How to be safe(r) online

Ars Technica’s excellent guide, by Sean Gallagher.

I flatter myself that I am pretty secure online. I’ve written a series of global bestsellers about information security, I’ve worked for EFF for nearly 20 years, I’ve given keynotes at some of the world’s largest infosec conferences. And yet, I have been hacked. It wasn’t even very sophisticated!

It was in 2010. My kid had made a fuss about going to day-care so my wife and I were late walking to work. The cafe we always stopped at for a coffee had longer lines at that hour, so I stood in line while she sat down and read a paper.

https://locusmag.com/2010/05/cory-doctorow-persistence-pays-parasites/

I had reinstalled my phone’s OS the day before — the same day I’d had three different articles come out. I was hearing from a lot of people about those articles, and I was having to re-key my password in a lot of websites because I’d blown out my browser preferences with the reinstall.

Standing in line, I got a DM from an old friend: “Is this you?” followed by a URL. I clicked it, and my browser opened, then redirected to Twitter. I sighed, thinking that I needed to find the system setting to tell my phone to open tweets in the Twitter app. I typed my Twitter password into my browser, and ordered coffees.