Linux hobbyist, Machinist and tinkerer

Public Key 405B46E81DCCDB2B310DEF0DA5F0B998E8AC3752

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  • 63 Comments
Joined 2Y ago
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Cake day: Jun 14, 2023

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im am aware its a test taking browser, im was making a joke


Good day, or good evening privacy people! So as many lots of people may know there's 3 ways to build a world for yourself. Start your own business, go into the trades and apprenticeships or go to collage. There is no wrong choice because it is for you to make, i mean its your life after all! But any way today i wanna talk about number three on our roster, i have a very close friend who has chosen to go to collage . He is a pretty smart person as well has immense empathy and sympathy and has decided to follow his intuition to go seek further education. To become a substance abuse therapist, and recently he is getting closer to the end of his collage degree. However for some of the final exams they require a software called "Secure Browser" by Respondus. This is in fact not a Secure browser, wheres the TOR?? This browser is meant to kill all background apps and to eliminate the possibility of cheating, by you guested it SPYWARE!! Now one of the description from my friend is that you MUST use this software to take the quiz or kick rocks and get a bad grade. So we read the TOS which is about what you expect. "Respondus collects data to operate effectively and to strive to provide you with the best experience with LockDown Browser. You provide some of this data directly, such as when you contact us for support. Some data is obtained by recording how you interact with LockDown Browser by, for example, receiving error reports or usage data from software running on your device. Some data is obtained by how you interact with the assessment delivery system, such as the amount of time spent answering a question. The data we collect within the Help Services depends on the features you use, and includes the following: Webcam & Microphone Check. The webcam and microphone check streams video and audio from your webcam to the Respondus servers. The video and audio can then be played back by you to ensure the webcam and microphone are working properly. The video and audio recorded during the webcam and microphone check is stored in temporary cache on the Respondus server and is automatically deleted in about an hour. Persistent storage is not used for these recordings, and Respondus does not provide a way to electronically identify the recordings as being transmitted from a specific user. " aswell on a separate webpage for a general TOS not for secure browser but in general for using any of there software they collect Webcam & Microphone Check. and System Check. unique System Check ID. Basic personal data (first name, last name) Authentication data (user name) Contact information (may include postal or email address) Pseudonymous identifiers (student ID code assigned by LMS, if applicable) Device identification (IP address) We may disclose your personal data to partner companies where you have agreed to have that information shared System Check. The System Check gathers certain information from your computing device, the networking environment, and the institution's Learning Management System. So obviously like any sane person living in the year 2025, and not wanting a data company have, voice, video and as much data they can get out of there ~~Secure Browser~~ RootKit. We both decided and or was predetermined, that it doesnt ~~run~~ infect linux. Because its only for PaidBSD (MacOS) or Windows, So we thought about running a virtual machine of windows 10, but the idea was quickly thrown out because odds are it probably checks for hypervisors. So we decided to take out "old reliable" the 14 pound billet of a computer from circa 2008 aka my lenovo T440p with libreboot and a de-soldered webcam and microphone. Some of you may think im paranoid at this point, but i havent trusted windows since windows 11 came out. Sooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo anyhow We installed windows 10 and installed "secure browser", we ran a test for the software to make sure it would function without a webcam or mic. And it did! So end of story right? malware and scummy business solved by FOSS software and soldering iron? Well for my friend it is solved but for those who are not tech savvy or paranoid they still got con'd. So enough about the past lets talk about the future, My friend has decided to complain to the teacher whom runs the class and requires them to run this software. That there should be alternatives, we have constructed a email which as of writing has been sent. This is paraphrased but the points are all made the same, " I disliked having to use Lockdown Browser. Since I run Linux it was hard for me to get it to work. I ended up having to get an old laptop and install windows 10 to get it to work. Lockdown Browser does not support Linux. I also disliked the TOS because they are able to use your microphone and camera and that "we may disclose your personal data to partner companies..." I feel as if this is an invasion of privacy as a student. I think colleges are becoming so focused on academic integrity that they overlook what students' information is given towards the company (in this case Lockdown). Like I said before this is forcing students to take video and audio recording of themselves or else they cannot take the test. They also say in the TOS that for the microphone and video the test run is deleted, but they never say what happens to the quiz video and audio. If I would have known this class was going to use Lockdown for its test-taking I would have had second thoughts. https://web.respondus.com/tou-ldb/ " I am proud of my friend, as he also wants to fight for digital sovereignty, privacy and a better digital world. we discussed this email back and forth onto what it should say. He asked me what i would add, and i flat out gave my rather blunt opinion on the matter. "There should be another option, i understand the microphone and camera requirement because they don't want you to cheat. But it never says whats done with that data on there website, it says what happens to the demo data but not the quiz data! they leave an open ended "we may share your data" which im 99% definitively means there selling it to partners. That end of the day you should say what you think about this software, respectfully and precisely. Its your collage degree, its your collage, its your money. Let them know that you are displeased with this choice." he then added the part about if he knew this software was going to be used in this class he would have reconsidered taking it. which i think is very fair and to the point of the matter. To close off this very lengthy post, i want to thank my friend for sharing his experiences with me. And to let other people know about the evil that infects collage software, like Pearson. Which is another topic for another day. Cheers Steamy Public Key 405B46E81DCCDB2B310DEF0DA5F0B998E8AC3752
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Dammit i read it as DOH in a homer simpson voice in my head aswell!!


Nah photos, would be better and or theres an app that can import gpg keys from photos. I dont quite remember what it is tho


Thats if the key was uploaded to a keyserver.



Yeah i realized this after i got to work and lookup up what gpg uses for ascii armor. Its base64, i used base64 -d and i could get some parts of my key. The photo has been updated to remove alot more of the key.

Major fuckup on my part.

But i learned that ASCII armor is base64 i guess.


Yeah qr codes would be the “easier way” But i never scan any of them because MALWARE


You would need to know the whole key to know. If there are blocks missing you cant get anything from a key. And you would half to see in in real life to corelate my user alias to my real identity. Which i originally going to use a key that i have for online accounts (a key for steamy) But i then realized that would then have my online account linked to my real identity


It should be if there is chunks missing its unusable. At least thats my thinking, since gpg is usually a binary and ascii armor makes it human readable. As long as a person cannot guess the blacked out parts, there shouldnt be any data.

Kinda like binary if your missing bits of binary in a program it should be unreadable

–edit

im full of shit Its base64 and you can somewhat decode it


Yes im aware of how asymmetric encryption works. Theres a public and private key The public key encrypts the private decrypts. You make a web of trust off of signing others public keys verifying there identity.

I wanted a specific key pair for the hat for separation of online and in real life. I know you can’t learn much from an email, but still, Its my preference and it was i font that i liked and ended up picking. I understand it may not be your preference, please do not "yuck my yum’ there are BILLIONS of fonts out there and i picked the one i liked.

Which on a separate note, i originally made a hat patch with a public key but it was DSA 3036 (the max size key i dont know if thats the right number.) And i etched it on the leather, each letter was 0.04 of a inch and was basically unreadable. So i ended up going with the default gpg preset for ecc


Yeah i thought about that! I have been playing with base64 encoding tho!


Specific key for this hat, i wanted to share this idea. But i also wanted to see if any local people would email me. Also didnt want to paste my email adress online LMAO.

Also cause nerd fonts IM ADDICTED


I recently have been playing around with GPG (its pretty fun!) And decided to make a hat with my public key on it! Its a fun conversation starter at walmart, when somebody asks what it is? It activates my tism, and i get to talk about computer science! Its also important to teach others the importants of encryption especially as of one day ago the EFF made a post talking about yet another bill trying to go after encryption. The keen eyed among you see i have blocked out certain parts of my key, this is because i have a key for this hat exclusively and would like to see if anybody i talk to about encryption in real life bothers to email me. I know its not much but i enjoy it! I laser etched the leather, and hand stitched it to the hat. I know this is more kinda clothing stuff, but it just didnt feel right posting a hat with a gpg key on a fasion/clothing community. Hope you enjoy My little project >:) hehe
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From going do the rabbit hole with recently learning freebsd. Is that every good brand nvme ssd has a default password for hardware encryption and you can use certain software to change the default encryption key. However basically everywhere i read online said that hardware based encryption is rarely/never implemented correctly. So an attacker still can most likey retrieve data from the ssd, so basically software encryption will always be more bulletproof. Because people can steal your ssd or clone it and all data on it is useless without a header and key. If using full disk encryption, So basically software based encryption will always be alot harder to break than hardware encryption.



I know openwrt actually realised a openwrt router.

I bought a flint 2 from glinet And it works pretty well




I never used a proxy. I have it setup that gluetun opens port 8080 as the network host. So all traffic is routed through gluetun, i verified it by installing traceroute in the searx container.

Thats my whole stack



Docker Glueton+SearxNG
I recently learned about a great search engine called SearxNG. it can be self hosted and is a metaseach engine, AKA it uses everyone else's search engine and puts the top results out of all of them in your search results. I instantly loved this because it gave me AD free/ Sponsored free search results, aswell as the added benefit of keeping my search query's on my local machine. However i then realized, it asks other search engines like google and bing for querys. I did not like that, so i setup Gluetun as a network host in docker, which then takes all searx querys and tunnels them through the VPN. making it harder to figure out what im searching compared to my raw IP adress. i have the DockerFile and thought i would share. anything with $$$ needs to be changed. https://pastebin.com/NfHcUWLs link to dockerfile
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2025 privacy recommendtions
Was watching this and thought id share. It is very intreasting. this video topics cover, recommended mobile operating systems. chat apps, smart TV's and modern cars. all of which like to track and spy on the end user, and what some good alternatives are.
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It depends on the model of the computer. I have personally librebooted a t440p thinkpad and although perhaps a usb controller can be reprogrammed. Id fine that highly unlikely, i had to buy a specific programmer, then realized the kind people on the libre boot form recommended a raspberry pi to program the ROM chips on the thinkpad. I then had to deconstruct the thinkpad to get acess to the 2 chips on the motherboard housing 2 firmwares. For the BIOs, i believe that it is highly unprobable for a usb port to re-program a usb HID device like a keyboard, mouse or camera. There a specific chips that are ESP programmers they are designed in a very particular way and exclusively are for programing and reading. Most chips are read only chips on USB devices for long jevity. And technically you can reprogram them, however you need an ESP programmer to connect to them and flash. And lets say theoretically you reprogram them with malware, it would be extremely hard to guess the manufacture of the usb controller chip as well as the layout of what pin does what. It was very complex to program an bios chip and certain models of computers have multible chip for certain things like firmware blobs. I think the artical is highly theoretical and never showed any real exploits being used in the wild. Im not an electronics engineer or anything but from what i know about playing with libre boot and arduinos it sounds unrealistic like 1995s hackers/watch dogs to reprogram usb bus’s with a built in usb bus.


“If a malware flashes a ROM then you buy their laptop and erase the hdd or ssd or buy a new hdd/ssd, then you flash coreboot to the computer. After all this the malware can still remain in the firmware and you would never know unless the malware makes itself obviously known by a ransom attack or stealing all your crypto or something.”

This is untrue, the previous owner can theoretically get a virus that if the virus takes advantage of architecture exploits or zerodays. It could install a malicious firmware blob within your bios. The odds of this a rather rare and would rather half to be a widespread issue with the chipset. Or a threat actor would need to know the exact firmware and model of your motherboard. Flashing a new bios or updating your bios clears the chip that stores your boot firmware.

Malware lives on storage, an ssd or hardive can harbor malware as an infected OS. Some malware can live in RAM, but ram is cleared on a power cycle. If you got a used laptop and you update the bios and reinstall your os your fine, the OS should have proper sandboxing and seperated permissons. The cpu being old in certain models can be mitigated with patches and bios updates. However newer also doesnt mean more secure, certain am4 cpus had architectural flaws. At pwn-to-own buch of hackers using zero days to unlock heated seats on a tesla without paying the stupid subscription because of the CPU flaw and ram buffers.

And if you want to get tin foil hatty. How do you know you werent man in the middled when you bought a laptop from a retailer. What if a bad actor installed or tampered with the new laptop you bought. And now is less secure than a second hand laptop because joe down the street doesnt care what you do with the laptop as long as he gets paid. Or vice versa, how do you know joe didnt install malware on the pc so he can sell your information on the dark web??

And realistically there are alot of an attack surface for any device. Lets say you have your laptop and sombody steals it. Your using LUKS full disk encryption right? Lets say you did for this example, your headers for decryption are plaintext on boot. So a threat actor can use brutforce to crack your disk. You can setup LUKS to have your headers on a separate disk that you take with you. Its the equivalent of taking away a lock and a key. So all the threat actor is left with is a door. I can go on for hours about potential attack surfaces, TPM, secure boot, Intel management engine, ISP’s, SSD’S vs HDD’s.

“Privacy and Security are a mindset not a tool, device or service”


S tier play, say i want all my money to go to the local childrens hospital aswell as the truck. If it happend to be real (which its not) you helped out sick kids. And you make the spanmer on the other end feel like the peice of shit they are!!


89℅ of all search traffic is through google search. I dont like microsoft or apple, but 89% is ridiculously high and a monopolistic by all means. I hope google sells chrome


Hi, so dumb question What if you go to a hospital for a tragic Accident involving your face being mulched???

Its kinda idiotic


Openwrt on my flint 2 With adgaurd/pihole I know its not technically an app, but lots of people forget there routers exist and are a very big security hole

You would not believe what my samsung tv pings

Tiktok (somehow came preinstalled)

Hulu(we dont have a hulu account)

Tubi(we dont use tubi)

Amazon(it seems to be for samsung tv plus)

I ended up blocking everything except amazon, samsung tv, and netflix on the dns level

Its also really good for stopping non power users (aka family member’s) from getting malware/phished

–edit fixed formatting


But is it compatable with my 1999 toaster. It can run doom if that helps


Neat project but i question why they chose systemD for there init system?






Surface pro 3 with nobara works really well for a tablet. Touchscreen driver works after surface kernel is installed. There is also a ublue support for the surface i beleave. Only downside is battery life 3 hours if your lucky because of the cpu.


And that one other time the US goverment built a super computer out of Ps3’s (no im not joking)

https://www.warhistoryonline.com/war-articles/ps3-supercomputer.html

1000015946


Its me mario on the ps2

The real question as can you run gentoo on the Ps2

(I believe playstations runs a version of gentoo for its OS? I think)


Follow up message be like

“Hi this is mark from instagram, so a face scan wasnt enough to verify your account. We sent you vials to fill with your dna, so we can be 100% sure.just to verify that you are who you say you are thanks!.”


My theory is that apple wont let the developer share there code for IOS because of “security”

I remember an emulator (retro arch i think?) Got on ios at one point and was later removed because it showed apples file system layout. Which apples reason was “because it could be used to make malware for IOS”

I feel like there is some similar thing with signal IOS





Saying you have nothing to fear, if you have nothing to hide is the equivlent. of saying i dont need the freedom of speach beacause i have nothing to say.

I belive the quote is from cory doctrow. BASED person


![](https://sh.itjust.works/pictrs/image/5a158d57-4736-4136-a8eb-e0f911b23861.webp) so ive been looking into a Yubikey because i want 2FA on all of my accounts. however on yubicos website it says it supports linux. but the documentation is confusing and i want the Authentication app to setup my Yubikey on my main OS (NixOS) it seems that yubico only supports ubuntu, which i tried using in distrobox but with no success. so i looked on flathub and found this app however it gets me kinda spooked that the app is made by the community. is it safe to use my yubi key with? and if not does anyone have any idea how to compile from source, which btw im kinda a noob at compiling from source which i know is ironic because i run nix. link to flathub application https://flathub.org/apps/com.yubico.yubioath
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