Tips and tricks to help and secure your online work
Since I am part of this community, I decided to share some of my experiences to help your everyday work on computers. Most of you might easily be familiar of what I'm about to write..
I'm a sysadmin and software developer for long time now and I love improving my everyday work with bits of optimizations and automatizations. The real value in this is that when you optimize a work flow (by saving time for example), the optimization stays, so from that point of time it will continually free up the resources by the saved amount.
What we need for our businesses are security and efficiency. For me, efficiency means speed or saving time and security is important to protect our business data. I'd like to show you some well known and popular solutions which projects I have nothing to do with whatsoever.
For efficiency:
- when doing an online research, you need to open a lot of web pages and even leave them open to inspect their content later
- this can hugely slow down your computer because of the heavy javascript most website usually utilize
- a solution for this can be an addon (extension) to the browser that can suspend scripts or unload tab contents and so free up memory and decrease processor load (your notebook battery might last much longer too)
- an example for firefox browser is the "auto unload tab" addon:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/fir...to-unload-tab/
- and for chrome browser "the great suspender":
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/d...jodocebajanakg
- we usually need to get back to websites too where they run several type of javascript that freezes our browser or simply tracks things we don't want them to
- another addon called "noscript" can give us full control over what kind of scripts and contents we allow to run:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/fir...ddon/noscript/
- this is a not so much for novice users
- another easier usage mode is to use noscript in white list mode istead of the default black list - for this, enable scripts globally and forbid only the ones you want to block - this gives a better user experience but with less security - chose it yourself
- sometimes when using Windows operating system, it can get real slow with full of unwanted applications loading at system boot up
- if your system get stuck and you're in a rush and need a quick fix, feel free to try the Ubuntu operating system without even installing it (you need to boot from a DVD or a flash drive):
Ubuntu PC operating system | Ubuntu
- you get to a desktop with preinstalled software with automatic internet connection where you can start browsing at once
- no viruses around
- hardware compatibility does matter, but the nature of this system is that the industry tries to keep up with it by providing drivers for the latest computer models, wireless and graphic cards
- anyway, feel free to give it a try, you're only from a boot away
For security:
- when visiting a normal http website, all of the data in our communication goes through the internet (the gateways) unencrypted, so they can be easily stolen or tempered with
- this is bad when we provide login information with passwords
- when using a so called https, everything goes encrypted from point to point from our machine to the server serving the website
- "https everywhere" always redirects our browser to the secure version of site if available
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
- when it comes to storing passwords in our browser, always use a master password to secure them
- this way when someone sits down in front of your computer, they cannot steal your identification that easy
- anyway you can keep your browser open for months by only suspending the machine (closing the lid), just make sure that the computer also asks for a password when coming back from a suspend
- never accept third party cookies in your browser
- this means that a site cannot take over the login informations of other ones
- for example, a site cannot use your facebook or google login without you specifying it explicitly
- in firefox, you can reach this setting at preferences / privacy / accept cookies from sites / accept third-party cookies
- in chrome, the setting is at settings / privacy / content settings... / cookies / block third-party cookies and site data
- always use strong passwords for logins, though this is not an easy task because you need to make a list of them and keep this list secure against stealing or getting lost
- I advise against using online password storage services because a famous one has just recently gotten hacked and this way all of your sensitive info gets leaked at once
- I provide you here a relatively easy procedure that I have never documented anywhere else
- the idea is that you come up with a master password that you document somewhere safe (you must never forget this)
- we use this master password to generate the rest of the other passwords for all sites
- this way you need to remember only a single one, and no matter wherever you are without your computer or phone, you will be able to generate them and so get access to your sites and services
- I show you a method using the Ruby programming language that can be installed on mobile phones or desktop machines (Windows, Mac, Linux)
- let's see Windows: you install Ruby from here:
RubyInstaller for Windows
- always use a strong password for master password
- let's say that your master password is "zhFOq1K7rU" and you want to provide a strong password for your facebook.com account with your email address: hello@gmail.com
- to get the strong password, run this Ruby code on your computer:
ruby -e 'require "digest"; puts Digest::SHA1.base64digest("zhFOq1K7rU,hello@gmail. com,facebook.com")'
- the output that you can use as a strong password is the following:
JM4VvkV05QbzbNR5hnvQVYgzMVE=
- the above code uses a one way encryption method called hash by using the master password as a salt to it giving a strongly random output, see more info about it here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHA-1
- because you always know your master password, your email address and the website you're about to login to, you will be able to regenerate the strong passwords anytime, for example using different website names too
- you need to use this process in rare cases only, because you usually make your browser remember your passwords
- if the websites says that you need a special character in your password and the above one does not generate one with that, you can just extend the password above with a special character like "+" so you know that if the one above does not work, you need to try it with an extra special character
- if you wanna play around with Ruby. you can do that on an online interpreter here:
https://repl.it/languages/ruby
- never provide real passwords on a foreign website like this
- you can try the above on this site by typing the following:
require "digest"; puts Digest::SHA1.base64digest("test me")
- if you need a random number, just type rand and hit enter
to be continued...
I'm a sysadmin and software developer for long time now and I love improving my everyday work with bits of optimizations and automatizations. The real value in this is that when you optimize a work flow (by saving time for example), the optimization stays, so from that point of time it will continually free up the resources by the saved amount.
What we need for our businesses are security and efficiency. For me, efficiency means speed or saving time and security is important to protect our business data. I'd like to show you some well known and popular solutions which projects I have nothing to do with whatsoever.
For efficiency:
- when doing an online research, you need to open a lot of web pages and even leave them open to inspect their content later
- this can hugely slow down your computer because of the heavy javascript most website usually utilize
- a solution for this can be an addon (extension) to the browser that can suspend scripts or unload tab contents and so free up memory and decrease processor load (your notebook battery might last much longer too)
- an example for firefox browser is the "auto unload tab" addon:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/fir...to-unload-tab/
- and for chrome browser "the great suspender":
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/d...jodocebajanakg
- we usually need to get back to websites too where they run several type of javascript that freezes our browser or simply tracks things we don't want them to
- another addon called "noscript" can give us full control over what kind of scripts and contents we allow to run:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/fir...ddon/noscript/
- this is a not so much for novice users
- another easier usage mode is to use noscript in white list mode istead of the default black list - for this, enable scripts globally and forbid only the ones you want to block - this gives a better user experience but with less security - chose it yourself
- sometimes when using Windows operating system, it can get real slow with full of unwanted applications loading at system boot up
- if your system get stuck and you're in a rush and need a quick fix, feel free to try the Ubuntu operating system without even installing it (you need to boot from a DVD or a flash drive):
Ubuntu PC operating system | Ubuntu
- you get to a desktop with preinstalled software with automatic internet connection where you can start browsing at once
- no viruses around
- hardware compatibility does matter, but the nature of this system is that the industry tries to keep up with it by providing drivers for the latest computer models, wireless and graphic cards
- anyway, feel free to give it a try, you're only from a boot away
For security:
- when visiting a normal http website, all of the data in our communication goes through the internet (the gateways) unencrypted, so they can be easily stolen or tempered with
- this is bad when we provide login information with passwords
- when using a so called https, everything goes encrypted from point to point from our machine to the server serving the website
- "https everywhere" always redirects our browser to the secure version of site if available
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
- when it comes to storing passwords in our browser, always use a master password to secure them
- this way when someone sits down in front of your computer, they cannot steal your identification that easy
- anyway you can keep your browser open for months by only suspending the machine (closing the lid), just make sure that the computer also asks for a password when coming back from a suspend
- never accept third party cookies in your browser
- this means that a site cannot take over the login informations of other ones
- for example, a site cannot use your facebook or google login without you specifying it explicitly
- in firefox, you can reach this setting at preferences / privacy / accept cookies from sites / accept third-party cookies
- in chrome, the setting is at settings / privacy / content settings... / cookies / block third-party cookies and site data
- always use strong passwords for logins, though this is not an easy task because you need to make a list of them and keep this list secure against stealing or getting lost
- I advise against using online password storage services because a famous one has just recently gotten hacked and this way all of your sensitive info gets leaked at once
- I provide you here a relatively easy procedure that I have never documented anywhere else
- the idea is that you come up with a master password that you document somewhere safe (you must never forget this)
- we use this master password to generate the rest of the other passwords for all sites
- this way you need to remember only a single one, and no matter wherever you are without your computer or phone, you will be able to generate them and so get access to your sites and services
- I show you a method using the Ruby programming language that can be installed on mobile phones or desktop machines (Windows, Mac, Linux)
- let's see Windows: you install Ruby from here:
RubyInstaller for Windows
- always use a strong password for master password
- let's say that your master password is "zhFOq1K7rU" and you want to provide a strong password for your facebook.com account with your email address: hello@gmail.com
- to get the strong password, run this Ruby code on your computer:
ruby -e 'require "digest"; puts Digest::SHA1.base64digest("zhFOq1K7rU,hello@gmail. com,facebook.com")'
- the output that you can use as a strong password is the following:
JM4VvkV05QbzbNR5hnvQVYgzMVE=
- the above code uses a one way encryption method called hash by using the master password as a salt to it giving a strongly random output, see more info about it here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHA-1
- because you always know your master password, your email address and the website you're about to login to, you will be able to regenerate the strong passwords anytime, for example using different website names too
- you need to use this process in rare cases only, because you usually make your browser remember your passwords
- if the websites says that you need a special character in your password and the above one does not generate one with that, you can just extend the password above with a special character like "+" so you know that if the one above does not work, you need to try it with an extra special character
- if you wanna play around with Ruby. you can do that on an online interpreter here:
https://repl.it/languages/ruby
- never provide real passwords on a foreign website like this
- you can try the above on this site by typing the following:
require "digest"; puts Digest::SHA1.base64digest("test me")
- if you need a random number, just type rand and hit enter
to be continued...
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