Dust: Mail Change -- Update Your S**t

As many of you know, I'm a general-purpose security freak/paranoid. I rarely touch an internet connection anywhere ever that's not anonymously VPNed, Sandboxed, and encrypted. I'm currently running a 100% virtual machine that was created pure and clean as the driven snow some time back. This means when I restart, literally everything that wrote anything to my hard drive disappears — my machine is exactly as it was back then, with nary an extra byte on it.

On top of all that, I use TOR when I need an extra three or four layers of untrackability. All my browsers (usually "Brave," a heavily armored version of Chrome) default to auto-clean literally everything they pick up.

In short, for all the existing I do out here, not a one or a zero is kept by me locally — it does not exist. Every single thing that I do that I want to keep (like this blog, its backups, emails, and a variety of other stuff) is actually encrypted and routed to zero-knowledge encrypted cloud account(s), such as Tresorit (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tresorit) (to name one) through non-local proxies. All of my passwords are utterly random, each used only on a single account, and are at least 12-35 characters, mixed alphanumeric and special characters. Just proving that any of my equipment has ever even been hooked up to the internet is an NSA-level project, never mind what I did while I was out here.

As I said in a previous blog entry, "I Don't Have Anything To Hide -- I Just Have Nothing I Want You To Know". I think the principle is important, in other words, and armoring data against people and organizations who want to get into it is something I know a bit about, for a variety of reasons.

All this is by way of announcing that I'm moving all my communications off of Yahoo! mail (which I despise on all kinds of levels anyhow) and up to ProtonMail (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ProtonMail).

My ProtonMail address is: asbestos_dust [at] protonmail.com

I'll still get stuff sent to asbestos_dust [at] yahoo.com, at least for the moment, but I am rapidly moving away from it, and everything I send out from here on out will be from the ProtonMail address.

The reasons I decided to mention this at all are:

(1) Some of you actually email once in awhile, although not nearly often enough (whine), and;

(2) Some of you have evinced a passing interest in at least occasional security in your own doings.

The problem has always been that encrypted communications in particular are a pain in the ass, requiring key swaps, codes, and all kinds of esoteric weirdness. Even we hardcore paranoids were put off by it. But this stuff is cool — ProtonMail is free and absolutely fall-off-a-log easy. They require no name verifications or any of that crap — they don't care who you are. Which means if you have web-names that you've been using for decades, you can get free accounts in those names as long as they haven't already been taken. (Ahem! Get on the stick and claim them now if you want to make sure.)

All your email from that moment on is 100% hard-encrypted between your machine and ProtonMail and if your correspondent is ALSO on ProtonMail, it is 100% encrypted between you and him/her. You can read the tech notes yourself if it interests you, but the short version is that even ProtonMail can't decrypt it. Not "won't". CAN'T.

If you don't want to sign up with ProtonMail because you're one of those "roll your own" command-line commandos who insists on doing it the hard way, you can encrypt your messages and send them as inline text to my ProtonMail account using the following ProtonMail public key:

If you have no clue what that is or how to use it, ProtonMail is for you — same bullet-proof encryption and security, but zero aggravation.

And that's my public service announcement for the day. Gonna talk about the vacation I just came back from when I next fire this thing up. Unless something else catches my interest. So stay tuned.

Dust

Sunday, September 9, 2018

Mail Change -- Update Your S**t

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