Prism: there are alternatives

6
Since the Prism surveillance scandal broke in the Guardian and revealed the extent of government access to internet users data, many including myself have been looking for alternatives. The Prism Break website has listed a huge number of these, which is great but a number of these aren’t particularly user friendly so I’m using this blog to highlight my picks all of which are available free.
BrowserPrior to the revelations I had been a committed (Google) Chrome user, it offered faster feeling experience than IE and had the then innovative omnibar which allowed Google searches to be undertaken without visiting the search engines home page. The best alternative to this is Mozilla Firefox; it’s free, open source and customisable and available for Windows, OS X, Linux and Android.
The Omnibar add-on gives you the ability to search straight from the browser address box, as per Chrome. DoNotTrackMe and Adblock Plusare also must adds, which block both annoying ads and hidden java script, which track your movements across the internet.
Mobile Web BrowserAgain wanting to ditch Chrome from my iPhone, I tried Opera andDolphin; both of which are available for iOS and Android. While Opera offered data compression features it seemed to freeze when data coverage was poor. Dolphin on the other hand seems slick and is easily customisable to force searches through the privacy conscious DuckDuckGo (see below).
Search
If you want to get away from the dominant Google, Bing and Yahoo, worth trying are the European StartPage or the US based DuckDuckGo, both of which promise no logging or tracking of searches. Both offer good web search but lack the niche video, news and blog searches of the established players. StartPage, however, does have a reasonable image search.
Cloud StorageThe best alternative to Google Drive, and (Microsoft) Skydrive I’ve found is the 256 bit AES encrypted Spider Oak. The service is hosted in the US but the level of encryption means even their staff don’t have unencrypted access to your data, the downside to this is if you lose/forget your password there’s no way of recovering your back-up. They offer 2gb for free to anyone, or those clicking through this linkshould get a 1gb referral bonus (3gb).
Mapping
Open Source Routing Machine finds the fastest car route in seconds, the only quirk for UK users is that postcodes need to be separated correctly unlike Google Maps. A slight downside is that it doesn’t offer walking or cycling directions.
Mobile Messaging
The Wickr app for iOS offers free encrypted messaging that self erase within a predefined time, which can be set up to 5 days. It’s unbelievably easy to use and Mashable reports it has been approved by IT security consultant Dan Kaminsky but the developers reluctance to release the source code has left some doubtful of its claims. My take on it is, can it be any worse than iMessage which is archived and probably accessible by the NSA. An Android version is promised in future.
It would be foolish to believe you could ever fully escape a security services or police investigation, but this software should stop or limit the wholesale archiving of our digital lives, help us regain our privacy, and send a message to the established players that their are consequences of breaching our trust.
Please feel free to comment below and follow on twitter:@madeupnamethree
About these ads

6 THOUGHTS ON “PRISM: THERE ARE ALTERNATIVES”

  1. mail.yandex.com offers 8gb cloud storage, encrypted and servers are held in Russia. But the best thing about this is a folder on desktop like any other, which is connected to the cloud.
    Betterprivacy for firefox is the only add on to delete LSO or long tern ‘super cookies’.
    HTTPS-everywhere is another add-on which encrypts all websites with encryption.
    But one of the best cookie managers is:
    https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/self-destructing-cookies/?src=api
    This is the closest to not using cookies at all.
    Hope you find this useful.
    Reply
  2. myeh I suppose so, but the FSB wanted to see who is funding him. Are they foreign trying to destabilize? I feel Russia got court orders for this, and still trust Russian FSB more than you know who !
    Reply
  3. Oh dam I forgot to say, I encrypt everything before it goes to yandex with 4096 bit rsa encryption. It’s easy to encrypt a file before it goes to the cloud. That’s insane encryption !
    Reply
    • This definitely opens up your options if your willing to encrypt before you upload to the cloud, and there are free encryption programs like TrueCrypt (http://bit.ly/12Hn1Xj) will take you to AES256. What do you use to get it to 4096?
      The other thing worth pointing out for anyone reading in the UK is Part III or RIPA (Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act) requires you to give the police the key/password or face up to 2 years in jail, 5 if your suspected of terrorist offences..
      Reply
  4. I am using Ubuntu at the mo, and a program called seahorse. There is a slight learning curve with it [seahorse], contact me if you have trouble.
    But it doesn’t keep asking for passwords every time you encrypt or decrypt anything.
    Thankfully I don’t live in the UK ! But the line has to be drawn somewhere especially where children are concerned for example. The law should require one hands over keys in cases like that.
    Then again we have company secrets, medical secrets, and personal information we have a right to keep private. We pay the Government to do a job.
    Reply

Leave a Reply