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Linux nerds literally only want one thing and it's fucking the idea that your full disk encryption will pay off one day.
It's when your disk breaks and you can just throw it away without worries.
It can, but most likely it only would if you're doing illegal shit and get caught. They'd search your place for evidence and FDE could keep them from discovering some things.
But uh, if they got that far into investigating you then you're probably already screwed.
Not true at all. Governments regularly raid political dissidents. It's a disciplinary tactic in and of itself. I've been raided for plenty of shit and never been convicted of any crime.
I mean the average dork not cool people like you (if you're being truthful)
Persons of interest to governments should always be diligent.
My point is that raids are for the purpose of gathering evidence. The way it usually works is that the state decides they want to criminalise you for something so they search your place for anything they can use to incriminate youβnot vice versa, ie they dont already have enough evidence to incriminate you when they plan the raid.
I don't know about a majority of people, but with the rise of the far-right across many countries I think it is a significant number of people who are at risk of this, and I think it's rather short-sighted to assume only a small number of "cool people" are affected (thank you though). Like I am a nobody, I'm not famous, and there are lots of political organisers and militants like me you've never heard of being targeted for their political activities. You don't need to be a Snowden to have some degree of state interest in you, and most state repression (raids, incarceration, arrests, etc) is relatively cheap to dish out willy-nilly.
I think he's over blowing the 5 dollar wrench method.
Unless you live in a place where human rights are disregarded like every possible moment, they'd probably only resort to torturing you to gain access if they believe you are somehow connected or have ancillary evidence that points to you. IE that darkweb dude they tortured in Turkey to gain access to his encrypted laptop containing incriminating evidence.
Otherwise they'll just do a preemptive raid hoping that it leads to new information.
Like right now border patrol has been forcing foreigners to show data on their mobile devices to see if you have any roasted vance memes so they can turn you away. But in many cases, it has been done because they already had you flagged as posting or sharing roasted vance memes online.
Of course you could also always be in a craphole country where they'll torture you anyway, regardless if they have any reason to believe you are connected to something, but simply due to the fact that you opted to use FDE or any practical security scheme.
I know a nice middle aged mum whose house was raided by whatever the Australian SWAT team calls themselves at 2am. She's basically considered a public enemy by the government. And the worst she's ever been accused of is blocking traffic and using water-soluble spray chalk on buildings.
Doesn't need to be a government but just common thiefs getting your computer and selling it to someone who knows what to look for.
It pays off the moment someone steals my bag with the laptop when I leave the office or coffe shop.
your full disk encryption will pay off one day
They day you fuck up your password one too many times and lock yourself out of your own computer.
Is there any reason to do full disk encryption, vs encrypting a single partiton or a folder with eCryptfs? Itβs not like your /usr/bin, etcβ¦ needs to be encrypted, but encrypting it reduces performance.
Suppose you're in some hypothetical country where torrenting is illegal. The presence of /usr/bin/qbittorrent on your disk could be enough to face charges. Unencrypted /var/log? Maybe they can see you've been running a cryptocurrency miner. There could be plenty of data outside of $HOME on your computer which a cop might try to use against you.
In the most paranoid hypothetical scenario, someone could mount your unencrypted /usr/bin and replace openssl with a compromised version.
/var/log and the likes arenβt really issues, I just have mine as a link to the real one in an eCryptfs folder. Though I guess youβd be right about qbittorrent, this is something pretty rare.
In the most paranoid hypothetical scenario, someone could mount your unencryptedΒ
/usr/binΒ and replaceΒopensslΒ with a compromised version.
I suppose if youβre in this situation, you have way more important things to deal with. That would imply someone has physical access to your computer, at that point if they really want to know what youβre doing they might as well setup a camera.
What I'm getting at is that for people using FDE, any performance hit is worth it compared to worrying that you've covered every angle.
By default, most FDE have horrible performance hits and require significant tweaking, configuring and benchmarking to get it right depending on hardware, use cases, conditionsβ¦ Iβm sure there are quite a bunch of people out there who donβt want to do any tweaking while still having the performance they paid for.
Unless what you are doing is heavily I/O dependant (mostly heavy database workloads), that's not really true anymore, especially with a modern CPU and say, LUKS encryption. Phoronix has a recent review of FDE using LUKS, and apart from synthetic I/O tests, the difference isn't really observable.
Try cryptsetup benchmark on your pc and look at the results for aes-xts for example.
That's the best part, it can never really "pay off." It can only mitigate. Hardly seems worth it to me. Alas.
Aren't you worried about your laptop getting stolen?
I personally am only worried about data loss, not data theft. But I do take privacy relatively seriously nonetheless.
The important files are encrypted. The browser runs in RAM.
"Well, we raided his mom's house and confiscated all his cobbled-together e-waste."
"And!?"
"His drives were encrypted. Apparently he 'applied PQC patches to dm-crypt himself', whatever that means. All I know is that it made the guys from NSA scream. There was nothing we could do."
"So we've got nothing?"
"Oh no. He happily gave us both the keyfile and the passphrase."
"So..?"
"No warez, no CSA, no political manifestos or illicit recipes. Not even tax evasion - it's not like he has an income. Just... copyleft source code as far as the eye could see."
copyleft source code is a telltale sign of communism, thus anon can be associated with Big terrorist like the Antifa.
I lolβd at this. But seriously, privacy is a fundamental human right. You donβt need to have something to hide to assert your right of privacy.
The NSA dude screamed in ecstasy because someone finally used his dm-crypt patches.
Time for the $5 wrench...
Or just beat the shit out of them and get the info you need (or more likely want).
Relevant xkcd: https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/File:security.png
that did actually happen to a guy, over the password to his bitcoin account
https://abcnews.go.com/US/nyc-crypto-kidnapping-torture-case/story?id=122280419
"His fucking kernel is deblobbed too?"
As a noob, I genuinely can't tell if this is real jargon or not
It's referring to binary blobs. A windows exe might be a binary blob.
These are distributed compiled. Even if the project is open sources, the binary blob might have been generated by a compromised compiler.
This is one of the reasons the XZ Utils compromisation went unnoticed for so long. One of the compressed files used for testing contained malicious code that would be included in the build artefacts (IE, the final compiled binary) under very narrow and specific circumstances.
So "deblobbed" means absolutely everything in the OS was built & compiled on their computer from original source code
Thanks! I wonder if I will ever reach that level of privacy paranoia. At the rate that I'm going, maybe 5 years.
Thanks. But I don't understand why any of that ensures that the compiler isn't compromised? Do you mean they have presumably vetted the compiler themselves first? This is something that would be incredibly time consuming to do, assuming we are talking about gcc or something equivalent, which, I mean if you're compiling an OS...
The concepts they're referring to have more to do with Ken Thompson's Trusting Trust essay. Laurie Wired recently came out with an episode about it. It's a rather intractable problem in computing, and unfortunately, even with the best practices to overcome it, you can never be 100% sure that your system is completely free of compromise.
That's true.
But the idea is that there are no precompiled binaries that are implicitly trusted.
So you CAN vet all of the code and artefacts, and if something doesn't seem right you can trace it back to the code and understand exactly why, instead of seeing a black-box binary and coming to the conclusion "it's doing something it shouldn't, but I don't know what or why".
The idea is that you are in control of the entire build process.
But yes, it would be extremely time consuming to vet GCC, build it from source and (I guess) compare checksum/hashes against published binaries. Then vet all of the source code of everything you need to compile for Gentoo, then compile that and compare checksum/hashes etc.
Which is why it's in a 4chan meme.
But I imagine governments agency will have some deblobbed Linux installs with the technical capacity to vet all the code and artefacts
Lol tell me your computer is blobbed without telling me your computer is blobbed!
Tower's explanation of blobs is kind of strange and not really correct. In a general sense a binary blob is just a situation where you have open-source software that is combined with proprietary components.
Most relevant example to the meme is that the Linux kernel is open-source, but can sometimes contain drivers that are proprietary and don't have source code available. Those proprietary drivers would be the blobs.
As a counter-example, the linux-libre kernel that devfuuu linked to, is a version of the Linux kernel that has had all the blobs removed.
They missed out the firmware in the WiFi adapter
fool of you for thinking timmy would have wifi in his thinkpad T430
That's not firmware in wifi adapter.
Or live in a van.

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