Welcome to my homepage!

My name is REDACTED, I live at REDACTED, I am REDACTED years old. I am married to REDACTED and have two children, REDACTED and REDACTED. My wife goes to her hairdresser at REDACTED every Thursday, there is a convenient alley nearby where she can be mugged, raped and murdered. My children attend REDACTED school where they can be easily kidnapped Monday through Friday after school. And here are some pictures of my house. Please note that rickety old backdoor that can probably be broken into using nothing but a rusty spoon…

(Disclaimer: none of the above is even remotely true. Just to confuse the Russians, you know :-) )

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Does your homepage look like this, just without the redactions? Then you may have a problem! What about your social media profiles? Nothing there that could be used against you? No incriminating pictures or videos that someone – anyone! - could find worthy of blackmailing you? How about prospective employers, do they really need to see that super embarrassing video from last New Years Eve?

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I generally urge caution when publishing anything about oneself. Once it’s „out in the world’ you no longer have any control over it. Just watch the news to learn how a simple “tweet” (including “deleted” ones) or even just a “like” can get you into hot water these days. Therefor you won’t find much about me here – except that I’m very “data cautious”, a fundamental building block of my profession, which I won’t tell you about :-)

Here are some links that may help you to protect yourself

(Sorry, can’t help you with social media, just avoid it, like I do...)

CyberGhost – One of many VPN services that will protect your IP-address while surfing

TinyWall – Simple administration tool for the Windows firewall, doesn’t add new drivers or similar

Firefox – Better at protecting your privacy than the other browsers

- also check out the NoScript (protects against Javascript attacks etc.) and Forget Me Not (kills unwanted Cookies etc.) plugins

- and use a “data cautious” search engine like Duck duck go (simply set it as default in the Firefox settings)

Thunderbird – Mail client that is also “data cautious”

- also use GPG inside Thunderbird and encrypt your e-mails when sending them to friends

Bitlocker – Encrypt your storage in case your notebook gets mislaid/stolen

IRC Server – Have your own kind of, sort of “social media” chats with friends

Linux – If you’re determined enough it will give you all you ever wanted (Kubuntu is the easiest to get started with)