My security and privacy tools

A quick list of the things I use to improve my web experience:

HTTPS Everywhere – Does its best to detect whether a site offers HTTPS, and switches to that if so.

DNSCrypt – DNS traffic can be encrypted, too.

Block third-party cookies – In Chrome it’s a checkbox at chrome://settings/content. In Safari, it’s the default. Fluid is a nice Safari wrapper, btw.

AdBlock Plus – Ad blocker that’s open source. Funny story: I work for a company that makes money on ads, and I wrote one of our ad servers. Every six months or so, I give myself a heart attack when I don’t see the ads on the site, and remember above.

I don’t hate ads by the way, just the 90% of them that are worthless.

Disconnect – Blocking of analytics and such.

All of the above have the ability to cause trouble under certain conditions, but they work well for me. DNSCrypt takes a few seconds to get going on a new connection.Originally published at clipperhouse.com on September 6, 2014.