This is a quick reboot of a post I wrote two years ago called Alternatives to Firefox on Manjaro Linux. The original post was written when it was disclosed Firefox had suffered multiple zero-day vulnerabilities. And at the time I was running an Arch derivative called Manjaro Linux on my 2015 MacBook Pro.

Today I want to share my two favorite browsers for Linux, which I recently installed on my 2019 MacBook Pro running Arch Linux. Rather than getting my browsers from the AUR these days I’m now installing with Flatpack for speed and simplicity. If you’re not familiar with Flatpack I encourage you to visit their website and read up as it can save you a lot of time no matter what distro you’re running.

So here they are. My two favorite alternatives to Firefox for Linux.

Subscriber Identity Module. That’s what “SIM” stands for. I acquired my first SIM when I was 17 at a T-Mobile outside Chicago when I got my first cell phone, the Nokia 1110, the best-selling phone of all-time.

A few years later I was working in Chicago and almost everyone in the office had an iPhone. But a few people had Android phones. Their phones did so much my dumb phone couldn’t do. Though having grown up in an analog world the idea of the phone doing everything concerned me in that I would grow dependent on it.

It was around 2004 when TBP was infiltrated by the Feds. For at least a day or two the homepage of the website showed nothing other than an emblazoned FBI logo. I’m sure I still have a screenshot somewhere but I trust you know how to verify claims people make on the Internet.

Back then I was an avid IRC user and knew how to set up a sophisticated FTP server replete with eggdrop reporting real-time connection activity to a hidden channel on EFNet. Those were the days when anything felt possible online. Then, all of a sudden, the walls came crashing down.

If you’re a software developer working ethically you’re almost certainly using GnuPG to sign your work. And if you’ve been at it for any length of time you’ve almost certainly been forced to switch machines. Unless your aim is to create a new identity for each machine you use you need a simple, repeatable strategy moving GPG keys privately. Let me show you how.

I’m no Steve Wozniak but I carry a healthy distrust of computers. After hearing of the Equifax data breach affecting the privacy of more than 145 million Americans, learning Uber paid and tried to cover up the loss of 57 million driver and passenger records and seeing the lasting impact of the Meltdown attack I’m starting to understand the gravity this quote from Woz:

One of the motivations behind dual-booting Linux on my MacBook Pro was to take back control of my personal data. Not just because Apple uses faux encryption on iCloud. And not because macOS has been shown to leave users open to eavesdropping exploits. But because when I use my Mac with macOS the operating system gratuitously beams out activity records¹, sharing information I’d rather keep private with people I don’t personally know nor have I ever met. And without the ability to shut it off, I find my privacy – the sentient and autonomous nature of my very being – constantly under attack.

In many instances, privacy is threatened not by singular egregious acts, but by a slow series of relatively minor acts which gradually begin to add up.

I've Got Nothing to Hide and Other Misunderstandings of Privacy

In this short guide I’ll show you how to encrypt and route your local Internet traffic through a fast, modern, and secure VPN tunnel called WireGuard using a free and open source operating system called Manjaro Linux. I will explain how to install WireGuard on Manjaro, share a simple means of establishing and testing an encrypted Internet connection, and leave you with next steps and personal experience to help further your understanding and gain confidence getting started.

I read an article on Medium titled How to encrypt your entire life in less than an hour. The article provided a number of tips for staying secure digitally. One of the tips was to use the Tor browser because popular browsers such as Safari and Chrome were not private enough – even in private mode.

What the author didn’t tell you was that it’s possible to increase your privacy without switching browsers using Dan Pollock's hosts file. A quick look at the file describes exactly what it does…

Daily Beast reports 8Chan refugees are leaving DARPANet, commonly known as “the Web”, for a new home on ZeroNet and doxxing their IPs in the process.

Getting on the ZeroNet can be done more discretely, however, and it’s not hard if you’re running Linux – even if running Linux on a MacBook Pro: