“Anyone who says they have the best of anything automatically sets themselves up for criticism and potential ridicule,” Jack D. Miller writes for Mac360. “That’s the nature of a free and open internet.”
“Another natural aspect of the internet is the loss of privacy and security,” Miller writes. “Every website we visit, use, or buy something from has the potential to take away some privacy, invade our security, steal passwords, and track everything we visit. So, what to do?”
“WhiteHat Security Labs’ Aviator browser for Mac and Windows is billed as ‘the world’s most secure and private browser,'” Miller writes. “Aviator employs a few tricks such as blocking advertising tracking using the clever Disconnect extension. Your local internal address is also blocked, which stops malicious website pages from hitting your browser (and by inverse extension, your router or firewall).”
Read more in the full article here.
But does it come with a tinfoil hat? Using this without one would still leave you vulnerable!
Cute. But you don’t have to be paranoid to understand that privacy is a big issue and will become a much bigger one in the future.
It doesn’t matter which political way you lean; there WILL be a regime in the future that is in vehement disagreement with you, and that has no qualms about employing all methods it has at its disposal to root out dissenters and protesters. And you. It has happened many times in the past and it will happen many times in the future. The difference now is that the tools at their disposal are incredibly more powerful and intrusive.
And if you don’t care about politics, you will have very private, personal conversations with somebody about a medical problem, a marital conflict, or moral uncertainty. Conversations that will be devastating to you if they go to your parents, your spouse, your employer, or your health insurer.
It cracks me up when government people on both side of the aisle say “if you don’t have anything to hide, what are you worried about?” And then they proceed to block Freedom of Information requests and withhold documents from the press and the public because they too have Something To Hide. Don’t fall for it.
What they have to keep secret is matter of national security, and we just have to take their word for it.
After all… would they lie to us?
“Everybody’s got something to hide, except for me and my monkey…”
-= The Beatles
Dr. Botvinnik’s Easy Guide To Locating Shills On The Internet, today’s lesson:
• The shill’s favorite term is “tinfoil hat.”
Being unaware of the threat only reveals your ignorance.
Interesting. I’m going to give it a try.
This sounds similar to Epic and TorBrowser.
I currently prefer TorBrowser as my go to ‘paranoid’ browser, because of its robust proxy network. But there’s definitely room for improvement. It’s not so amazing out of the box, but it is extremely customizable through its support of Firefox add-ons. Epic and Free both seem have better out-of-the-box configurations.
lotta customization in Aviator.
I just followed your advice and downloaded TorBrowser.
This tech, is not about being paranoid. It’s about exercising our right to privacy. I am not worried about the government looking over my shoulder. Well I don’t want them to, and they do not have my permission. I do not fear they will pass judgment against me.
What I fear are groups and agencies looking to leech off me, my info, identity, for their own self gain.
That sums it up. Thanks for your input.
what is the difference between Epic and Aviator?
$5 Billion.
A private and secure browser, great for the free and civilized world. Fifth rate terroristic nations of course will most likely pass a law against it.
The US will be first. Then, of course, the UK should Cameron get reelected.
Please kids: Do NOT use Aviator. Not now anyway.
WHY? Below is my review of Aviator over at MacUpdate from December 5, 2014. From that date through now, Aviator has STILL not been updated. It’s still at v37.0.2062.99(2.5). That’s ridiculous. (o_O)
I’d really like to like this rendition of Chromium. It makes sense as a concept! But in reality on OS X 10.9 Mavericks:
1) It’s NOT kept up-to-date with the Chromium lineage.
2) Good luck finding a way inside the application to check if it is up-to-date.
3) It’s clunky crap that barely works.
4) It shockingly won’t let you work with its preferences, unless it feels like it.
5) Therefore, this is non-functional software that is DANGEROUS specifically because it does NOT keep up with Chromium security updates.
Summary: SEVERELY disappointing! I’ve tried using Aviator over and over, uninstalling it, downloading it again, reinstalling it, each time hoping that this time it will actually work AND IT DOESN’T. Total FAIL. I really don’t want to know its ultimate fate. The neglect factor has been far too severe for me to ever bother with it again. So it’s back to naggy, annoying Chromium for those times when no better browser will do.
Bad show WhiteHat. Bad bad show.
Meanwhile, what’s today’s current version of Chromium?
42.0.2275.0
I just tried it out and it seems kind of buggy. It got stuck and I had to quit it.
In addition, I have little snitch on my Mac and when I first launched Avaitor, it made a number of connections to sites with google in the link name. Not sure if that means anything.
Aviator is a variant of Chromium and depends on various Google APIs and services. But I never saw it attempt to reach Google surveillance URLs.
Not sure about Chromium. Does it phone home?
I just got a license for Little Snitch, from MacHeist. So now I will have to do some homework. It’s one thing to have a secure browser. It’s another when it phones home to tattle on you…
Chromium does NOT phone home UNLESS you follow its nags and log into Google. At that point you’re being tracked by the usual slew of Google tracking cookies. If you don’t log into Google, you’re simply contending with the usual site-by-site tracking rubbish.
There are now MANY applications that phone home to here and there, typically to Google Analytics. Some of them ask if you’d like to send in user data (which is actually tracking data) or not. Choose NOT. Some apps just stick it to you.
Here are a few such apps I found by digging around in my Little Snitch logs:
Songbird
BoinxTV
iMazing
LyricsFinder
Opera (which is rendition of Chromium)
Steam
YouTube to MP3
Zinio Reader
Bartender (lets you turn it off)
CRAP I got BoinxTV and wanted to start using it. I thought Opera was wholesome. It works better on some sites than other browsers. Yeah I have Steam, don’t know what to do about that, I use it to with my kids. I also use Bartender, thanks I will look at the settings.
Any of the ‘reverse firewalls’ (as I call them) will stop this garbage dead. I use Little Snitch. The one in Intego’s NetBarrier is perfectly usable as well.
In addition, when I go to whatismyipaddress.com, it shows it. I thought it wasn’t supposed to?
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