A tool to slow down web crawlers (instead of making you solve captcha puzzles)

ClamAV is an open source antivirus, but I would recommend against using an antivirus altogether due to their invasive nature. You shouldn’t need one with proper sandboxing and isolation.

Mainly because it’s proprietary, privacy invasive by nature, and invasive on computers.

I wanted to show that it is a mobile OS for those who are unaware

Oh

You may be interested in this infographic instead ;)

The size on the list does not matter. I resized them so they could fit better on the page.

The intention was more “Banks keep my data safe,” but I wanted to provide a clearer explanation that if your data isn’t safe, neither is your money. I didn’t have enough room to put my full thoughts.

Encryption is a type of security, and Tor/VPNs encrypt your traffic. Accessing .onion sites over Tor is (at least in theory) more secure than accessing clearnet sites.

Yes, this was the intention. It helps protect your website’s data by slowing down web scrapers.

Proton VPN and Mullvad VPN are both open source, meaning their code can be publicly audited to make sure they’re upholding their standards of privacy and security. Furthermore, Proton VPN offers a free tier. These are the main 2 reasons. NordVPN only protects your privacy against other websites, not NordVPN themselves. Hope this helps! Let me know if you want more details.

Edit: Mullvad VPN can also be paid for in cash/Monero, and they don’t ask for any personal information to use it (not even a username!)

Security isn’t the size of the app

This could have two meanings, one of which I figure I should address:

1. If you mean “size of the userbase for an app,” then yes, even projects that fly under the radar are much more secure than “mainstream” options. That’s the main purpose of this infographic.
2. If you mean “physical size of the app on the infographic,” the reason they’re different sizes is simply because they were hard to fit on one page, and this made it look nice ;)

Good question! There are hundreds of good resources, some of which include Privacy Guides and my friends at Punching Up Press (they have a lot of other good infographics). Naomi Brockwell TV is a YouTuber with some great beginner friendly videos to guide you step by step. Let me know if you’re interested in others!

I don’t understand how this is possible if this is a private, account free service.

It’s likely there in case (for example) you, in court, testified to using Duck.ai for illegal purposes. DuckDuckGo themselves would not be the ones dragging you to court, but they could get caught in the crossfire, so they want to avoid liability.

Overall, I don’t get what ddg gets out of this very expensive to offer service. Which means I don’t teust its a way to privately use LLMs.

These are the possible motives for each side:

DuckDuckGo gets to add AI to their service, which attracts users. DuckDuckGo is paid in sponsored results at the top of searches, so more users means more money.

The AI providers are willing to provide free/cheap service as a sort of sponsorship to attract users of their own. If you are using GPT on Duck.ai and decide you like it, you may be incentivized to use OpenAI’s own service to chat with the better model, since the models on Duck.ai are not top of the line. It’s the same thought process behind free tiers in services.

Both sides win in this arrangement.

You can add &kbe=0 to the end of the URL when you search to disable it. If you know how to add custom search engines this is the easiest way.

Otherwise, you can add "kbe":"0" as a value inside the duckduckgo_settings parameter in the bookmarklet, like this:

		'duckduckgo_settings': '{"description":"Each key is a setting documented in https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/settings/params/","kdcm":"6","kdcs":"0","kbe":"0"}',

Cheers!

There are plenty of options:

• You can carry around a spare burner phone that is powered off. These are relatively cheap ($30 + the cost of your cell plan), and has the benefit of working even when your main phone dies. You can leave it charging in your car.
• You can carry around a cellular hotspot, such as one from the Calyx Institute. This also helps fund a pro-privacy organization, and this hotspot can be used to provide internet for multiple devices. See this video for more information.
• You can still call emergency services even without a SIM card.
• If there are public Wi-Fi networks nearby, you can connect to those in order to get in touch with people you need.
• You can ask anyone nearby for help. Whether it be borrowing their phone to make a phone call, using their phone as a hotspot, or having them help you directly.
• Hike to the nearest civilization for help.
• Wait for a bus to pass by, if they are in your area.
• Some smart cars have the option to call for help built-in.
• Use GrapheneOS with a carrier. It will still be much more private than using iOS, and you can disable the cellular radios when they are not in use by enabling Airplane Mode.

Even without any of those, the chances that you will be completely stranded with no one to help and no way to call emergency services are very, very slim. Privacy protects you from more likely scenarios, such as data breaches or identity theft.

As I mentioned, using rustup requires granting VSCodium more invasive permissions to get it to work. Furthermore, installing it would require layering system packages, which should be done sparingly. Using the Rust SDK is the recommended approach by VSCodium while using their Flatpak, and it is actually the simpler option.

secureblue has native support for containers, although it uses the more modern Distrobox rather than Toolbx. I tried installing VSCodium in this way, but I couldn’t get it to start due to some windowing system issue. Even if I could, it comes at the cost of security. Firstly, user namespaces need to be enabled. Secondly, the app would have less granular permission control (e.g. full access to the home directory). For those reasons, it’s better to avoid using containers unless explicitly required. This method works fine, so there’s no need.

This guide is actually only 3 steps:

1. Install VSCodium
2. Install the Rust SDK
3. Enable permissions

The rest is just extras, like installing rust-analyzer, which you would need to do on any distribution. The reason it’s so long is because I wanted to make it painstakingly simple for anyone to be able to do it, regardless of using the command-line, user-interface, mouse, or keyboard. Depending on how hardened you’ve made your secureblue system, you really could just install everything with one command:

flatpak install -y com.vscodium.codium org.freedesktop.Sdk.Extension.rust-stable/x86_64/24.08 && flatpak override -u --env=FLATPAK_ENABLE_SDK_EXT=rust-stable com.vscodium.codium

secureblue isn’t designed to be fast, easy, or simple. It’s designed to be secure.

Hope this helps!

Looks good! Thank you!

I’d be happy to collaborate in the future if you ever want to :)