FedX

Same boat, really don’t want to keep supporting them, because of the reasons others have mentioned. But I have something like four or five emails, not to mentioned hundreds of relays, it would be really hard to lose if I ditched them as my provider.

What’s interesting is that this is far more an example of a social, rather than political, failing of our society. We can all agree that social media is harmful to everyone in many contexts, but can also provide a certain benefit in the sharing of knowledge, information, and ideas. How many of us had something of a queer awakening after being exposed it on social media? I sure as heck fall into that boat.

I once heard it equated to drinking, your taught from your parents what a responsible (or not) way of in taking alcohol is. Same with driving, same with work. In all these things were there is a fine balance of harm and benefit, we are taught be the older generation. But what if there is no older generation to teach us? Well, as is the case with certain indigenous communities in Alaska where no alcohol existed, you find yourself with no one being responsible. For the regulators, the obvious solution is an outright ban. But banning subsistence that are “bad” for you if addictive, never works. Prohibition, and the war on drugs are key examples of that.

We see this and scoff, because we are the ones who, though trial and error, found something approaching that balance. We see the harm is not in the social platforms themselves, but rather in the algorithmic monetization creating great psychological harm for everyone. We see that anyone using the internet is (more or less) a pseudonymous peer, and attempting to classify groups by geography and/or age is quite foolish. We also see the abuse and harm that attempting to do so would cause. Unfortunately, but rather predictably, the politicians are corrupt ass hats in the pocket of big-tech and invariably, make exceedingly stupid laws greatly to the detriment of the people. It is, therefore, of my opinion that the only reasonable solution is to get rid of them in their entirety Ⓐ.

Listened to a rather interesting episode of Darknet Diaries the other day about a European cyber crime group. To this day, the FBI has been unable to decrypt the devices. The feds didn’t give too many details about the specifics, but what they did share was quite interesting:

• Five layers of encryption, each with unique passwords.
• LUKS root partition presumably tied to TPM2.
• Veracrypt or truecrypt volumes in userland.
• A custom-made encryption toolkit.

From what I gathered, I think the optimal balance of usability and security (especially for a headless machine) would be the following:

• LUKS root volume tied to TPM to protect against cloning of disk. Also, nothing too valuable ever lives on root.
• More important data stored behind a FUSE encryption layer like gocryptfs, these can be easily opened remotely. You can also tie the password to data hidden inside the LUKS volume for effective two-password protection if the volume is not already behind a LUKS layer.
• If your really concerned, add in additional layers as needed. You can tie LUKS to TPM and FIDO, not sure if you can set up a two password mode, but that would be quite nice. You can also (probably) tie FUSE based systems to biometrics like Howdey or fingerprint sensors if you have them. This could also be setup in a kind of two-password mode for a single volume. Realistically, two layers of encryption is overkill, but it’s more about ensuring multiple layers of redundancy rather than making it harder to crack.
• I can’t recommend systemd because of its numerous security vulnerabilities, but homed does have a neat feature where it will unmount encrypted home volumes when your computer goes to sleep. Not sure how effective or useful it is, but it is a nice feature. Been wanting to see if I can setup something similar on Chimera/Artix with dinit user services.
• Defiantly set up duress key-codes/panic buttons. Likewise, been wanting to write a clone of swaylock with duress code support, but as far as I know, nothing of the sort exists right now.

It is also very much worth noting, even though the FBI never got into the hackers’ computers, they had more than enough evidence to convict the lot. Being the defender of a computer system is always a losing battle.