Hey, can you give a crash course on safe internet browsing, for my young adult novel about an evil person who does nefarious things online, but doesn't want to get caught. I read through some of your posts- Linux, Tor, uBlock Origin, is there anything else important to make my book realistic?

That’s about all the big stuff, for general use! If you’re using Tor browser you don’t want to download any other extensions, since they won’t add any more privacy than you already get from Tor and have a risk of leaking information or giving you a more unique fingerprint. uBlock is good though since 1. Tails comes with it built-in, so a good portion of Tor users already use it (plus you using it makes it harder to tell who’s using Tails and who’s using standard Tor) and 2. blocking ads is just something everyone should be doing

Just don’t let anything you want to keep secret touch any software owned by facebook or google. Switch your default search engine to DuckDuckGo Tor. Get an encrypted email. Store anything sensitive that you have to have on your computer offline in text documents and the like, rather than on the cloud. Be careful what info you share and where

And the golden rule is, if it could be used to convict you of a crime, don’t let it near any device that can connect to the internet. Use writing and in-person communication instead. If something like that absolutely has to be done with a computer or on the internet, you should use Tails or Whonix - those are the heavy-duty tools. But remember that nothing is completely airtight