Ubuntu Tutorials

This evening I got to thinking about web browsers and privacy. Privacy is, of course, a regular concern for many of us and there are many different “solutions” out there. Recently web browsers have been adding privacy modes, which allow us to browse the web without storing a lot of cookies, history, etc. Google Chrome (or Chromium) provide the “Incognito” mode, which allows for private browsing. This mode can be launched using the key combination “shift-ctrl-n” or selecting “New Incognito Window” from the menu. The only missing piece is until recently there hasn’t been a way to launch this mode by default.

In this article I will outline how to update your system to launch Google Chrome’s Incognito mode by default. This includes launching it from the Applications menu as well as making it the default when opening new links.

Step 1:

Edit your Application menu entry for Google Chrome (or Chromium) using the ‘alacarte’ application. You can launch this command directly or right-click on the Applications menu and “Edit Menu”. Navigate to “Internet” section and select the Google Chrome (or Chromium) entry.

Once selected, simply double-click the item to open its properties and update the command, description or title.

As you can see from the screenshot above, the addition you’ll want to make is the “--incognito” between the existing chromium and %U. This will update the Applications menu, essentially setting Incognito mode as the default when launching this application new.

Step 2:

In addition, if you want links to be opened in Incognito mode you’ll also need to update your Preferred Applications configuration. This is done in the Preferences > Preferred Applications. This is assuming that Google Chrome (or Chromium) is set as your default. In the screenshot below, you’ll see that we’ll essentially make the same change as we did above.

Conclusion

These two simple steps will configure your browser to perpetual private mode. From my searching, I couldn’t find any documentation specific to Linux, so here it is. I hope you find it helpful!

I covered VNC this afternoon in my Linux system administration course and the question came up on how to secure VNC. You may or may not be aware than VNC is not encrypted by default, which could be a security concern.

If you use VNC regularly to connect to other Linux machines you may want to consider adding a level of encryption with SSH. Here is a quick run-down on how that is done:

If you look at the man page for vncviewer (man vncviewer) you’ll notice there is a small section for -via. The -via option, as outlined in the man page will do:

Makes the connection go through SSH to a gateway host. The gateway should be the target host for best connection secrecy.

Basically this is saying that you can tunnel VNC over SSH within your connection command. Let’s give it a try.

vncviewer -via user@host localhost:0

This, of course, will require that you have both ssh and vnc access to a remote machine.

This is a much simpler method than many other tutorials I’ve found which generally suggest creating a tunnel with ssh -L and then using that tunnel.