Category: Privacy

I have been using DuckDuckGo as my search engine of choice for the last few years. Howerver, DuckDuckGo seems to have a few problems:

1. It is based in the US, arguably not the most privacy-respecting jurisdiction in the world.
2. Only part of their source code is open.
3. Uses Amazon Web Services (AWS) as a cloud provider and Cloudfare CDS.
4. It looks like their browser was caught tracking visited websites per user.
5. At the end of the day, you can’t really know that they are telling the truth when they promise not to track you.

In this post, I’m discussing Searx, a better alternative to DuckDuckGo that is truly open and driven by the community.

It’s been a while since I started trying to decouple myself from big tech companies that sell my data to third parties, give them away freely to governments, or feed them to huge, unsupervised AI systems to target me better with ads – what is commonly known as degoogling. Today I’m taking another step in this process by deleting my personal Twitter account. twitter.com/jumpinglangur is no more!

Edit (2021-11-04): fix terminology mess-up: LUKS on LVM -> LVM on LUKS
Edit (2021-07-01): fix typo in GRUB_CMDLINE: cryptodevice -> cryptdevice
Edit (2020-06-16): use dd to create swap file instead of fallocate

Disclaimer: some of the steps in the Arch Linux installation procedure change from time to time, so I would recommend checking out the awesome Arch Linux installation guide in the Arch wiki to get a fully up-to-date picture of the process.

It is well known that Arch Linux does not have the easiest installation process of all Linux distributions. In my opinion, for technical users this is a big plus, as you get to know your system better simply by having to set it up from scratch. This comes with the perk that you only install the packages you need, leading to a smaller and arguably snappier system.

In this guide, I’m documenting my latest Arch Linux installation on my laptop, where I set up a logical volume with LVM on top of a fully-encrypted disk with LUKS. Encrypting your disk in your mobile devices should be a requirement if you value your security and/or privacy. Nowadays it has almost no performance penalties and it provides countless benefits.

If you are a qutebrowser user and care about privacy and anonymity, you may want to run qutebrowser using the tor network by default. Doing so is easy. This post documents how to set it up.

My degoogling process started a few months ago, and it included moving on from Gmail to a privacy-focused email provider, among many other actions. I surveyed the landscape and considered Proton Mail, Tutanota, Posteo, and a few others. Finally I settled with the Amsterdam-based Soverin.net, opened an account back in July 2019 and paid for a full year of service. What follows is the story of why I canceled my account yesterday in favor of another provider.