Tag: PRISM Break

How To Use KeePassXC with Firefox

Selective Focus Photography of Silver-colored Padlock.

After having installed KeePassXC on Windows 10, and followed the convenient user guide to store our first password, it’s now time to learn how to use KeePassXC with Firefox.

Even though you can safely store all kinds of accounts, passwords and notes in KeePassXC, it’s likely that the majority of what you will store are usernames and passwords for various internet accounts. And most of those accounts will be accessed through a browser. Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a handy way to automatically fill out online login forms with the account information stored in KeePassXC?

Well, you’re in luck, because there is.

With a handy browser extension installed, your browser can automatically discover that you’re trying to log in to an online account which username and password is stored in KeePassXC. The extension will pull the information it needs from the password manager, and you can log in with a simple click of the mouse.

I’ll cover how to use KeePassXC with Firefox in this guide. Why Firefox? Because it’s a fast and reliable, open-source browser with built-in privacy features, and that’s just the way I like my browsers. There’s a good chance you’re using Chrome, which is quite the opposite; a secretive, proprietary, closed-source browser controlled by Google, a company that earns its living by violating your privacy. You should dump Chrome. And while you’re at it, you should also dump Google.

But I digress. Let’s see how we can use KeePassXC with Firefox before it happens again.

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How To Install Pi-hole on a Headless Raspberry Pi

A close of up a Raspberry Pi.

It might come as a surprise, but I don’t really mind internet ads.

What I do mind, though, is how internet ads work today. To present you with relevant ads, the advertisement companies will track your every move on the internet. You might think that the sites you visit are isolated from each other, but ad trackers keep following you around everywhere you click.

That’s why I use EFF‘s Privacy Badger, a browser extension that blocks tracking cookies. By blocking this horrendous cookies, you fall off the advertiser’s radar. Because of this, I see very few ads on the internet. So Privacy Badger solves the problem for me.

But there are more people in our household that use the internet. Installing the browser extension on every device isn’t really feasible, and there is a lot of trackers that Privacy Badger won’t block. Mobile app advertisements is a good example. The ads shown in the apps my oldest kid plays on their tablet also track their every move.

So it’s better to attack the problem at its core.

This is where Pi-hole comes in. Pi-hole enables network-wide ad blocking. Configured as a DNS service, it will check every internet address that is accessed through the local network against a set of blacklists of known trackers. If the address is on one of the lists, the DNS request is blocked, and the tracker will receive no information.

With Pi-hole, everyone who is using our Wi-Fi access point are protected from pesky ad trackers.

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The KeePassXC User Guide

The KeePassXC User Guide. A yellow padlock.

Here’s a basic KeePassXC user guide where you’ll learn how to store and use your first super-secure password.

If you haven’t done so already, please install KeePassXC on your computer. You can do this by following my guide to installing KeePassXC on Windows 10. When that is done, return here.

KeePassXC might look a bit daunting at first sight, but there is no need to worry. To use KeePassXC as a basic password manager only requires basic knowledge of the application. And when you’ve finished reading through this KeePassXC user guide, you’ll have the knowledge you need.

Without further ado, let’s get cracking!

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How To Install KeePassXC on Windows 10

Follow this guide to quickly download and install KeePassXC on Windows 10.

In a post published last month, I concluded that KeePassXC is the best open source password manager. The time has now come to tell you how you can quickly get KeePassXC up and running on your Windows computer.

First, a word of caution. KeePassXC is a local password manager without any built in cloud synchronization mechanism. This means that all the passwords you manage in KeePassXC will only be available on the computer where the password manager is running. Also, as a natural consequence of this, your password database will not be backed up automatically. But fear not. We’ll cover cloud backups and synchronization across all your devices in a later post.

Now let’s get password managin’!

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What is The Best Open Source Password Manager?

In recent posts we’ve covered what a password manager is, and why you should use one. Now it’s time to find the best open source password manager.

If you’re not sure what a password manager is, or why you should use one, I recommend you read two of my previous posts. What is a Password Manager? covers the “what”, and Why Should I Use a Password Manager? covers the “why”.

What is the best password manager is, of course, subjective. But my criteria are as follows:

  • The password manager has to be open source. Open source code means that everyone can audit the code and make sure nothing fishy is going on.
  • It has to be free as in speech (libre). There are no restrictions on how the password manager can be used.
  • The password manager doesn’t have to be free as in beer (gratis). If it’s good enough, and the price is fair, I’d gladly pay for it.
  • The password manager has to work on the operating systems I use frequently: Windows, macOS, Linux, and Android.
  • It has to be possible to self-host the password manager. This means that I can install and run it on my own server or computer.
  • It has to be possible to synchronize the password manager’s database across multiple devices.
  • Backing up the password manager’s database has to be hassle free.
  • The password manager has to have an accompanying browser extension to make using it with a browser as user friendly as possible.

The open source and self-hosting criteria limit the number of possible password managers. While there are a lot of different password managers available, only a few of them are open source and supports self-hosting.

Now let’s get cracking!

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