OPNsense turns an old PC with two network cards into a serious network gatekeeper: intrusion detection, traffic shaping, VPN endpoints and per-rule control, all free and open source. Forked from pfSense in 2015 and updated with impressive discipline. You supply the hardware and the patience to learn an enterprise-grade interface. In return, your entire network […]
pfSense CE is the original open-source router firewall distribution, deployed everywhere from living rooms to branch offices. Mature, documented to death and commercially backed by Netgate, so drivers and security fixes keep flowing. The free community edition receives some features after the paid Plus edition. Still rock solid.
uBO Lite is uBlock Origin rebuilt for Chrome’s new extension rules: filtering rules ship inside the extension itself, no remote lists needed, and the default mode works with zero configuration. Same author, same philosophy, smaller sandbox. By design it filters less than full uBlock Origin, and it exists mainly for Chrome users who have no […]
Tor is the backbone of anonymous networking: layered encryption through volunteer relays, hidden services that never reveal their location, and two decades of the most hostile scrutiny cryptography has seen. Every other tool here gets compared to it. Latency ruins everyday browsing, exit nodes can read unencrypted traffic, and its fame attracts both censors and […]
I2P builds a network layer where every participant routes traffic for everyone else, hiding sender and receiver alike. Hidden websites called eepsites, built-in torrent support and internal mail make it a parallel internet with its own culture. The community is smaller, discovery is slower, and it shines as a network of internal services more than […]
Tor bridges are unlisted entrance relays for networks that block the public Tor relays. Tor Browser can request one itself. The Tor Project also hands them out at bridges.torproject.org after a captcha. obfs4 and Snowflake are transports: they make the first hop look less like a plain Tor connection. That raises the cost of blocking. […]
uBlock Origin is the final answer to ad blocking: open source, absurdly efficient with memory, curated lists you can extend indefinitely, and maintained for a decade by a developer with no price and no roadmap for your attention. Nothing else in the category comes close. Chrome’s Manifest V3 restrictions have made Firefox its best home, […]
Tor Browser is the practical way to use Tor. Traffic goes through three volunteer relays so the site does not see your home IP, and no single relay is meant to see both who you are and where you are going. The bundle adds per-site isolation and fingerprint hardening so one Tor user looks like […]
Snowflake lets a normal browser or computer act as a short-lived entrance so someone on a censored network can reach Tor. You do not learn which sites they open. The traffic past you is still Tor traffic. You do see a connection from their network to yours, because your machine is the door. That is […]
Trayvax makes metal card wallets in the United States. Some models add an RFID-blocking layer so a casual scanner does not read the chip in a contactless card. The frame holds a few cards and a bill. Warranties are part of the pitch. The steel is stiff until it loosens. RFID blocking is not a […]
BellCrier breach check
Most people are, and never hear about it. BellCrier checks your email against known data breaches for free, then alerts you when it turns up in a new one, with exactly what leaked and how to fix it.
