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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 2nd, 2023

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  • On most systems you can press a hotkey in grub to edit the Linux command line that will be booted and in about 7 keystrokes gain access to any unlocked filesystem. Asking how you can break into a system you physically control is like asking how many ways you could break into a house supposing you had an hour alone with a crowbar the answers are legion. No machine in someone else’s hand which is unlocked can possibly be deemed secure.

    Even dumber no installer will create such an insecure configuration because the people that design Linux installers are smarter than you.


  • You aren’t actually asking to how to bypass encryption because the key is already in memory. You are asking about the much simpler task of compromising a computer with physical access to same. Depending on configuration this can be as ridiculous as killing the lockscreen process or as hard as physically opening the case chilling the contents of ram enough that data survives transfer to different physical hardware. See also the massive attack surface of the USB stack.


  • This is a common misunderstanding insofar as how encryption works. You can’t flick a bit and TURN your storage unencrypted nor can you plausibly make your computer obey restrictions.

    If your storage is encrypted it remains encrypted always including the file you have open right now. Your takes a plausibly length usable string and uses it to compute or retrieve the long binary number actually needed to decrypt your files. This number is stored in memory such that encrypted files can be decrypted when read into memory.

    Once that key is loaded in memory anyone with 10 minutes and access to google could trivially unlock your computer in several different ways. It is virtually exactly like having no security whatsoever.

    If you don’t actually enter a passphrase to unlock you have no meaningful security against anything but the most casual unmotivated snooping.

    Your little sister might not be motivated enough to read your diary but the dipstick that stole your laptop will definitely be spending your money.



  • The author is an idiot.

    When someone comes to me asking how to get into Linux, they do not need to hear a laundry list of distributions to choose from.

    Only techies ask anyone how they “get into Linux”. Say it with me now. “People don’t buy, buy into, get into, install, or use operating systems” They buy fuckin computers. It is perceptibly to virtually all non-techies a feature of the device.

    There are a million types of cars but people manage to pick one and buy it same with breakfast cereals or shampoo because they are obligated to make a decision or go hungry, dirty, or walk everywhere.

    People don’t particularly like making decisions and they decided what OS they were going to use when they bought the computer and they have no intention of downloading an iso, write it to a USB, figure out how they boot from it, figure out the bios options they need to disable and what works differently than what they are familiar with.

    You lost them around step 2 and lost all hope of moving forward unless the prize at the end is something much better than “does everything I used to do but differently”

    The success of Chromebooks, android phones, and the steam deck is that it was driven by devices people wanted to use not an OS people wanted to use. If you want to see more Linux use that is the story you need to focus on.