Change Your DNS Servers To Google’s In Lubuntu

This article will show you how to change your DNS servers from your default servers to the DNS servers run by Google, specifically while you’re using Lubuntu. If  you’re not using Lubuntu, the process is likely fairly similar. Either way, it should be a nice and fun article, and we’ll even do it in the GUI instead of the terminal.

So, what is DNS? DNS stands for ‘Domain Name System’. As you know by now, machines are identified by their IP address. It’d suck to have to remember numbers instead of names. It’s also possible to route multiple domain names to the same IP address. So, we have domain names and use those domain names to resolve to IP addresses.

If you’re like most people, right now the DNS servers you’re using have come from your ISP – the folks who provide your internet service. This means that they can see which sites you visit, based on the requests you make to the DNS service.

Some folks don’t like this and prefer to find another DNS provider. (There’s also Secure DNS which this article will not be touching on.) One of those companies that provides free DNS servers is Google. Like them or not, their DNS servers are robust and consistently updated, often making domain propagation quicker for you.

This article is for Lubuntu, as stated above, but you may very well be able to follow the same exact steps with your distro of choice. And, now that you have a general idea of what’s going on, let’s learn how to…

Change Your DNS Servers:

To get started with changing your DNS servers, you need to find your networking icon in your system tray. It’ll be down on the right, not far from the clock. Once you have found it, right click on it so that it brings up the menu to let you “Edit Connections”. It will look something like this:

change network settings
Of course, your version won’t have the nifty arrow.

You’ll want to click the gear icon. That’s why I put the arrow there! 

That will open another window. This window will have tabs  you need to worry about – or a tab you need to know about. You probably shouldn’t need both. The tabs you’re interested in will look like this:

changing the network connections
You should need one of those, probably not both of those…

Now,  you should only need to edit one of those. If you’re still using IPv4 then you use that tab. If you’re using IPv6 then you’ll obviously want to use the appropriate tab. For example, the IPv4 would look like this:

screen to edit dns servers
This would be the tab you’re looking for, pretty much…

Now, where that arrow is is where you want to enter the new DNS server information. You separate them with a comma, though you can use a comma and a space – there will need to be a comma.

For Google’s IPv4 addresses, your choices for 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4.

For Google’s IPv6 addresses, your choices are 2001:4860:4860::8888 and 2001:4860:4860::8844.

Note: The ifconfig or ip addr will help you tell if you have IPv4 or IPv6.

When you’re done, be sure to click the save button to ensure your new settings take effect. Remember the screen and changes, should things go pear shaped. You can undo this easily enough.

This will, of course, work with any set of DNS servers out there. You can use it with other servers if you aren’t a fan of Google. This can serve as a general guideline for other servers, should you wish.

Closure:

Yup… There it is. You have another article. This time, it tells you how to change your DNS servers if you use Lubuntu. Again, it’ll work for other distros, but I’m only including pictures/vouching for it with Lubuntu.

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How To: Clear The Terminal Screen

Today, we’re going to learn to clear the terminal screen. This is generally done for privacy’s sake. You don’t want people to be able to scroll up and see what you’ve been reading in the terminal. This probably isn’t as important if you’re the only user and you’re in  your house, but you may still like to keep things clean and tidy.

We’ll go ahead and cover two ways to clear the terminal in this article. They’re both rather easy commands and you’ll find this article is definitely not all that complicated, or even very long. This is pretty much one of the first things folks should have learned when they started using the terminal. We might as well cover it here.

Rather than make this long-winded, we’ll just make this into a short and easy article to read. Let’s all learn how to…

Clear The Terminal:

To be clear, this just erases the text in the terminal. It clears the scrollback content so that folks can’t scroll up and see the previous terminal contents. Again, it’s a good idea to do if you’re in a multi-user environment where people may have access to your screen and you don’t want them to know what has been written to the terminal.

Obviously, you need a terminal for this article. Just press CTRL + ALT + T and your default terminal should open.

I suppose we’ll need some content, so let’s try using this command:

That should fill your terminal up.

Now, to clear it you can use either of the two following commands:

Or you can also use:

(Though reset may leave a little text at the top, it still removes the terminal’s scrollback history.)

Both of those will do the job, with ‘clear’ being the obvious winner = but it’s nice to have options. They’ll clear the scrollback in the terminal, preventing folks from scrolling up to read what has previously been written there. Of course, they could potentially still press the arrow up button and see what commands you’ve written, so you can try to prevent that as well.

Closure:

See? I told you that it’d be a quick and easy article. It’s not all that taxing to learn how to clear your terminal and that’s all that this article is meant to cover. Both of the two commands have a man page, but they’re not very useful commands for anything else but clearing the terminal. Have an easy day, a day where you can (maybe) say you learned something and not have to read a long article. After all, it was a quick and easy day for me!

Thanks for reading! If you want to help, or if the site has helped you, you can donate, register to help, write an article, or buy inexpensive hosting to start your own site. If you scroll down, you can sign up for the newsletter, vote for the article, and comment.

More Ways To Generate Strong Passwords In Linux

In today’s article, we’re going to explore a couple of other ways to generate strong passwords in Linux. It’s going to be a pretty easy task and one most everyone can learn from. It shouldn’t even be a very long article.

Weak passwords are easy to crack. You don’t want that, for obvious reasons. If you want to see how approximately how long it’ll take to brute force passwords, you can check sites like this one. Remember that the time given by that is more or less the maximum time it could take, and your password could be brute-forced (by repeated guessing) much sooner than that.

I’ve previously written an article about generating a sufficiently complex password. That’d be one way to generate strong passwords, but this article will cover a couple of other easy ways to generate strong passwords in the Linux terminal.

Generate Strong Passwords:

This article requires an open terminal, like many other articles on this site. If you don’t know how to open the terminal, you can do so with your keyboard – just press CTRL + ALT + T and your default terminal should open.

With your password open, we’re first going to use GPG to create a strong password. Everyone should already have GPG installed, so there’s no reason to cover that in this article. So, to do so, you’d use a command something like this:

It’ll have an output similar to this one:

using gpg to generate a strong password
Obviously, you don’t want to use that password specifically! Use your own!

You can change the 16 to any length you want. It’s obviously the number of characters. 

You can also use OpenSSL, which you likely have installed, to generate a complex password. It’s actually pretty easy and the command is:

Again, you can change the 24 to anything  you darned well please. Sometimes sites will have a maximum password length, which might seem kinda silly – as I think I recall there being a hard limit of 256 characters that the kernel will accept. Either way, the output would be similar to this one:

openssl can generate passwords too
That one is 24 characters long. Yay!

Feel free to mess around with changing the length. OpenSSL is likely installed by default and you don’t have to install pwgen. Both of the tools in this article will likely be installed by default.

Closure:

And there you have it! Another article said and done. This one is about teaching folks how to generate strong passwords in Linux. It’s an easy enough task and this article shouldn’t be too complicated for even the most n00b of the n00bs!

Thanks for reading! If you want to help, or if the site has helped you, you can donate, register to help, write an article, or buy inexpensive hosting to start your own site. If you scroll down, you can sign up for the newsletter, vote for the article, and comment.

 

Review: It Appears That uMatrix Is Back Under Development

This article is a bit of a review of some software called ‘uMatrix’. If you’ve never heard of it, it’s an impressive piece of software – especially considering it’s a browser extension.

I was nosing around some old projects in my GitHub when I decided to look upstream. Lo and behold, Ray Hill (gorhill of uBlock Origin fame) has picked up developing uMatrix again. (Install through your browser’s extension manager. Links below.)

What is uMatrix? GitHub page here.

Well, do you remember old school firewalls where you could not just block things by application, you could be even more refined – like narrowing it down to which port, ingress or egress, and even which domains that application could connect with?

Imagine something similar to that, except it’s for your browser. For each page, you can elect to block images, CSS, cookies, scripts. Then, you can decide which scripts and which CSS to allow through. You can elect which third party assets load, from cookies to images – and you can do so on a domain name basis.

There’s a learning curve. It’s a pretty big learning curve for a browser extension. Plan on a couple of hours to really get used to it – and to get your favorite sites configured. You need only configure them once and then you can backup the settings so that you can use it on multiple devices or put it aside for safekeeping. 

It WILL break sites. You WILL get frustrated.

More About uMatrix:

If I took privacy serious and were more security focused, I would not use the internet without uMatrix. As it stands, I have an older version (now updated) configured in one browser for when I want to visit stuff I absolutely don’t trust. If you take privacy serious (and cross-domain scripting, third party cookies are a huge no-no, but so shouldn’t images and CSS files) then you really, really should take a look at this extension.

Take a look at this:

uMatrix in Opera.
Look a little daunting? You can figure it out. I have faith in you!

In each of those columns, you can click to block it everywhere or to allow it on this one specific domain. As you can see, there’s everything from cookies to CSS, from media to scripts. The refinement you can achieve is amazing. It will take some work and time for you to ‘get good’ with uMatrix.

Now, you basically want it to operate in the default configuration you have it in right after installing, only allowing CSS and images from the domain you’re visiting.

When a site refuses to work properly, you can start by allowing scripts on an individual basis – on the per-site basis you see from the domains listed on the left. You can click on two areas in each column to give fine-grained permissions. After a while, you can get pretty quick at deducing why it doesn’t work. It’s usually a script from another site that needs to be enabled.

You’ll also learn how much cruft the web has, browsing much faster and having fewer scripts chew up your CPU and RAM. If you have a low-end computer, this is also a must-have.

At one point, Hill had stopped working on the project and shuttered it. I’m not sure when he started working on it again. I’m glad they did because it’s the best privacy and security browser extension I’ve ever seen in my life. Now that he’s working on it again, I feel comfortable recommending it.

uMatrix Review:

Really, I wrote this to share my joy. If I had to review it, and I guess I have to, I’d give it a solid 9.5 out of 10. I’ve deducted a half point because there’s no effort to make it all that intuitive to new people and this makes the learning curve harder. It’s hard to explain, but once you see what it does you will understand it better.

Not even I can make it all that intuitive until you actually test it out and start browsing the web with it. If you get frustrated, settle down and relax. You can make it work. It will take some time to get used to the new paradigm. You can browse much faster (more so than from just blocking ads) when you’re not loading a bunch of 3rd party cruft.

You might as well know where to get it. It’s available for the two major browsers, plus in Opera’s own little extension store. These extensions work fine on same-family browsers, like Pale Moon or Google Chromium.

You can pick it up for Opera here.

Of course, you can pick it up for Firefox here.

And you can pick it up for Google Chrome here.

Give it a shot. Commit to browsing with it for a full day and see for yourself what the web is like when  you’re not loading tracking cookies, scripts, ad images loaded from other domain names, and so much more.

By the way…

I worried more about these things years ago, back when I was a Windows user and for the times when broadband wasn’t a realistic option. I was more concerned with my security and letting scripts load in the browser, so I’d use uMatrix. It had the added benefit of doing a great deal to protect my privacy by making it extremely difficult to track my movements across the web. These days, browsers are much more secure and run in their own containers and I care less about privacy.

Even just blocking remote scripts, media, and images will speed up your browsing noticeably. By the time you have it configured for the sites you visit, you’ll have a pretty secure and private browsing experience. You should also consider making it work in incognito mode if you make regular use of private browsing.

Closure:

There you have it, another article. This one is a review of uMatrix, one of my favorite browser extensions even though I don’t actually bother with it for most of my browsing. I used to browse with it exclusively, but I’ve given up caring. If you care, and many of my readers do, then I highly recommend trying it for a full day. Commit to a full day and then leave a comment telling us of your experiences.

Thanks for reading! If you want to help, or if the site has helped you, you can donate, register to help, write an article, or buy inexpensive hosting to start your own site. If you scroll down, you can sign up for the newsletter, vote for the article, and comment.

Review: MetaClean (Clean Exif/meta Data From Email Attachments Automatically)

Today’s article is about MetaClean, a Thunderbird plugin that you can use to automatically clean Exif (and other meta data) from email attachments. This is not the type of article I usually write, but it’s a very interesting extension for the Thunderbird email client. It’s good enough to help make folks aware of it.

Just the other day, I updated this article:

How To: Sanitize Exif Data From Your Digital Images For Privacy Sake

The update was largely a link that went to a study regarding the privacy implications of Exif data. If you’re unfamiliar with Exif data and its importance, I would strongly encourage you to read the article. I’d also strongly encourage you to read the linked article. If you’re concerned with your privacy, or are regulated to be concerned with the privacy of others, this might just be one of the best extensions you’ve ever used.

See, Exif data is just one type of meta data. Lots of files, from pictures to text documents, contain meta data. For example, a file generated by a rich text editor (such as LibreOffice) will contain your username, may contain a record of edits, and may contain a list of usernames that have also edited it. Meta data contains all that and more.

Enter MetaClean…

Note: MetaClean is a proprietary product with an enterprise/business solution that offer their services free for personal use. It’s a closed source product and using it means you trust them to perform the services claimed and adhere to their claims.

The file remains on the server for the time necessary for its processing, depending on the size of the file the processing time varies from 10 milliseconds to 600 milliseconds, after this time the file is removed and it will be impossible to restore it (GDPR compliant).

Read on to learn more about using MetaClean.

MetaClean Automatically Removes Meta Data:

It’s easy enough to add MetaClean to Thunderbird. Just click on Add-Ons and Themes, and then in the search box put “MetaClean.” The search result should contain the extension and you can install it with a single click. It’s remarkably easy.

MetaClean basically uploads all of your attachments to their own server, strips out the meta data (but will leave their own branding in the field, for free users) and then returns the sanitized file to your computer before the email actually sends. I tested this with a number of files and it’s amazingly fast.

Again, it requires that you trust them – and not care that they leave a comment in your meta data. The comment is harmless and won’t lead to you in any way. Your privacy will not be compromised.

Here’s the amazing thing, it not only does all that – but it even works on compressed files – though it only currently supports 7Zip and .zip formats. With them supporting Thunderbird (and it working fine on Linux), we can hope that they’ll expand that to .gz and some folks may like it if it could also work with .rar files. For now, it works just fine with the compressed files I tested.

Meta data is in all sorts of things that you create or touch, though it’s not always a bad thing. It’s sometimes useful to have meta data. I, for one, like to include the ID3 tags with my music files. But, you don’t always want to share the meta data. In fact, in some industries you have to not share it – to be compliant with privacy laws. However, if that’s you, you might be interested in their professional options – where the server that strips the meta data is actually owned and run by you.

Basically, once you’ve added it as an extension, it will automatically sanitize your files – removing any personal meta data from the file. It does this all without any user intervention (once you tell it to automatically do so). If you want to send a file while including the meta information you can also tell the plugin to let that email through with the personal information attached.

Closure:

It’s really that simple. Just install MetaClean and forget it. You won’t have to wonder if you remembered to sanitize your meta data before you sent it. You can be pretty confident that it was sent without that private data still attached. It’s definitely one of the most beneficial and easiest Thunderbird extensions that I’ve worked with lately.

I realize that I forgot to give it a number rating! In this case, it does what it says on the tin. I wish their privacy policy (while excellent) spelled it out a bit better. The tools could be a bit more fine-grained. They could see about adding support for more compression formats. As for the rest, they do great. I’m going to award them a solid 8 out of 10.

Thanks for reading! If you want to help, or if the site has helped you, you can donate, register to help, write an article, or buy inexpensive hosting to start your own site. If you scroll down, you can sign up for the newsletter, vote for the article, and comment.

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