A year or more ago I started use brave browser as my main browser. It was a rocky start, but it appears the majority of wrinkles have been ironed out on the browser side.
I initially downloaded it because of the built in ad-blocking and the idea that I could reward publishers of sites I visit with tokens directly. This was back in the crypto-bubble.
I keep using it for the blocking. It makes a huge difference, and if you follow me on twitter I share and re-tweet a lot of digital privacy content that I find. Today I ran into a perfect example of WHY blocking is important. I came across this headline on Fark and clicked it – How the fark is this considered a “news article”? https://fark.com/go/1072983
Initially I get this data warning. This is a great example of a warning. I check the little shield at the top and it hasn’t blocked anything yet.
Why does any single page on the internet need to track you with 39 separate trackers?
Lets take a closer look at what all these are for.
21 of these are for vidible.tv, I’m guessing it’s for tracking what videos you watch on the page, how long, etc. Building a profile for you so they can entice you to spend more time on the site watching inane videos.
There’s one for Facebook so they (and Facebook) can build a profile for you so they can target you there too.
They are all related to advertising in one way or another. Marketing has a habit of ruining all the things, because attention is where the money is. Technology follows money because it costs money to develop technology.
Brave browser allows you to browse the web with a tiny bit more privacy. There are lots of ways to track you like IP address and DNS records that Brave can’t help you with.
For example, if you use public wifi there are also companies that use MAC addresses as an asset to sell to advertisers.
Other things you can do.
In future posts I will show you ways to further protect yourself from online browsers.
I will start with the simple ones Gom[2] can do like using Brave over Chrome, and build up to the more technical solutions like building your own DNS server.
Footnotes:
1 – They were all very long, so I just showed the first part.
2 – The name of my grandmother, that I gave her, when I was a wee-one
I bought my first NAS nine years ago. I built my first computer that was dedicated to network file sharing 8 years ago, and I have been running UnRAID for probably 5 years now. Until Windows 10 file sharing has been relatively straightforward, since Windows 10 however it has been a painful experience.
My network had been running smooth for about a year, I thought I had all the bugs worked out, then I went to site for a week and when I returned my laptop couldn’t reach any SMB file shares on my Unraid servers; that was almost two weeks ago. I hadn’t dedicated a lot of time to fixing it, but it was much harder than I was thinking it would be. It wasn’t until I couldn’t even get a NFS share to mount on Windows 10 Pro that I thought that it was more than just a SMB issue.
What worked?
Well at some point when I was away my computer must have updated and reverted a setting to a new default. I only found this out when I tried to mount the NFS share with:
net use z: \\server\mnt\share
This gave me an error stating that my organization doesn’t allow unauthorized guest access. Well that was news to me.
Windows Error Code 1272
You can’t access this shared folder because your organization’s security policies block unauthenticated guest access. These policies help protect your PC from unsafe or malicious devices on the network.
This turns out to be a easy fix. go to the start menu and type gpedit.msc
Now navigate to Lanman Workstation (I have no idea what that means) and click Enable insecure guest logons.
Double click, enable and hit apply.
Then you’re done.
Why did this happen?
I have no idea when this changed, but here are my current OS specs. I’m on version 1903.
So if you update and start to get strange errors connecting to share on your network whether it is with Unraid or any other NAS server, start with the normal fixes, but you may have to resort to this edit eventually.
A little after bedtime snack
