Life Between 0 and 1

Inspired by Nerd in the Brain

BRING THE HAPPY!

I can’t believe it’s already March!!  As I’m a life long technology geek, I thought I would highlight three services/applications that I use to help keep my stuff from falling into the hands of the NSA, lol.  Yes, the fact that my data is hard to get makes me happy.

DISCLAIMER:  I am not compensated in any way from any of these products.

LastPass

I’ve been using, and paying for, LastPass for a few years now.  I pay for it now as I have multiple devices that I need to access passwords from and a paid subscription is required to do that.  The best part of using a cloud based, encrypted password manager is that I only have to remember one really hard and complex password (master DB password).  I let the application auto-generate random complex passwords for most of the sites and systems I access on a regular basis.  These guys have slowly improved their system and platform so that it’s great on any device.  I highly recommend if you’re pulling your hair out trying to remember all your passwords.

Boxcryptor

This is a new service for me as I got tired of manually encrypting my files on my laptop before uploading them to my cloud storage.  Boxcryptor allows me to assign entire folder structures or just select folders (sensitive stuff) locally and then the encrypted version is then synced with my cloud storage.  It has proven quite effective as not even my wife, whom I share my online storage with, can get into the files that I’ve set to auto-encrypt based on the folder.  I’m still evaluating the product, but have not run into any problems yet.

ProtonMail

Need to send encrypted emails?  Want to have your emails inaccessible to even the provider?  This service does both.  I was amazingly impressed with them but wasn’t convinced they didn’t have access until I forgot my decryption password.  They informed me that I would have to reset my database and lose all the stored email.  I now use this account exclusively for very private or sensitive information such as taxes and insurance stuff.  I’m not sure at this time if its open to everyone or still on a waiting list.  They’re based in Switzerland.

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