i’m a 24 year old and depressed black lesbian living in henderson, nevada and me, my brother, and my sister in law have been having to survive outside of our home for the last month after our apartment complex said they had to investigate our place-leaving us to pretty much live out of our car and sleeping in it just as much. 

with little communication on their end and constantly delaying plans to provide us some sort of financial compensation, we’ve been paying out of our own pockets for food, gas, and places to stay which has been a huge strain on us emotionally and financially.

getting showers and being able to change our clothes is in itself a luxury since going back inside the apartment for even a minute is a long, weighty process  and honestly has just made things much more difficult and unsanitary.

if you have the time or resources, please boost or support us incase we still need to weather through this just a bit longer.

paypal: https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/primapuella

kofi: https://ko-fi.com/cakeradio

cashapp: $primap

Ocean and earth, plus a little sunrise | benmuldersunsets

This was one of the most baffling things of my whole childhood.

Step one, download and install Firefox.

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/new/

It will ask if you want to import all your bookmarks and saved passwords from your current browser/s. Do that. It will also ask if you want to make it your default browser. Do that too.

You will be given the option to create an account, but it’s not mandatory. It’s just a convenience service if you want to access your bookmarks and saved passwords on different devices.

Firefox has a load of built-in privacy protections but we’re going to install some addons to make it EVEN BETTER. Don’t worry they’re all free and once you’ve installed them you don’t have to think about them again.

First, Duck Duck Go Privacy Essentials. Firefox does still set your default search engine to Google, we don’t want that. You could manually change it but the Duck Duck Go addon gives you some tracker blocking, encryption, private searching, all set up and ready to go

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/duckduckgo-for-firefox

Next you need an ad blocker. ABP went stupid, so here’s uBlock

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublock-origin/

Do you use farcebook or any related product like instagram? Facebook Container automatically puts those in a little quarantine pen so they can’t follow you around and spy on what else you’re doing

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/facebook-container/

If you have multiple accounts (eg. work/school, family, public, personal, private) you can use Firefox Multi-Account Containers to manage them and keep their footprints separate

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account-containers/

Privacy Badger and HTTPS Everywhere are published by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and those people are serious as a heart attack when it comes to online privacy.

Privacy Badger sends a do not track signal, and also breaks link tracking by sites like facebook, twitter, etc.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/privacy-badger17

HTTPS Everywhere is… ok there’s a lot to explain here, and we’re already longposting so just, every time you connect to any page it makes it more secure.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/https-everywhere/

If you want to learn a bit about how this works and why it’s good to have, might as well start with the HTTPS page on wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTPS

You could stop here, that’s pretty good. But you can do more. You could install NoScript. A big warning with this one, it can break half the internet. It’s a LOT more user friendly than it used to be but if you can’t figure shit out by fucking around you should probably skip it. It blocks scripts from running without permission, protecting you from drive-by scripts that give your computer herpes, but also sometimes protecting you from script-heavy sites working at all.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/noscript/

Lastly an honourable mention for Ghostery. Ghostery has been a solid privacy addon for years, and now has adblocking powers. Honestly I haven’t used it in ages, a long time ago it conflicted with something else I deemed more important so I removed it and I never got around to picking it back up, but it has a great reputation and is trusted by a lot of people who I trust.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ghostery/

Now, this all only covers your browser activity, which is a lot but you will still need to manually adjust privacy settings on your google/gmail/youtube account/s if you have any, your facebook/instagram account/s if you have any, and your actual gotdamn operating system if you use windows. I know it seems like a lot of effort, I’m a lazy bitch too, but it’s very set-and-forget, you only need to do it once, and then just review it a couple of times a year.

Here’s some stuff about Windows 10 privacy settings

https://pixelprivacy.com/resources/windows-privacy-settings/

https://www.cnet.com/how-to/5-privacy-settings-to-change-in-windows-10/

And some stuff about google privacy settings

https://mashable.com/article/google-privacy-setting-you-should-enable-now/

And some stuff about facebook privacy settings

https://www.trustedreviews.com/news/facebook-privacy-settings-2939307

And here’s an honest explanation of what a VPN really does and does not do, why you don’t actually need one, and the few real reasons you might ever want one

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WVDQEoe6ZWY

And  a bit about password managers

https://www.cnet.com/news/best-password-managers-for-2020/

This is by no means the limit of the steps you can take to secure your online privacy, if you want to go deeper you definitely can. But if you don’t want to or don’t have the time or aren’t very technically minded, this will still put you way ahead of the pack. It won’t make you The Most Private but it will make you Much More Private Than Most, and it should take you less than an hour or two, depending on how many accounts you have on predatory datenkraken sites.

ProtonMail is a free email service that’s not google (already a good start), but also encrypts all your mail so no one but you and the person you’re emailing can read it

From experience, Tor is a lot more user-friendly than you might think. It does take a little bit of fiddling and getting used to, but the payoff is that all of your traffic becomes extremely hard to track. They have a desktop browser that’s built on Firefox and comes pre-installed with many of the extensions listed above. I recommend trying it on without uninstalling your current browser, just to see how you like it

American Terrorism… Lynching Postcards

Terrorism is defined as “the use of violence and intimidation in the pursuit of political aims.” Western media likes to paint terrorists with a brown face, but one of the most horrific campaigns of terror happened in the past century on American soil – the estimated 3,436 lynchings of black American men and women between 1882 and 1950, intended to control and intimidate the recently freed black population. There is nothing more disturbing than being confronted with visual evidence of humanity’s dark heart, especially when it is evidence of a widespread, mainstream hatred for and violence towards one another. Hatred that stems from fear, and is driven by religion and a belief that murder is morality made distorted flesh; violence that aims to cow and suppress any aspirations a community might have for equality and a brighter future.

When I came across this collection of American postcards from James Allen and John Littlefield, published in a book entitled Without Sanctuary, I saw how important it is to look at these images, today more than ever. These postcards were made to commemorate events that made many American white people feel proud – of their race, of their superiority, of their civilization and their intelligence. They took photos of their disgusting, cowardly accomplishments and memorialized them for future generations, to be found and collected and remembered by their descendents. On the backs, they wrote to friends and family in sociopathic excitement about the mob the participated in. These postcards capture the mobs witnessing with glee the murder of young men and women, whose most serious crime was the color of their skin. The corpses hanging and charred in these postcards lived in a world that counted down the days until their murder from the second they drew air into their infant lungs. This history is potent, stomach-churning and of essential importance to the America of today, and to the world of today. And the most striking thing about these photographs is that they don’t erase the perpetrators like many histories and memorials do today, preferring to focus on who was victimized rather than on those who proudly – and with government backing – tortured, raped and murdered people. The murderers in these photos stand proud, grown men looking at the camera with the smiling conviction that the teenage boy they just killed, one against a hundred, was deserving of their hatred, fear and frustration. No grand jury needed; the law was in the hands of the murderers.

History is not linear; history is happening all around us, all the time. These photos are context, they are reality, they are pictures of American terrorism. Read James Allen’s commentary below and be aware that these photos are sickening, and all too real.

Africans in America mounted resistance to white people lynchings in numerous ways. Intellectuals and journalists encouraged public education, actively protesting and lobbying against lynch mob violence and government complicity in that violence. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), as well as numerous other organizations, organized support from white and black Americans alike and conducted a national campaign to get a federal anti-lynching law passed. African American women’s clubs raised funds to support the work of public campaigns, including anti-lynching plays. Their petition drives, letter campaigns, meetings and demonstrations helped to highlight the issues and combat lynching.[4] In the Great Migration, extending in two waves from 1910 to 1970, 6.5 million African Americans left the South, primarily for destinations in northern and mid-western cities, both to gain better jobs and education and to escape the high rate of violence.