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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 6th, 2023

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  • is such a hassle it wouldn’t really pass in any company

    Hate to tell you, this is now the norm. Right now, today, thousands of corporate travelers!

    Company creates a travel laptop, perhaps even just a completely empty kiosk laptop. Corporate traveler downloads critical data to the laptop in an enclave (like a presentation). They have a two-factor token with them. If they need to get back to the corporate network for whatever reason, they use remote desktop software and no data is stored on the local device. They’re given policies telling them that if the computer is out of their possession, or view at any time, that the device is not to be used whatsoever afterwards. Contact security and let them deal with it.

    When the traveler comes back to the mothership, laptop is checked into IT, it’s completely wiped.

    Does remote desktop software suck? Yeah. It’s better than the alternative though





  • Right now when updates get applied to the NAS, if it gets powered off during the update window that would be really bad and inconvenient require manual intervention.

    In memory caching, and the Amy cashing, well I think the file system would almost certainly be in a consistent state, you might lose data in flight if you’re not careful.

    The real problem, that I need an nas for, is not the loss of some data, it’s when the storms hit and there’s flooding, the power can go up and down and cycle quite rapidly. And that’s really bad for sensitive hardware like hard disks. So I want the NAS to shut off when the power starts getting bad, and not turn on for a really long time but still turn on automatically when things stabilize

    Because this device runs a bunch of VMs and containers as well closing down so that all of those rights get flushed is good practice



  • Well I’m ranting about this process, I have other complaints.

    Synology.com - if you want to add a second factor to your account, requires a phone number to be the master factor, in case you lose your second factor. So if you’re worried about Sim jacking, or even just not having a consistent phone number for the lifetime of the deployment, it’s kind of a terrible practice. There’s no way to unlink all phone numbers from an account, you can only replace them with a new phone number.

    Synology does actually support hardware USB keys, but only as a secondary factor behind SMS… Ai ya.






  • Things like gapps are closed source, have full permissions, and cannot be installed only on some profiles.

    Except in stock AOSP or grapheneos.

    Agree that qubes is the gold standard. But not to let perfect be the enemy of good, the vast majority of people, the vast majority of people, the VAST majority, are going to be unable to run qubes, either by technical ability, availability of appropriate hardware, or portability reasons.

    Mobile phones for all of their faults, are the most secure piece of general computing hardware most people have in their lives




  • I think lineage is a good operating system for a limited exposure use cases. Like a project phone on a safe network, or as a webcam, or is like a embedded hardware controller. But not on the raw internet, not processing raw internet data, not with open Wi-Fi, not with open Bluetooth.

    Even with all of that, it should still be segmented from the rest of the network



  • You can use a hardware security key, like a yubi key, or a software fido2 equivalent.

    That way it satisfies the two factor requirement, without using a phone number.

    For initial registration you can use an SMS service like SMS pool or the others, you pay a little money, you receive a real text message to a real phone number. You just don’t have access to that number in the future

    Your voice, vocabulary choice, lighting conditions, power interference frequency, can all give away parts of your location and identity. You have to choose what level of paranoia is sufficient

    The most anonymous, would be to have a v-tuber like model, respond and parrot LLM generated voice audio, from a script that’s been translated a few times. Or pay a voice actor from Fiverr to read your script.

    Of course this whole time, using a VPN.



  • I think this person is just permanently a contrarian.

    Randomizing the numbers does provide good security, because there’s no longer an oil imprint on the most frequently used numbers on the phone, making guessing the pin code much harder before the TPM locks the phone.

    Phones are full fledged computers nowadays, with Android you can have different profiles. For their level of paranoia, they could have a profile they never use in public, and only login with a full password, only when they’re in a secure location.

    For the randomized pin, and biometric two-factor use of a phone, that covers most use cases, and is quite secure compared to most models of data security average civilians use.

    You can have different scopes, if you’re in a crowded place, reading Lemmy isn’t really a big security risk. But logging into your banking would be. All of that is possible on Android, the fact that they’re so staunchly pro computer, is difficult for me to take their analysis seriously