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Show HN: A ninja's Handbook: A book on privacy, security, and anonymity online (zolagonano.github.io)

127 points by znano ↗ HN
This book was a project that I started after two years of constant paranoia and anxiety, trying to achieve a decent level of privacy and anonymity. From the things I learned during that time, I decided to write a book to help jump-start the privacy and anonymity journey of those who might be in the same situation.

I know this book is not a complete guide on how to harden your devices and operating systems, and it wasn't meant to be. It was supposed to cover the very fundamentals of privacy, security, and anonymity rather than the highly technical stuff that might exhaust and frustrate normies.

Repo: https://github.com/zolagonano/a-ninjas-handbook

21 comments

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unlisted7347
Feels like people don't care about privacy that much. Last time I told my exgf about CCTV cameras in public places and how they shouldn't be connected to a network but rather have internal storage to fit a reasonable length of recordings. Since, live CCTVs never prevent any criminal activity and they possess great threat of surveillance by state or bad actors who may get access to them.

So, she called me paranoid.

znano
Yeah, but compared to few years ago things have changed for better, i see a lot of communities dedicated to privacy nowadays, a lot of more resources and content is out there now.
orev
Local storage can go bad, and it also adds cost to the camera. But the most important reason you need streaming to a DVR is that the criminal could steal the camera and if it’s only using local storage, now your evidence is gone.

I do get the concern about general surveillance, but that’s not an argument your insurance company is going to accept.

mixmastamyk
Local storage is not built into every camera but locally centralized.
freeplay
"Locally centralized" is a new one for me
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Cthulhu_
I mean I'd rather CCTV footage stays local to the location it's in (a secured security room with a limited data retention policy), but I get why it's networked, because that way it can scale up better. More cameras etc.

And while CCTV is for solving crime or at the very least proving to the insurance company that something did in fact happen, at the same time they're a known deterrent, hence fake cameras. There's plenty of shops that have a screen when you come in to show you that you're being recorded, which again works as a deterrent.

[dead] kelsey98765431
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bitwize
How were they persecuted? My friend Mark said he saw a ninja totally uppercut some kid just because the kid opened a window. You think someone with that kind of real ultimate power would be a crybaby about being persecuted?
debo_
Yeah, ninjas do totally hard stuff. If it was easy, they'd call it Business Major Gaiden.
3np
I heard that there was this ninja who was eating at a diner. And when some dude dropped a spoon the ninja killed the whole town.
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tnicks
"In the early 2000s, a whistleblower known only as "Deep Throat" played a crucial role in exposing the Watergate scandal, which eventually led to the resignation of U.S. President Richard Nixon." - Chapter 7

Watergate took place in the early seventies (72-74). Mark Felt was identified as Deep Throat in 2005 but was the informant in the 70s. The point on anonymity stands however.

itohihiyt
How does this compare to Michael Bazell's Extreme Privacy book? Apart from this being a free resource.
cbanek
I've read the Extreme Privacy book, and it seems like a very condensed pocket book comparatively. The book has a lot more stories and anecdotes about his mistakes in the past.