There are innumerable plugins to stop this tracking occurring. Google needs to know what their users are clicking on, and by virtue are now in the business of changing their code so frequently as to thwart these privacy tools. It's a game of cat and mouse between the privacy tools and Google. Make sure to download addons/extensions that will update to reflect any changes in Google Search
It might be closed source, but that does not equate to 'bad'. It doesn't contain too many smaller parts it is easy to analyze what the binary is doing. It does attempt to update, but this behavior can be blocked. Binary blobs do not have to be a black box, and it is trivial to open up Antilogger in OllyDBG and see what it is doing under the hood. It might sound like I'm fumbling around in the dark here, and I admit I am; but Antilogger is one of the first ten programs I install on a fresh Windows install.
Regular electronics consumers are not going to buy a Thinkpad with FreeBSD on it, and then house the laptop in a Faraday cage to airgap it. It. Does. Not. Happen.
I'm not defending M$ here at all. I'm just saying if people are going to use WinAll, there are rudimentary and basic things to install before using it. Otherwise it's like sex without a condom...
Windows 10 and previous versions are known to be SIGINT enabled either by design, or by accident. It would be very cloak and dagger to say by design, but certainly more plausible to say by accident. There are numerous ways to harden Windows however, and depending on how much time and money you're willing to invest; you can get a pretty robust setup. Personally I use Zemana Antilogger (try to get an older copy - the new one is possibly backdoored). Download this: http://hardenwindows8forsecurity.com/ (Some of the settings still apply on Win10 I think). And buy the new version of Glasswire: https://www.glasswire.com/ (Super handy utility that stops all the phone behavior of Win10 that can get quite intrusive/invasive). There are many other hacks to harden Windows but I won't go into them here. But you can have those ones for free...
Here's Antilogger: https://www.zemana.com/AntiLoggerFree Please avoid the new version, as it's probably weakened by ICs. I'm sure an older copy is lying around the net somewhere.
Yeah the list goes on. Even for the pros, there are an insane amount of steps to get the install perfect. And it has to be perfect, as one overlooked thing can mean the box can be taken offline by net-hooligans. Things like Commando are handy for this and I frequently use recipes when I spin up a new server: https://commando.io/
I say this because so many peeps think using these pre-installed WP bundles is all kittens and unicorns; it is not. I am not singling out DO specifically, but any VPS provider that has pre-installed soft that does not respond to threat landscapes and it not hardened correctly. Users install without a care in the world for having their VPS naked and like a sitting duck. (Yes I monitor inbound traffic on VPSes and there are people who are interested in flooding if you don't practice throttling and load balancing, or PTR records which resolve the raw IP to other domains).
Wordpress is awful on DO and many things can and do break. Trust me, I've been developing with Wordpress for over a decade, and WP on a VPS is a whole different kettle of fish. Whether it's hardening the VPS to avoid a DDOS, or auto-patching Ubuntu when OpenSSL gets another vulnerability. It's quite mightmarish. DO is good for things like Gitlab and VPNs and things like that, but good luck trying to get something bulletproof and high availability. It's a devops nightmare. It can be achieved, but it takes some time...
Worth watching Haroon Meer's keynote at TroopersCon if you feel like fixing a few things. There are hard problems that do infact need solving: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rarpym8JJXQ
Hacking for me was always about pushing the envelope, and if that meant getting the right tools for the job, then that also meant working for old industrial monopolists and building out my crystal palace in my own free time. After work I would come home, switch on my Pandora's box, and use my paycheck to have fun. The problem with doing this for extended periods of one's life is that you see all your peers getting stinking rich, and you almost feel left behind, like a lone wolf hacker who missed the proverbial boat of investor money. On one hand this can feel miserable because Fear of Missing Out (F.O.M.O) feels like a legitimate thing to be concerned about. On the other hand, the hacking escapades are exhilarating and quickly drown out F.O.M.O because those same people that are getting rich are missing out on the joys of low level disk hacking, and twitter bots that can disrupt markets and sway the stock market any way one wants. The F.O.M.O is quickly drenched by fun. Let fun precede every other activity. This is the hacker way.
This article tells a great story about overcoming certain hangups about one's ability, but never touches on talent not being matched to an audience. In some industries it's not what you know, but who you know, and the context. Take for example that famous experiment with Joshua Bell playing the violin in DC Metro Station: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UM21gPmkDpI Nobody even noticed, and having known it was Joshua Bell, they certainly would have. Practicing all alone with a musical instrument in my bedroom is no more exaltation than it is a mismatch of talent and audience. If anything my neighbor will be filing a noise complaint...
Without blindly claiming TC is backdoored, it does have an horrifically bad RNG which is housed in the application, and uses frantic wiggles of the mouse to generate seed values. Now depending on how much caffeine is in your system at the time, the values generated can differ quite substantially, ranging from super low (unsecure) entropy to 'fair game' entropy. Frankly I don't trust it one bit. If you consider how much room a mouse can potentially move within a typical desktop screen, the seed values are constrained within those params, always and forever.
No mention of the DMCA in this? A lot of the anxiety of content theft has been silo-ed away with the DMCA. Really people have to earn the right to get upset over intellectual property theft when we have mechanisms in place like the DMCA
Interesting that facial recognition is now de facto in CCTV software now. Might want to consider wearing one of these: http://www.dezeen.com/2013/12/12/headgear-to-thwart-mind-rea... On the other hand, wearing your heart on your shirt sleeves relieves the anxiety of InstaGoogle using you as a data point