Skip to main content

Blocklist-Update.sh

Blocklist-Update.sh is a script that I wrote to manage blocklists from bluetack etc to be used in conjunction with Transmission torrent downloader in Linux/MacOS. The script can be taylored to work with Qbittorrent as well, but the placement of the blocklists means you'd have to redirect the blocklist to go somewhere locally manageable as Transmission uses its own blocklist directory in .config. I believe there are about 10 lists there now. It works well for my needs. It can be ran weekly using crontab in standard user profile.  To download:  blocklist-update.sh To download the others:  Github
Post a Comment

OPERA TO INCREASE SECURITY IN BROWSER BY ADDING CRYPTOCURRENCY COUNTERMEASURES.

Opera is the first choice that many think of when they want to get away from the norm. Opera has been around since 1994 and since has brought countless improvements to the browsing experience. Under direction of Jon Von Tetzchner and his team, the browser added tab stacking, extensions, mouse gestures, and security enhancements before not seen by browser software and some which weren’t seen until Chrome in 2008. Opera also brought CSS support. It was the first to offer this. CSS allows website developers use something other than javascript to make their sites look pretty. It allows for control of text and background color on a page. It also handles font size for people who want to add a little something more than just bland HTML to their page.

Opera was at the forefront for many years and then it just kinda slacked off. That is where Vivaldi came in, however, Vivaldi didn’t really produce an actual browser until around April of 2016. Vivaldi did add features that Opera 12 had which they long forgot. Vivaldi uses the chromium engine, much like Opera, but they want to revive the old Opera 12 browsing experience. The reason for using the Chromium engine is because it is an incredibly pain-staking task to invent a new browser engine from scratch and Vivaldi’s team wanted to focus more on usability, functionality and features over reinventing the wheel. They therefore used the fastest engine they could find still being supported. Like Vivaldi, Opera did promise a web mail client coming shortly, but no one has heard anything new on that concept. Vivaldi on the other hand. Vivaldi has a community site, a blog site for bloggers and a fully functioning web mail client.

But enough of a comparison, the news is about cryptocurrency mining and countermeasures that Opera is putting in place in their built in ad blocker. That’s right, the Opera team are giving you another reason to use their browser and their ad blocker. They are adding a list of currently known currency mining operations on the web. This list will block scripts from those sites. You can read more about it on their desktop blog site. http://blogs.opera.com/desktop/2017/12/opera-50-beta-rc-cryptocurrency-mining-protection/

The Company may seem stagnant, but they are at the forefront of security and efficiency in their code now. The Opera team work with Google to try and improve their chromium engine for better memory and CPU consumption as well. Opera is fast, blindingly fast and offers a neat and organized browsing experience in a clean interface. If you want a really good browser that is stable, Opera is the place to be right now. Currency mining is only one of the things that the team are working on, you can find more at their security blog:

 While Vivaldi is coming along very nice with new user features, Opera is paving the way with security fixes and improvements to speed.  

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

NOSCRIPT CONFIGURATION FOR PALE MOON SPECIFICALLY

I wrote an article before about making Pale Moon more private. I covered a few of the settings and back end changes I make each time I install it. I mentioned Noscript, but I didn’t give any details about how I set it up. First though, you have to get the version already marked for your version of “Firefox” or in this case, Pale Moon. If you went to https://addons.palemoon.org/addon/noscript/ you would probably find the Pale Moon addons page devoted to the newest possible Noscript being marked specifically for Pale Moon. Other versions may work, but these are hybrid addons and the closer we get to Noscript 10, the less I trust it to work with Pale Moon specifically. I just opt to stick with 5.0.6. There have been people asking about what happens when Maone, the developer stops supporting the hybrid versions of Noscript, “Will it work with Pale Moon?” Why yes it will. Noscript blocks scripts, that’s its main function and it will do that as long as Java script exists on a page. ...
Post a Comment
Read more

SSD PARTITION ALIGNMENT

I was searching for more information regarding SSDs last night as that is what I now use, I found an interesting little tip that most users will never have to worry about, but people using Arch Linux, Manjaro or Windows that was cloned from another drive may want to consider checking this. The Partition manager within Linux normally takes good care to ensure that you have some free space to be used by the SSD in the event that a cell becomes worn out or corrupted. Also, Linux generally ensures that a proper amount of unallocated drive space is set aside preceeding the partition. However, on my own image of Manjaro, I discovered that this was not the case. The partition was “out of alignment”. To fix this situation, I found an article on  Lifehacker that went into instructional detail about how to solve this from a live environment or an image of Gparted . Gparted is a separate live environment of Linux that is based on Debian and uses Gparted as the main tool to manage...
Post a Comment
Read more

PALE MOON PRIVACY SETUP

I did a review of Pale Moon back when 27.6.2 came out in linux. I had mostly great things to say about the browser then and my feelings towards it have not changed. Pale Moon is a very useful tool for scowering the net. It has privacy at its core with a few implementations made by Moonchild, the lead developer, built in. I also mentioned the point that Pale Moon has a canvas poisoning feature in the backend, however, I wasn’t very clear about how to turn it on. I thought in this tutorial, I’d show with a series of screen shots, some of the useful settings and preferences that I change to make Pale Moon a bit more private. I also thought I’d take this time to rant a little more about some of the not so savory issues with Firefox which have recently come under scrutiny by various people in the the Linux world. First order of business, if you haven’t heard, Mozilla recently added an extension into their browser which gave people ads. That’s right, they were ads for a specific t...
Post a Comment
Read more