Last week I explained how to tell if Jeffery Goldberg, Editor of the The Atlantic, is is your group chat, which is obviously among he most important privacy articles I’ve ever written. But it wasn’t the only privacy piece I wrote: I also I talked to a number of privacy and security experts to write a couple of articles for Lifehacker which, arguably, can help you even more . The first is about the best browsers for protecting your privacy) (hint: it’s not Chrome) and the second is about why you should be using an ad blocker.
- PowerToys Now Converts Videos and Audio Too Lifehacker Turn videos into audio files just by copy-pasting.
- Why e-ink is better for reading than your phone or tablet PopSci It was fun briefly looking into how this technology works.
- This Free App Brings Back the Windows 2000, XP, or Vista Taskbars Lifehacker The Windows XP taskbar is the pinnacle of UX design.
2 responses to “Stay private while browsing and other stuff I wrote this week”
@JustinPotBlog The problem with Privacy Badger is that it doesn't block ads on Google Search, and the Adblock Plus "acceptable ads" program is based on UX only, not privacy standards, so it's risky.
Getting protection while selectively allowing legit ads is hard. Today the best you can do is uBlock Origin and manually re-allow ads on known good sites.
(yes, Google is even allowing scam ads for "ads.google.com" — if your ad blocker allows search ads you have a problem https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/news/2025/01/the-great-google-ads-heist-criminals-ransack-advertiser-accounts-via-fake-google-ads )
@JustinPotBlog Also Firefox has some new (ish) advertising features that they silently turned on by default—as a user you have to know to find them and turn them off.
https://blog.zgp.org/turn-off-advertising-features-in-firefox/