Good advice from a Hillary Clinton supporter

[GreyGeek]

https://www.wnd.com/2018/09/google-manipulates-25-of-worlds-elections/

“Humanity will survive, but it won’t be free,” says Epstein, a liberal who favored Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election but who now has become a champion in exposing the bias and censorship of opinions on the right side of the political spectrum.

On the "right side of the political spectrum:?

It's wacky, I know, coming from Peter Schweizer, president of the Government Accountability Institute, to equate Twitter, Facebook, Google, and other bastions of Marxist politics with the "right side".   Despite that neck breaking twist in reality, Schweizer does give some good reasons and practical advice for escaping from manipulation by those social media sites.

His reasons:

Throughout history totalitarianism has been associated with storm troopers, blitzkriegs and superior firepower, but a bestselling author and filmmaker says it’s creeping into American culture, subverting privacy rights, instituting censorship, imposing speech codes and threatening free elections – without a government action or a shot being fired.
...
It’s all about surveillance capitalism, manipulation of the political culture, blacklisting and the potential for a stealth power coup.

Already, one of the scientists featured in the film claims one-quarter of the world’s elections are already being impacted.

“You don’t see it, it’s not visible – you are not seeing police coming into your house,” explained Schweizer. “But they are, in a real way, like Big Brother, sifting and determining what you should see and what you shouldn’t see. “The problem is you can see storm troopers – you can see the fist of government trying to infringe on your rights – you can’t see what Google is doing because its hidden and we don’t know what we don’t know.”

Amazing.  The Marxist controlled social websites are massively shadow  banning, blocking and deactivating Conservative accounts, leaving only the Marxist and their allies the AntiFa and Democrats (I repeat myself) to be able to freely post.  The AntiFa's call for 5 man sniper teams to shoot individuals is still on Twitter.    This website linked to a blog which contained a call to "slaughter" President Trump.   The link fails because CloudFlare blocked the access to the DNS server.

You've requested a page on a website (archive.fo) that is on the Cloudflare network. Cloudflare is currently not routing the requested domain (archive.fo). There are two potential causes of this:

    Most likely: a Cloudflare administrator flagged the site to be routed around Cloudflare at the DNS level. The DNS change may not have propagated yet or the site owner may have hard wired DNS to statically point at Cloudflare.

The Google article continues:

“All three of these are connected to each other: if you are censoring information and people don’t see it, you are manipulating them – you are manipulating their thinking,” the Harvard psychologist told WND. “If you are surveilling them, it’s easier to manipulate them because the more you know about someone, the easier it is to manipulate him or her. The danger has to do with the mountains of information that these companies are accumulating which is being used to manipulate us and to make decisions about us without us even understanding that these decisions are being made. More and more algorithms are being used to make decisions about whether we can get credit, whether we can get a certain job, a certain promotion. People are unaware of that, but that’s what’s happening more and more.”
...
“What’s at stake here is not just free and fair elections – it’s not just democracy, its human autonomy,” he warned. “If one or two private companies can manipulate billions of people around the world in significant ways and get away with it, what’s left of human autonomy? It means morning ’til night, we are doing, thinking and feeling things that they want us to do and feel and think as we enrich them, as they accumulate more money. We are losing ourselves and in so doing we are enriching a very small number of people. That’s not the kind of world I think we want to live in.”

What to do?

The authors suggestions are spot on, and they will go far to reduce Marxist influence in your lives:

“First and foremost, do not use Gmail,” Epstein told WND. “It’s not an email system. From Google’s perspective, it’s just a surveillance tool. Instead of using Gmail, use one of the newer systems which guarantee the privacy of your emails. I use Protonmail, which is at protonmail.com. Proton mail is based in Switzerland, it’s subject to strict Swiss privacy laws and it uses end-to-end encryption to ensure emails are private.

“Do not use Chrome which is Google’s browser. They created Chrome because they weren’t getting quite enough information from your search engine about what websites you were visiting, so they invented a browser, Chrome. Chrome monitors every single thing you do when you are online.

“Do not use the Google search engine. So, what do you do instead? I use a search engine called ‘Start Page.’ Start Page, which is at StartPage.com, gives you full access to Google’s index, but it doesn’t track you. That’s because of an arrangement that they have with Google. Google can cut them off at any time. But in the meantime, instead of using Google.com, use StartPage.com and you’re not tracked.”

He recommends using a browser called “Brave” that is faster than Chrome, doesn’t show advertising at all and it protects your privacy.

Android phones, he argued, are the most unsafe devices: “Do not use Android phones. Android is also Google and Android records what you are doing whether you are online or not online.”

While there is no competitive alternative to Facebook, Epstein emphasized the information consumers publish on Facebook can be “used against you.”

You can supplement Brave's security by using your computer's hosts file.  Linux's hosts file is at /etc/hosts.  I don't know where the WinX hosts file is located, but this github link may help.

If you have an entry in your host file like this:
127.0.0.1   somewebsite.com
or
0.0.0.0 somewebsite.com

then if some active pixel on some website you visit tries to pull something off of somewebsite that line redirects the HTML GET command to the infinite bit bucket in the sky.  Some webpages force your browser to visit 3 or 4 dozen or more websites for tracking, monitoring, ads and other nonsense.  These calls slow down your browser significantly.  With those calls short circuited your browser's speed picks up amazingly.

The following website is to a text file that can be selected and pasted into hosts, or replace it.  It blocks over 57,000 ad sites, tracker sites, etc.  It's the one I use.  Some sites won't let you see their content if you block their ads.  Too bad for them.  There are MANY other sites that usually have the same content.  I just go elsewhere.  It's exactly like encountering a "No Guns" sign while shopping. 
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/StevenBlack/hosts/master/hosts

That hosts file is less than 300Kb.  I've used one that is 17Mb.   The smaller one works for most because I restrict my browsing habits to a few sites and generally don't go randomly clicking around.  I also never use Tor to visit the onion side of the web, i.e., the "Dark Web"..

Above I posted how CloudFlare blocked access to the DNS servers for sites being hosted on its online server.  You can let your hosts file act as your own private DNS by including an entry in hosts something like this:
1.2.3.4  someblockedsite
Your browser, which always interrogates hosts first to see if the domain name you're asking for is listed in it, sees someblockedsite listed and uses the IP address in front as the destination to query.

Linux, and some other operating systems also use a second paradigm called hosts.allow and hosts.deny.  Its syntax is a little different:
https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/linux-security-cookbook/0596003919/ch03s10.html

[shooter]

 I tried, but can your translate that into english?

[GreyGeek]

Which part?

[shooter]

 The confusing part !

[Mali]

The confusing part !

I believe Shooter is referring to pretty much all of it since it is pretty technical for the average user. I understood what you had to say, but most of our readers won't get it since topics like hosts files are a bit more technical that the average user understands.

Let me see if I can Barney this down for you, Shooter.

To get to whoozits.com you need the IP address to be able to communicate with the website and to get that address your computer asks a DNS server to look up that address so your computer can get to the website. This would be much like when you would dial 411 to get Suzy Q's phone number so you can ask her out on a date. IN this case the host file would be the equivalent of using a phone book to look it up yourself instead of paying Ma Bell to do it.

Basically, GG is saying that if you use your own "telephone book" for certain locations on the Internet you can actually defeat a lot of the known spam and malware, as well as tracking, because you changed the name to point to 555-1212 instead of the actual phone number.

That better?

BTW, I have been using Brave for a few weeks now and I am not impressed. It may load pages faster sometimes, and it does a great job of blocking ads, but it tends to "pause" a lot and uses more resources when I have a lot of tabs open.

I looked at ProtonMail, and I am looking for an alternative to GMail, but it costs money and I am not ready to change my email address... yet.

[Les]

Interesting, does Brave work well?  I'm on a Mac and currently using chrome and duck duck go for search engine, and not terribly fond of chrome but better than safari or others I've tried. 

[Mali]

Interesting, does Brave work well?  I'm on a Mac and currently using chrome and duck duck go for search engine, and not terribly fond of chrome but better than safari or others I've tried. 

Like most of the other browsers out there right now, Brave uses the Chromium engine as it's base so technically Google still has hooks in it at a very low level, although there is still no definitive answer as to how much access Google has through the Chromium engine.

Brave is good, but still new so there are issues. I can't use it at work because the web application we use there doesn't always work when I use Brave.

[Jito463]

Android phones, he argued, are the most unsafe devices: “Do not use Android phones. Android is also Google and Android records what you are doing whether you are online or not online.”

The only thing I would take exception to, is this.  The only viable alternative to Android is iPhone, and I absolutely refuse to use an Apple device if I can avoid it.  For your average user it may be fine, but as someone who is technically inclined, it's far to restrictive and locked down for my taste.  In any case, it's entirely possible to lock down the telemetry settings in Android (for example, I can completely disable voice activated search on my phone).  Also, Android itself can be modified to strip out most of the Google stuff.  While that requires more technical know-how, there are options like LineageOS that have already done this for many popular models (the downside is when you have a less common model, like my Samsung S7 Active variant).

As for browsers, I prefer Opera.  The new Opera also uses the Blink (Chromium) engine, but it offers some features that I've rarely found in other browsers.

[GreyGeek]

Mali gave the novice version.

The World Wide Web (WWW), also known as the Internet, was originally designed by a government agency, DARPA, as a means of communicating between government, military and academic institutions during a nuclear attack because a web of connections would allow the bypass of any connection that was destroyed during the attack.   Initially, one had to know the "address" of the site they wanted to connect to and that address was given as four numbers,  w.x.y.z  (0-255.0-255.0-255.0-255)  This number was called IPv4.    At first one could keep a list of agency names and their "quad" numbers on a few pages.   When that "internet" was given to the public, users replaced the quad numbers with site names and used the hosts file to link the site name to the quad number.  As the number of users expanded it became obvious that even a hosts file couldn't efficiently hold hundreds of thousands of site name - quad number linkages.   

Paul Mockapetris created what we now call the DNS, the Domain Name Server system.   Rather than keeping the connection between sites ("Domains") and quad addresses (w.x.y.z) in hosts files Mockapetris established about a dozen root servers which held nothing but a two column database containing rows which held the domain name and its associated quad address.   Databases are fast, but having only about a dozen servers to serve quad addresses to over 4 billion WWW users didn't work either.  So, several hundred secondary domain name sub servers are stationed around the world.   Those are the servers that serve quad addresses to the browsers of billions of people.  When a new domain name is given a quad address that pair is sent to one of the primary DNS databases.  Each of those databases update the hundreds of minor DNS servers spread around the world.  That dissemination can take a few hours before a regular user can access a quad address by using a domain name.    Also, the data sent back and forth was strictly what could be typed on a keyboard, in English.  IOW,  upper and lower case alphabet, the numbers, and a few symbolic characters.  The Control and other keys were used to send control signals down the wire so the teletypes on the other end could issue a carriage return, or a page ejection.    That collection  of characters were called the ASCII character set.    Just using the  ASCII set to send information didn't allow graphics, tabular reports, font editing, and a lot more.     Sir Timothy Bernard Lee created the Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML), which allowed the embedding of graphics, movies  and a variety of fonts,   He gave us the Internet in its present form, with one exception.

That exception is that about 4-5 years ago we ran out of available quad addresses that could be assigned to new domain names, i.e., web sites.  To fix that problem a new numeric protocol was created, called IPv6.  It creates a number so large that each grain of sand in the entire world could be issued its own IP address.  And several other worlds could be tossed in as well.  In your home every nail, every plank of wood, every floor and roof tile, every dish, every nut, bolt or screw, every appliance and everything in them, every fiber in your carpet could be assigned their own IPv6 address.  We will never run out of IP addresses again.  Ever.  Never.

While I have in my hosts file actual IP addresses of websites I do not want to lose contact with if their DNS entry is blocked or removed, most of the entries in my hosts file contain domain names which I do NOT want to allow into my computer, matched to 127.0.0.1 or 0.0.0.0, or their Pv6 equivalent. 

Now comes the dirty part.  When the powers that be decide that they do not want you to access the site of a domain that publishes information the powers do not want you to have, the powers merely instruct the operators of the primary domains to remove the row in the database that links the quad address of the site you are interested in to its domain name.  Unless you have that link in your hosts file you will not be able to access that domain name.   When Obama gave away the Internet he gave away control of the DNS servers and the naming conventions.   

However, hosting services like CloudFlare, which many people pay monthly fees to in order to host their blogs, videos, Internet businesses, etc., do not have to remove the doman name-quad address link in the primary DNS servers.  All they have to do is send any requests for your quad number, also called an "IP address", to the infinite bit bucket, which on their servers is also 127.0.0.1 or 0.0.0.0, the same as it is on your computer.  Any one who normally visited your website on a regular basis will no longer be able to access your site even if your DNS-Quad link is still on the primary DNS servers.  This is called "Blocking".  Since CloudFlare, Google, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, PayPal and all the other Marxist controlled hosting businesses are not government agencies they claim that they are not violating the 1st Amendment's free speech clause.   But, IF the Internet is now the public commons, and it is, they are INDEED suppressing free speech and it is specifically speech of those with whom they disagree.   Blocking of Conservative voices on a massive scale was first used by Obama in 2008 and again in 2012 when he weaponized the IRS against those conservative political groups which were applying for 501(c)3&4 status so they could solicit money with the advantage that donations are tax deductible.  In the 2012 election ONLY Democrat donors were privileged to take tax deductions for political donations.   394 Conservative political groups were cut off at the knees.     In today's political climate if you can NOT raise a LOT of money for advertising and to pay campaign workers you WILL lose.  Period.  So, by any practical measure, Obama and the Democrats stole the 2012 election.

In April of 2015 about 95 talking heads of the MNM met with Clinton's campaign chairman, Podesta,  for "dinner".  Their goal?  To map out how they would report the campaign.  Between then and November of 2016 it became obvious what methods they decided to use, and they have continued to use those methods since then.  David Muir, for example, begins each 30 minute evening news with about 15 minutes of Trump bashing using the most ridiculous claims and story lines.  Only Pelosi or Maxine Waters could write such crazy "news" stories.


Brave is what I use on my iPhone 6+
It's in the app store.
If you have a data plan then data that is downloaded to your phone when you browse adds to your data usage.   Brave blocks that data and saves your plan data for important stuff you want see.

Here is its website: https://brave.com/
Brian Eich, the founder and CEO, was originally hired by Mozilla to be its CEO, but before he spent a single day in that position Mozilla's "Code of Conduct" officer decided that his views on abortion were "hateful" and got him fired.  BTW, the "Code of Conduct" requires that if you refuse to reference an LGBQTwhatever by their "preferred gender and nouns" you will be fired.  Or, indirectly, if you are a Christian or support Israel.

Mali is correct.  Brave uses the Electron/Chromium engine:
https://brave.com/faq

Why aren’t you using Mozilla’s Gecko engine on laptops?

We were, under a partially sandboxed, multi-process architecture called Graphene. But we did a careful head-to-head comparison and by every measure, Electron/chromium won

The FAQ explains in more detail how you can get specific as to which ads you will or won't allow, blocking paradigms, etc....