Hi guys I am new to this site & just moved away from the sheep so I am looking for some good security tips to keep me safe
ie Firewall , A good VPN antivirus etc

I know what comes up on Google but I mean the best I came across seemed to be bitdefender at like £40 or go commercial in the £1000s

hopefully I can get some help to stay same & anonymous to the real world
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Posted on: Rocksolid Light
www.novabbs.com

well firstly, welcome.
now for your questions:

1) "keep me safe": from whom or from what ? if you want to be safe from the kind of surveillance that targets anyone nowadays and the common malware traps, the answer is different than if you fear (or you know) that you are targeted in particular (because you are a criminal, political dissident, minority of some kind). in the following i will give some answers to the first part.

2) i assume that what you do is use a laptop or mobile device to surf the web and probably use some other services as well (like maybe bittorrent or streaming services). i further assume (and that is from the specifics you ask, like "firewall" and "bitdefender") that you use a Windows of some kind.
based on this, my first advice would be to adjust some facts:
-forget everything that the tech industry has ever told you about "antivirus", "malware detection", "system safety scanners" and so on. In contrast to what they claim (and what I believed as well in the past), these things will not make your unsafe system safer. they will, however, introduce new weaknesses into your system (even if it might have been safe before), that can be exploited. there are some threads regarding the subject in security. There are few real use cases for this kind of thing, and end user devices are not among them imo.
-forget everything a vpn provider promises to you. there are a lot of examples where they handed out the logs to lea just to protect their business. also, they might make a business from eavesdropping themselves and sell the data, so you need to trust them.
Second step:
-get away from all commercial software (Os or other), and start to use FOSS and FOSS only for your activities. In short: welcome to the world of Linux :-). If this is new to you, make a start with Tails. (https://tails.boum.org/install/)
-start to read up on Tor (https://www.torproject.org/projects/torbrowser.html.en) and the right usage of it, darknets in general and a myriad of other things (like browser fingerprinting just as an example)
-use common sense for your online activities. Use passwords. Not the same names or passwords for any two accounts. Separate identities as much as possible (in contrast to what all social media platforms want you to do). Use services that don't track and exploit you (like this one here). And so on and so forth.

cheers

trw
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Posted on: Rocksolid Light
dkzerogt6z6ybhcj.onion

https://cyber-wolves.blogspot.com/2015/12/get-started-for-noobs.html

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Posted on def2

Take a look at the free Ipfire distro.
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Posted on: Rocksolid Light
rslight.i2p

rslightuser wrote:

> Take a look at the free Ipfire distro.

Interesting. Focus on security, traffic prioritization etc. Is it in some way related to Mozilla?

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Posted on: novaBBS
www.novabbs.com

ipfire has no relation to Mozilla afaik.
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Posted on: Rocksolid Light
bchz4vggexx63qvy.onion