Periodically I’ll be doing an ad-hoc deploy of MVPS HOSTS file on a Mac or Android system, and have to improvise a means to accomplish the required conversion from DOS to Unix line termination from the shell prompt.
Privacy
Online privacy management techniques.
Leaving Windows for Linux on my Primary System
Few outside the technology business may be fully aware that Windows 10 arrives in the context of a major strategy shift at Microsoft. Feeling the heat from Google, Apple, and others, Microsoft needs to mutate and evolve its business models to compete in the end user computing marketplace. Selling Windows and Office licenses for whatever number of cents OEMs pay them for the right to ship these products on newly purchased machines is no longer cutting it in an age of falling PC sales. There’s new business out there, a pie they’re hungry for a big piece of.
How To Deploy MVPS HOSTS File on an Android Phone
I have replaced the default HOSTS file on my Android device with the MVPS HOSTS file, a blacklist for blocking advertising, tracking and malware-distributing server names. Installing this blacklist confers the same browsing security, privacy, and performance benefits on my phone as I have long enjoyed on conventional workstations: ad blocking, faster web page loads and decreased bandwidth usage, mitigation of browsing behavior profiling and contextual ad targeting, and reduced exposure to malware infection by malicious web sites. Allow me to demonstrate the specific procedure that I used and hopefully save others some time.
CyanogenMod Breaks New Ground on Mobile Privacy
While Google, Microsoft, Apple and Facebook are busy bending knee to their government handlers and/or telling marketing departments what color underwear you have on, the incredibly smart and capable developers of the CyanogenMod aftermarket Android distribution are cooking up compelling and even potentially disruptive mobile privacy technologies.
Recommended Practices for Browser Security and Privacy
Historically, advertisements were limited to operating in one direction: from your newspaper, radio, or television screen to you. Enter the full duplex, bidirectional intertubes, and now advertisers have a slew of lucrative new methods to target the awful nuisance of advertisements to you. The history of sites you visit and your search history (behavioral targeting), the content of the page you’re browsing at the time (contextual advertising), and potentially all sorts of demographic and personally characterizing information may be in scope depending on the application (think e.g. Facebook).