Yes, people talking about suicide want "attention". But this usually isn't the same kind of attention spoiled children want. People talking about suicide often mean it, or at least think they do, and talking about suicide is one of their last attempts to grasp at whatever straws they think might support them as they fall.
Don't trivialize the pain that can and does make people end their own lives.
...have to defend their license at a license board hearing...
To all Slashdotters, take note:
- Never support licensing for programmers.
- NEVER support licensing for programmers.
- NEVER SUPPORT LICENSING FOR PROGRAMMERS!
If there's anything that can make you a raving libertarian, it's professional licensing. Did you know the US state bars can refuse to license a lawyer who passed all tests and has no criminal record because (paraphrasing) "he's a jerk"? Seriously. Not an exaggeration. I can't find the case right now (slow Internet), but that has happened. Look up how broad the requirement of "good moral character" can be. Don't want that bull feces in YOUR profession? Oppose licensure. Always.
In OO language, we don't want any friends and we want to make sure that no data is exposed and all functions that provide functionality (get, set, do_something, whatever) are checked properly.
Friends are irrelevant. In C and C++, you have the ability to set pointers to arbitrary values, cast them to whatever you want, and then use them to overwrite arbitrary memory. Friends matter for minimizing code complexity, but, as Stroustrup said, C++'s object model is intended to prevent accidents, not fraud. If you have evil code with access to an object, whether or not the code is friends with the object's class is entirely irrelevant.
Christ
Is this what you're talking about: http://blog.invisiblethings.or...
It's an impressive idea, although it depends on the TPM which is not designed to be safe against physical attacks. There's no reason the implementation of that should only work with QubesOS, either, although the developers appear to be the same.
Please read the link again, and/or work on your reading comprehension skills. The part you talk about is referring to not showing up to court when summoned, not failing to pay a monetary judgment.
Generally, once you have a judgment, it's up to you as a creditor to enforce it. You can do this in a number of ways, including enlisting a sheriff to help you (for a fee). But the debtor doesn't end up in prison for not paying a judgment.
Do you see how "not showing up to court" != "not paying a judgment"? Like I said earlier, the only way you can end up in jail for not paying a debt is if it's child support or a fine. These exceptions are perpetually controversial because they're basically debtors' prison, although supposedly inability to pay is a defense to the contempt charge.
In any case, I've thoroughly skewered your stupid "send me an email saying you'll pay me $10000" or whatever hypothetical. Unsecured creditors have no ability to force you into jail. Just make your court appearances, stupid.
Yes, protocol on Slashdot with alleged bullshit things is that burden of proof is on the bullshitter. Since, you know, you made the original claim?
But I'll throw you a bone. I won't even use insult you with lmgtfy.com. Aren't I a nice guy?
Bullshit.
It's generally not contempt of court not to pay a judgment. There are special cases where it sometimes can be with child support, but, as a general rule, you're just wrong on this. Even with child support, if you show up in court and prove you can't pay the debt, it's not contempt of court.
Trolling? There's no harm in running a mixed-mode system. It makes your kernel slightly larger and means 32-bit shared libraries will be loaded when and only when you're actually using 32-bit programs. You still get the speedup for software compiled in long mode. Given that the CPU designers baked the support logic into your CPU anyway, there's really no downside ot using that support when it makes sense.
Or the claim is entirely bullsh.
Right. Like those silly people who think Candlejack will come to ta.
It took four months for my relatively unknown server.
This smells funny. How specifically did your server get hacked? If I put out a server running nothing but Apache serving static HTML and SSH with a good password, I would expect it to be hacked approximately never or until the next sshnuke exploit. Which, again, would be approximately never. What were you running where you got hacked in four months?
Correct. Not the first time that acronym has been confusing.
Thanks for bringing this up. Minor correction is he was charged but not convicted.
Your explanation isn't correct. The entire situation is unsettled law.
Except that privilege escalation attacks against these multi-decade-old systems appear year after year. A well-funded state attacker (OP is about activists, after all) would certainly have some at their disposal.
All code has bugs. Xen has bugs. Qubes has bugs. And yes, OSes have bugs, although Linux local privilege escalation bugs are not an everyday occurrence, and OpenBSD bugs are very rare. You can't handwave a 0-day privilege escalation vulnerability into existence and claim that there are no 0-day privilege escalation vulnerabilities in Xen.
Re: CD-R, lets assume I use an optical disk to move a quantity of email messages from a networked/untrusted machine to an airgapped one (both conventional architecture). If I export as
tar is pretty solid, actually, but, if you don't like it, make up your own trivial archive format (it's not hard), or don't use it and follow a one-disk-per-message protocol. And don't use a filesystem. dd if=email.eml of=/dev/cdrw (approximately), then dd if=/dev/cdrom of=email.eml
Even so, the untrusted networked system could take a chance that you have automounting enabled or that you will inadvertently do something to mount a volume... it could write a malformed filesystem to the disc anyway.
User error could happen with any system. You're really stretching here.
Once an air-gapped system is compromised, it can alter the hard drive firmware to store passwords and keys in a format/cipher readable by the attacker who can later break-in to the premises and steal/confiscate the computer. In a Qubes non-networked vm, there is no out-of-band way to communicate or store info, and a compromised vm wouldn't have access to the disc encryption password in any case.
Where did I ever say any of these computers had hard discs? And of course there's an out-of-band way to store info. Just use a magical vulnerability in Xen I made up to write it to another VM's permanent storage.
What you described #s 1-5 sounds much more complicated than using email in Qubes. And presumably this covers only email for one type of role (work, personal, etc); Covering all the roles means using many additional computers and burning many discs, and each role needs its own disc encryption passphrase.
I have no idea where you're getting that disc encryption has anything to do with anything here, and, no, you could definitely use the same three computers for all your emails. If you find burning discs to be too cumbersome, use floppy disc drivers or Zip drives or something, but it's really not that bad, especially if you don't bother to fixate.
This whole notion you have that "the operating system is insecure so let's put another layer on top of it" is just silly. If you make Xen your operating system, then Xen is your operating system. If you want a secure operating system with no privilege escalation, then that's what you need. Using a hypervisor doesn't magically make security vulnerabilities go away. There have and will be attacks against Xen, against Qubes, and against any other complex pieces of software you create. You want a secure OS, then you need a dead-simple OS written with security in mind. True security comes from simplicity, not complexity.
The one thing I think you're right about is that modern OSes are too complex to provide extreme levels of security. OpenBSD is the best, but even it is a quite complex piece of software. A braindead-simple POSIX-like OS kernel prizing security above all other values may have its uses. It could use generic hardware drivers for the hard disk and display adapter (VESA). Ethernet would be a problem but maybe there's a standard for USB Ethernet adapters? Wayland for the graphics API instead of X, braindead-simple written-from-scratch TCP stack, you get the idea. I'll have to make that when I have time. It shouldn't be too hard.
Burz,
I'm not saying it's impossible to customize a USB device. I'm saying rooting a machine to the point that it can customize an arbitrary USB key plugged in by the legitimate operator of the machine is impractical. You're also invoking speculative, unknown attacks against the USB host driver and firmware, which I will see you with my previously invoked unknown, speculative attacks against Xen. Also, you completely ignored my suggestion of using an optical disk if you are concerned about USB.
Safest way I can think of using airgapped machines right now for encrypted email:
1. Copy received email from networked machine C to write-once optical disk.
2. Decrypt received email on airgapped machine A.
3. Compose reply on different airgapped machine B, encrypt reply.
4. Copy encrypted reply to write-once optical disk.
5. Send encrypted reply from networked machine.
This involves three physical computers, but none has to be recent or expensive. Airgapped machine A has no ability to send information to C or B, and airgapped machine B is never touched by any devices from the outside world, and also never needs to know any secret keys, since all you need to encrypt an email message is the recipient's public key. Theoretically you could type such a key in by hand, but in any case it's a once-per-recipient transfer.
I would argue using USB sticks in this scenario gives only a very slight reduction in security, but write-many optical disks would be a practical approach if you're scared of USB. I will say that compiling out obscure and unused USB kernel drivers is a good move, as is disabling USB kernel module autoloading.
Real Programmers don't eat quiche. They eat Twinkies and Szechwan food.
