The best Portmaster (Windows, Linux) and InVizible Pro for Android and forks (LinageOS, /e/OS....), apart common sense (PEBCAK license)
this post was submitted on 08 Aug 2025
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Privacy
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I wish I could put portmaster on muhh router πΈ
Portmaster works from the OS, because this way you can selective allow or block the traffic of every app and even from the OS itself, which with Pi Hole, needed for router level isn't possible, there you can only monitor the global traffic.
Makes sense, thank you for clarifying error of my desire
Do you find Portmaster to be viable? I've seen it around and read a couple brief articles about it. I've just never found anyone who uses it. I use MalwareBytes Firewall Control from Binsoft (Alexandru Dicu - https://www.binisoft.org/). It's fairly bare bones but it does the trick. I'm always looking for something better. I do have the whole network behind a standalone pFsense box. I just needed something local on the machine to silence chatty programs and services.
Portmaster is the most powerful GUI firewall out there.
The learning curve is steep and it is not a good fit for the filthy casual.
It has very good block lists... Too good.
For example, if you want to play a vidiya game esp online it will likely block half the connections so you need to go in manually unblock what's needed.
Ain't no normie ever gonna figure that out lol so I stopped telling people to get it.
It needs to have normie config IMHO
Ainβt no normie ever gonna figure that out
We were all 'normies', to use your vernacular, at one point or another. Could it possibly be more complicated than building an Altair with less than supportive instruction manuals of the time?
Touche but dropping kids in the deep end of the pool... Some of them drown π₯²
Yes, the filters are deadly eeficient, you can block global all tracking from Google, Facebook, Amazon, Ms, but than you need to set what you will block exactly, if you block eg,Google globaly, forget to be capable to access any of its services, including YouTube. Globally I blocked only Facebook, because I don't use any of the Zuckerbot services and clicking on a Facebook link or any of it's other services or AIs, I see only this (and in change it's pixel or any other tracker or logger, embedded in any website, my middle finger)
Anyway, Portmaster is not so difficult in its settings or the learning curve, well, at least not for someone with minimal basic nocions, I found it pretty intuitive, way more complicated is to set up Pi-Hole, which is certainly nothing for noobs. Portmaster is installing as is and maybe selecting the DNS server you want use from the list, because it has good default settings which guarantee a reasonable privacy. Everything you block is easy restaurable if the result isn't what you want. No problems to recommend, because it's save to use and relativ easy to handle, even for newbies
All true but vast majority of people will never be bothered to be blocking/unblocking per connection, at best they will do per app and even that is a very small minority.
As said, Portmaster by default already has a good setting, a newbe don't have to do nothing to improve a lot his privacy, more than download, installing (run on boot) and forget about it. Grandmother safe.
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OnionShare
Picocrypt, which is an encryption tool for files and folders. It's a 3MB application that utilizes XChaCha20 as its encryption algorithm. It isn't developed anymore, but it's well worth it regardless.
Neigsendoig, my producer, just started using it, learning how it works.
open keychain - foss to to track pgp keys and generate them
Okay, just curious, does anyone else have a bug preventing them from using Openkeychain? Whenever I try to confirm a key, it simply gets stuck at the "My Key:" selection drop-down. There's a 8 year old GitHub issue that was started and it never got solved...
And like, there's no alternatives for this app are there? It seems Thunderbird defaults to them.
EDIT: I've been trying to create a keypair from Open keychain and simply export the pair to my laptop to use it there but any key it generates is unable to be imported by both gpg and Thunderbird. It seems I'm not the only one having this issue, meanwhile the project seems to be no longer maintained. What do I do? Give up on using Thunderbird on mobile?
I used deltachat and sent an auto crypt setup message, and k-9 handed it off to open keychain just fine. k9 is being merged with Thunderbird Mobile so this should work fine... for mobile. but man was it a hassle getting the keys to my desktop
Oh shit, I'm doing this with my granddaughter! She's not 2 yet so I need to wait a bit but I'm doing it!