State of the Onion: Update on Tor Project from 2014

Should you continue using TrueCrypt?

It was the last days of May when TrueCrypt website suddenly was took down and replaced with a page suggesting a migration to Microsoft Bitlocker.
No one really knows what happened, I personally believe that the NSA asked the devs to do something they didn't want to, so they decided to completely stop the project, similar to what happened to Lavabit some time ago.

You can find a lot of theories and even declarations of some guys claiming to be the developers, I don't trust much in those claims, as the TrueCrypt developers were anonymous and even if they were the real devs, probably are legally obliged to deny everything and say nothing strange happened.

But the real question is, should I continue using the latest version of TrueCrypt? Is there any other software that I could use to replace it?

If you run Linux is highly recommended you migrate your encrypted volumes to dm-crypt LUKS. Linux Mint 17 Qiana installation wizard includes an option to encrypt your system partition using it, so if you don't know much about Linux, that's an easy way to start.

If you need support in multiple platforms the response is simple, there is no other option than using TrueCrypt.

But is TrueCrypt safe to use?

A group know as OCAP ( Open Crypto Audit Project ) was crowdfounded to do an audit to TrueCrypt source code, on April 14th they released the Phase I Audit report that didn't found anything disastrous on it, they mentioned they had a big announcement coming, but then TrueCrypt project was halted.

So it seems its relatively safe to use TrueCrypt, for sure is way better than no encryption at all and is better than Microsoft's Bitlocker.

Another option if you are on Windows but don't want to use TrueCrypt anymore could be to run Linux inside a virtual machine and that way using dm-crypt LUKS.

But it really depends on how important is the info you are storing, if is your business documents, your porn stash or you live in a country other than US and the NSA wouldn't be asked to decrypt your disk even if they could, just continue using TrueCrypt until we have news about the fork, now called Ciphershed officially.

Metadata COMSEC lesson

What is metadata? The government storing and analyzing it compromises your privacy?
How can you extract it from other people's files? What can you do to eliminate it?

All those questions and more answered in this week COMSEC for preppers lesson, check it out
HERE.

Reduce your online traces with DuckDuckGo

Lately I've trying to reduce the signature I'm leaving online with Google following me everywhere I
go, and is pretty hard, specially for email, I'll let you know if I found a solution.

Escaping from Google to go to other US provider/host won't solve anything, US gov can still analyze
your traffic and can access the provider's internal network and DBs.

You don't know what I'm talking about? All of that was leaked by Edward Snowden, you can check
this nice article at the Washinton Post about it.

Anyway, this is an easy step everyone can take to stop being related to everything they search, which
could have nasty results, you can see this great infographic explaining why: http://donttrack.us/

To start trying it just go to https://duckduckgo.com/ and in the bottom right corner there is an option
to configure it as your browser default search engine.
The first days your fingers will try to type google as soon as you open a new tab, but try to resist it :D

DuckDuckGo as a lot of great functionalities, for instance I love the !bangs, that is using something
like !a to search directly in Amazon, !yt to search directly in Youtube etc.
It also supports the classic keywords like 'site:' or 'inurl:'

Besides by default it will run using HTTPS, not like other services where you need to configure it
manually.

And there is another great advantage, you can use it directly from the Tor network as it also runs as
an hidden service!

Give it a try, I really liked it

https://ddg.gg/
https://duckduckgo.com/
https://3g2upl4pq6kufc4m.onion