Junior Member
Yeah that damn fscking linux kernelOriginally Posted by not.sure
Junior Member
What a pleasant place this forum has become... sigh.
Returning to the topic, the one thing I worry about is having just another cpu hog next to the gnome tracker sitting around... Every day I need to stop tracker manually because it never finishes, keeps blocking one core. Ah yeah, and the fan going nuts, of course.
Senior Member
Your router has outdated Linux software, most likely. A cracker coulld easily hack this instead and serve you with an extra line of html text when you browse normal websites like Phoronix and Slashdot that, if carefully crafted, can totaly ignore your OS and run directly as binary on your x86 CPU and do whatever the fsck it wants. You have no idea how far cracking has come if you think that a closed firewall and SELinux can protect you.
Senior Member
Well, If people make utterly foolish and uninformed statements they should maybe expect to get tweaked a little bit.
Regarding cpu usage. If you dislike it so much why not just remove it. Or there are plenty of distros that have minimal interfaces. Or maybe look into what is broken and try to look for a fix?
The indexing systems under OSX and windows tend to work rather well these days as do the ones on linux (on most circumstances).
Phoronix Member
Though I don't believe my computer to be a fortress, I'm sure have no (real) idea how far cracking/hacking/ect has come. Where can I go to read good/current info on computer/network security? Something readable for the average linux user, interested in the topic with no intend to learn neither how to crack others system nor go through a lot of work to secure his/her own..
Junior Member
Calling people idiots is still out of line. For some reasons IT forums tend to go that way, at least in my experience. It might be interesting to correlate that with the average age of the users. The sad thing is that this is not doing justice towards the majority of polite poeple subscribed.
I would like it if it worked. But tracker has never consistently worked for me since it exists in Ubuntu. It did work for a while in Maverick, but behaves now as I described. The log files aren't helpful either. I'm using this system for my job, and don't want to fiddle around with it too much. Also I won't remove package which are part of the ubuntu-desktop metapackage. And I won't install another DE, for that matter.
Actually, all I wanted to share is that in my experience these desktop tools are not always as mature as they are advertised. Again, that's my observation and I'm happy for everyone who has made better experiences.
What have the Windows or OS X indexing systems to do with Linux? This statement is noise.
Senior Member
I agree 100% with you, those apps are going to kill our privacy.
Senior Member
It's not noise, isn't this thread about Zeitgeist, related to indexing systems?
The ones in Linux don't work as they should, are slow, use much memory, etc. But in Mac OS X and (now) Windows and they work.
Senior Member
The internet. No realy. There are sooooo many holes and ways that it isn't funny anymore. Let me just go ahead and say that you can't secure your computer if you hook it up to the internet. But there are some ways to make drive-by cracking realy hard.
First of all do not use a router, just a modem. Let your Linux box do the routing for you, if you must. An example for Fedora users: http://buzznol.blogspot.com/2008/10/...ora-linux.html.
Never use 'tested crap' like Ubuntu. Always use the latest incarnation of the software you want to run.
Get rid of x86 to avoid nasty hardware cracks. I know; I won't do that either.
Another funny fact is the BIOS. It is by far the biggest secutiry hole almost nobody knows about. Did you know, and you can digg through Coreboot documentation for yourself, that the BIOS program never stops running? No realy; it's inside part of your RAM that your OS can't read out and it has NETWORK ACCESS and it allows you to read ALL YOUR RAM. So make sure you have a motherboard with two BIOSES and regularly trash the rewritable BIOS. To avoid bootsector virusses, get a BIOS program that blocks from writing the MBR unless you allow it at OS instalation.
Then there is something called package sniffing. Oh don't worry; while wireless is just a local problem, the internet is a worldwide one.
Never stumble upon a comment of someone that inject malicious text. Oh don't worry; just use your crystal ball to avoid the problem.
Use an internet browser that nobody uses and that is so obscure that you can't load any websites at all.
Bottomline:
RESISTANCE IS FUTILE!
You've got to ask yourself why you want to protect your computer from being hacked in the first place.
If you want nobody to read your secret files than don't place them on your computer, or make a seperate partition that is by design not accesable with your installed OS and load up a live usb/cd that can mount it and doesn't have an ethernet driver onboard.
If you fear about others knowing what you do then disable history stuff like Zeitgeist and remove that mic/webcam.
If you want to do banking stuff than run the latest Lynx with cryptography.
If you just want to solely control your own computer for controlling sake then GLHF.
Bottomline here is: use your PC as if everyone around you was watching over your sholder. Simply accept that privacy is no longer.
Senior Member
Except pretty much everyone has atime turned off these days because it's such a performance killer: and a disk killer if you're using an SSD. And anyone of clue encrypts the disk.
Yeah, about ten of them.Open Office has a list of recently opened documents. ZOMG!!!! Privacy!!!
Mine doesn't. Firefox also has 'private browsing' mode which doesn't keep any history.Firefox has a history of sites I browse. ZOMG!!! Privacy!!!
Anyone who doesn't think this could turn out to be a security nightmare should probably stick to running Windows.Anyone who thinks that this has privacy implications should stay indoors.
To give an obvious example with Linux as it currently exists, if I'm not logged in no-one can tell what files are in my home directory because it's encrypted. But if the locate database builder happesn to run while I'm logged in then those files will be listed in the locate database... while names aren't much use by themselves, they do at least tell an attacker which encrypted folders are worth trying to break into.
Storing things you don't need to store is simply a really bad idea if you care about security in the slightest.
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