The role of Linus being a stubborn decision maker will be handed over to a competent close one to Linus. He is not letting any of the “sociopolitical” experts take over the tech role that Linux plays critical to servers, security users, militaries, governments and activists.
Out of all the possible Git choices, they chose one of the worst options. I am very curious about the reasoning for that. Could have been a Mozilla-hosted Gitlab instance, or something else like Gitea
Especially lately, incredibly poor performance, and constant outages. Plus if you’re an owner of a private repository, I don’t want them to train their asshole AI based on my code, without my knowledge
At least when it comes to Git I'm not too concerned. What could MS possibly do to you? Maybe vendor lock in via the issue tracker? They aren't using it and it's not exactly that hard to migrate off of it in the first place.
The bad practices of its CEO doesn’t inherently write off the software, instead the software’s merits should do the talking. Which Chromium-based browser would you recommend based on its merits?
The bad practices of its CEO doesn’t inherently write off the software
Ah yes, the CEO with his little influence on the products from his company…
Which is Brave collection “donations” and then keeping them, then? Is it a CEO bad practice or a software bad practice?
instead the software’s merits should do the talking.
You’d get a Shawarma from a Hamas-run restaurant, right? Sure, they swear death to all infidels but their cooking is so authentic and great… Who cares that the restaurant funds them!
Which Chromium-bases browser would you recommend based on its merits?
Opera, Vivaldi, ungoogled-chromium, and some others don’t pull the same shit.
I made a commentary about it here lemmy.ml/post/511377 in the FLOSS vs Closed Source Philosophy section:
The soul and spirit of FLOSS is socialist/communist, in a similar way to piracy. The purpose of it is to serve the greater good. In comparison, the soul and spirit of closed source software, outside rare cases of benevolence, is highly corporate and fascistic, similar to a leech, which in many cases these days may suck money out of your wallets for subscriptions. It may also serve as a leech to suck your data for telemetry and spying purposes.
Yeah, I tried this, and it works from my session, but I still got the same error from trying to run the program. I figured it was because it is called outside the bash session so the run commands have not been run, but is that perhaps not true?
Thanks! I was trying to implement this, and was trying to figure out how to pass all the arguments! This worked for me! I got some other errors, but they don’t seem related to this, so now to find out what they are all about 😅
Personally, I don’t see how a TPM module is more useful than full disk encryption with a password you enter on boot.
I struggle to see how it makes automatic login safer given it does nothing to protect against the really common threat of someone physically stealing your laptop or desktop.
I don’t trust any encryption or authentication system that I don’t have access to the keys for. Microsoft has also kinda made me feel it’s more for vendor lock in, like they did with secure boot.
Still, I’m probably being unreasonably pessimistic about it though - be interested to see any practical use cases of it.
In theory, the TPM can be used to verify that the bootloader, kernel and injtamfs haven’t been tampered with, which is very very useful as FDE (in the running machine) is only good if that remains true.
I’ve heard that before, but there are two main problems that stick out to me:
A lot of the marketing for TPM (at least when I was setting up bitlocker on Windows) suggests that it’s used to support decrypting drives without a password on boot. But that doesn’t seem to offer any protection from the devices being stolen. The bootloader may be safe but it’s not actually verifying that I’m the one booting the device.
I can’t think of a situation where someone would be able to actually modify the bootloader without also having full access to the files and secrets. Especially in a single-boot environment where every time the system is running, the device is decrypted.
I’m not saying that it’s all just a scam or anything like that, but it really feels like I’m missing something important and obvious.
The bootloader is stored unencrypted on your disk. Therefore it is trivial to modify, the other person just needs to power down your PC, take the hard drive out, mount it on their own PC and modify stuff. This is the Evil Maid attack the other person talked about.
I can’t see that being a reasonable approach for them to take, tbh. One option with TPM is that your system logs in automatically to the desktop, in which case they can just turn it on and use it normally. The other is that it requires a password at some point during startup, to which they could just use a (hardware) keylogger.
It only at most auto logs you into the display manager or more generally into login. Then you still need to get root access to modify anything from there. Login would still be based on user password/key/whatever.
Pretty easy to set up, can be taken out to not be modified at run time unless you want plus not being stolen with the computer itself.
I see only drawbacks with a TPM for a computer system like that. In embedded credentials, mobile applications, cold credential storage, etc… it works very well, but it doesn’t solve any problem that someone tech savvy doesn’t have a better solution for, in my opinion.
If you are a big enough target for an evil maid attack, you are either good enough to circumvent it better than an embedded TPM, or you are rich enough to hire someone who is.
If the device is stolen, your disk is still encrypted at all time. If you believe your OS’s login system is reasonably secure, then the attacker should have no way to access your data: they cannot access the data from software because it is blocked by login screen, they cannot access the data from hardware because it is protected by FDE.
One of the misconceptions I had before is that I assumed that the disk will be decrypted when you enter the LUKS password. This is not true, the password is loaded into the ram, and only decrypts necessary parts to RAM. All the data on the disk is never decrypted, even when you are working in your OS.
they cannot access the data from software because it is blocked by login screen
The system may still be vulnerable to over the network exploits. So for example, if the system is running sshd, and a couple of months from now a root exploit is found (à la heartbleed), the attacker may get inside.
It’s somewhat of a long shot, but it’s still a much larger attack surface than butting your head against a LUKS encrypted drive that’s at rest.
they cannot access the data from hardware because it is protected by FDE.
RAM is not protected by FDE. There are (obviously non-trivial) ways to dump the RAM of a running system (Cold Boot attacks, and other forensic tools exist). So if the attacker is dedicated enough, there are ways.
One of the misconceptions I had before is that I assumed that the disk will be decrypted when you enter the LUKS password. This is not true, the password is loaded into the ram, and only decrypts necessary parts to RAM. All the data on the disk is never decrypted, even when you are working in your OS.
Hah! That would be impractical :) Imagine having to decrypt your entire 32TB drive array everytime you booted your computer.
While I don’t use TPM myself (I dislike being tied to a specific hardware) the way it protects you is:
Disk is protected through encryption, so you can’t remove and inject anything/hack the password.
If boot is protected/signed/authorized only, a random person can’t load an external OS and modify the disk either.
All this together would say, even if someone acquires your computer, they can’t do anything to it without an account with access, or an exploit that works before a user logs.
In a way, the attack surface can be bigger than if you simply encrypted your disk with a key and password protect that key.
The key is only released into ram, so unless the thief can read content from ram they cannot easily decrypt your disk. And most common thief probably do not have that ability.
That being said, you do need a login password to prevent the thief straight up booting into your OS and copy everything using the file manager…
One of the advantage of using TPM with FDE, is that you can use a much longer random password. If I dont use TPM I am forced to use a password I can remember, which is likely the same password I use somewhere else. This means if someone close to me stole my laptop, they will have reasonable chance of guessing my password.
Back about two decades when I was using Windows and it was till easily customisable, I changed the bsod colour to red for funsies. Windows being Windows crashed and went to my red screen of death - my ex's cousin saw it and thought it was something really really bad, "Wow, a red screen, never seen that before. Must be even worse than blue". No mate, I just customise the shit out of anything I touch 😅
The thought of someone’s Linux install failing catastrophically, displaying a “MSoS”, then the user switching back to the is MS OS because of it is funny to me.
Correct me if I’m wrong but isn’t this basically just better error reporting? It’s not like it’s gonna crash more often, it will just actually show log info if something catastrophic happens.
that’s the goal, they also gonna implement the QR code, but not like the crappy of QR code on windows(that send you to a suppirt page with a dozen of possible sulution, where nothing work), the qr code is going translate to the kernel panic message, i liked, i can scan the qr code and search the error on my cell
Not a luxury. A 128 GB SSD can be bought for about $25 (last year) or even cheaper now, and you buy once for many years, as home users write a lot less on SSDs.
Partitioning is great with a boot partition for each OS,and linux chainloading to windows. Then I have aseparate NTFS drive as secondary drive in Windows and Linux, in case I need to work on data in either OS
And when’s the last time that happened to you? I have Windows and Linux on my UEFI laptop on the same disk since 2020 and never had that happen on Windows 10 and 11.
Windows wont if you set two independent boot partitions, and you chainload from kinux grub to windows. windows never realizes there is another boot partition. Grub is your BIOS EFI default and Grub has an entry to kickoff windows boot. You can even boot to linux right after what ahould be a windows update restart, do your linux work and when you kickoff windows again the reatart and update continues. i have had this setup since 2017.
Nobara is based on Fedora and maintained by GloriousEggroll. It has a lot of kernel-level tweaks and pre-installed software that aims to make it easier to start gaming right out of the gate
I'm not a fan of the cult-like community. I'd rather not my distro hang on to the good will of one single person.
It's probably the best option for gaming though if you're not willing to dip into the AUR.
Firefox does something else very important: provide another rendering engine for the web. When that landscape homogenizes, you get IE6 all over again. And we never want to go back there.
Also I’d rather there was a separate option for additional privacy than it be the default.
People who want the extra privacy can usually figure out what they need and how to get it. The average person will just switch back to chrome when websites break. They wont be able to figure out which settings to toggle off in order to fix the site
Keep Firefox useful for most people while also building more privacy friendly features.
If it’s something people SHOULD be using, have a popup explaining it and let people decide
It wouldn’t be terrible, as long as it’s based on an open source foundation. Although that depends on the specific open source license. As long as the engine can be forked, the worst of IE6 should be avoidable.
But yes, with Opera moving to Blink, you’ve got really only two-ish browser engines. KHTML/WebKit/Blink and Gecko. WebKit/Blink are Open Source, but I think mostly BSD, so Apple/Google could migrate to a proprietary license easily.
Gecko is MPL, which IIRC is somewhat Copyleft like the GPL, just a bit less stringent.
With the Apple/Google impasse with WebKit/Blink, I think we should be able to avoid an IE6 situation, but I would feel better with a stronger Copyleft license.
As much as I love Firefox, I think Firefox has less browser share than it did back in the IE6 days.
Please link to the source in the future. Pictures without alt tags are an inaccessible medium for people with impaired vision. Screen readers don’t ship with an OCR.
All you have to do to help visually impaired people with screen readers is to search for the title on Google (or your privacy friendly engine), click the first result, and add the link to the post.
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