How to navigate the Internet more safely

Published by marco on

Updated by marco on

This 21:36-long video is chock-full of useful information: use a real VPN (not a free one; be sure of the vendor), hide your real email address wherever possible, stop clicking sponsored links in search results—although he doesn’t recommend to use a search engine other than Google—, use an authenticator app for 2FA instead of text messages, etc.

The Truth About Those Age Verification Pop-Ups by Evan Edinger (YouTube)

0:54  Details of the UK’s Online Safety Act
3:19  Recent “unavoidable” Data Leaks 
4:55  Why the Online Safety Act Immediately Fails
7:10  How Free VPNs can decrease your data privacy
8:24  How the Online Safety Act is filtering the news
9:10  How the UK Looks on the World Stage in Technology
10:30 How little Parliament seems to know about VPNs
14:25 How to actually keep your data private online
15:16 My best tip for searching Google
17:13 Don’t set your 2 factor authentification up wrong
18:09 How an Internet Router and VPN Work
20:31 How the UK’s Online Safety Act will affect UK businesses

He also doesn’t mention using a password manager, which is like the thing you should do. I can’t recommend passkeys yet because I haven’t started using them yet but I probably could easily do it with ProtonPass.

Will this advice keep you safe? The title of my article says “more safely.” There is no guarantee. But it’s better than using the the same password everywhere and clicking on everything in sight.

Building awareness helps. The other day, I was logging in to an issue-tracker for a vendor and noticed that my password manager wasn’t offering to help me log in. It was because I wasn’t on the vendor web-site anymore. The URL was being redirected to another URL. The new URL looked plausible but it was a different FQDN (Fully Qualified Domain Name). So now what?

Now what? Now you don’t log in.

Instead, I wrote to the vendor and they immediately responded to apologize for the inconvenience: they’re having trouble with their own domain name, so they had to use the redirect for now.

In this scammy world of scams, it is best to exercise an overabundance of caution. The thing that you think you want to do isn’t important enough for you to give up everything else.

Scammers like to instill time-pressure and panic. Don’t give in to it. Take a breath. Think about it. Verify through another channel.