In the 1990s, a colleague took me to “Snake Alley,” Taipei’s red-light district, for a night of drinking with “entertainers” and some of their very muscled, serious friends. A good time was had by all, fortunately. Still, I was young, dumb, and very lucky that I didn’t end up in any trouble.
Some parts of the internet are like that, too. If you think you’ll be potentially surfing in a risky internet neighborhood—a knockoff shopping site, a little-known streaming service, or somewhere you’re just not entirely sure is legit—and you have a spare laptop lying around, you can always repurpose it to become what I call a “Paranoid PC”: a laptop hardened for additional privacy and security.
In my case, I was able to do it for “free.” But it does require
