Important settings and tips #

• Every time you start the Tor browser, you have to set the security slider to safest. This disables JavaScript (a programming language that websites can use to de-anonymize you) by default and enables some more security features.

• If you use clearnet websites that require JavaScript (like reddit.com if you want to post, comment or vote), change the NoScript appearance so you can easily allow and disallow the scripts that you need as

• If a DNM site ever asks you to enable JavaScript, leave immediately. Ideally warn the community on /d/DarkNetMarkets too by making a post there.

• When shutting Tails down, it is best to wait until your computer is shut down completely before removing the USB stick.

• Is it okay to leave Tails logged in? No, you should shut it down when you are not using it anymore for a longer period of time (e.g. 10 minutes). Yes, it is a pain in the butt to restart your computer every time, but it is good security practice. Otherwise law enforcement could just visit you and would have all the unencrypted evidence they need even though you used Tails.

• Can I run tails on a virtual machine?
  No tails is designed to be a live OS and will not function properly in a virtual machine.Read about it here

• Spoff your tor browser’s userAgent and set javascript off With the recent updates to the 14.0 tor browser some system information can now be leaked to sites. You can read about the changes made here: https://blog.torproject.org/new-alpha-release-tor-browser-140a4/

While it makes sense if you are using tor to browse the internet with javascript on for compatibility sake, that isn’t really the kind of crowd we have here. For privacy you want to make yourself look more like everyone else. Specifically if you are running more rare Oses. Thankfully they make it easy to change to how it worked before.

Open up a new tab. At the URL bar type in about:config. If a warning shows up accept it. Then at the top search for privacy.resistFingerprinting.spoofOsInUserAgentHeader and set it to true. You can check that it’s working by going to https://www.whatismybrowser.com/ and seeing it say you are on windows 10.

At the same time in the about:config type in javascript.enabled and set it to false. This will disable javascript directly on your browser. Not only will it make it run faster but in the event that the noscript extention fails, you would still be protected.

If you have yet to do these two things, do them now. Harden your privacy and make your browsing just that little more private.