems - Mozilla firefox OS, (Provided no proprietary software is installed)
-
I've been considering switching to tails, but i was wondering if any data gets lost, and besides obvious security changes, what else would be different on a computer running tails?
-
I've been considering switching to tails, but i was wondering if any data gets lost, and besides obvious security changes, what else would be different on a computer running tails?
Personally i don't know because i don't use TAILS, I use linux installed on my computer because it's my only OS.
TAILS is a live CD system meaning that it runs in RAM, But i think it all depends on if the system is persistent or not, You can create live USB/CD linux systems in various different ways so it really depends on how you set up the live usb.
-
i'm running tails off a bootable usb, if you want you can setup a persistant folder on the same usb for storage. since tails is a vm, every time you turn the computer after runing tails anything not stored in the persistent folder is wiped from memory. I really like tails and whole heartily endorse it. check https://tails.boum.org/ for more detail. also it's pretty simple to get running, if i can do it anyone able to use tor should be able to get it running