• 0 Posts
  • 38 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 10th, 2023

help-circle

  • Together with secure boot and your own signing keys, it could be a good way to en/decrypt the a dm-verity secured read-only rootfs. But for the home partition I would probably still want to enter my own decryption key, maybe via systemd-homed. From there you can update the kernel/initramfs and read-only rootfs image and sign them for the next boot.

    This is complicated to set up. Otherwise maybe use TPM as a 2FA, so you still have to enter a pin?










  • I used to use Ubuntu in the past, and it wasn’t Unity, Upstart, Bazaar, Mir, Launchpad, Snap, Amazon ads integration etc. that convinced me to look elsewhere, it was that I found out how other, not commercial distributions, integrated and instrumented its user base into their development.

    Instead of having to sign a CLAs when contributing and signing your right away to some corporation, you become part of the community. (Update: It seems they have switched from their Copyright assignment, so something not as invasive in 2011, which is good. But they still require you to sign a CLA.)

    So always look who is developing the distribution first, are they individuals or is it one company. And don’t let yourself be bated into the dependency of one company, because then you will be the victim of enshittyfication eventually.




  • Well, I consume more open source software that I will ever produce, so I am in a dept to the community. If it means working a bit more to make my contribution useful to others and fit it into the bigger whole, I will gladly do so.

    Valve contributed to Linux before, so the fact that they don’t have any direct upstreaming plans right now indicates that something is causing friction.

    I would avoid reading too much into it. They and their developers are still contributing on other stuff. Also when working together, there will always be some friction, in any public collaborative project ever.






  • I started using Fedora Silverblue on a tablet, seems to work fine so far, but requiring a reboot in order to install new system packages is a bit cumbersome and the process itself takes a while, but ordinary Fedora also doesn’t win any races when asked to install a new package

    I think switching to FCOS or Flatcar on servers that just use containers makes sense. Since it lessens the burden of administrating the base system itself. Using butan/ignition might be unusual at first, but it also allows to put the base system configuration into a git repo, and makes initial provisioning using ansible or similar unnecessary. The rest of the system and services can be managed via portainer or similar software.

    I also do not have long term experience with FCOS, but the advertised features of auto-update, rolling-release, focus on security and stability makes it a good fit for container servers, IMO.

    An alternative to Debian on servers might also be Apline Linux. Which also has more a focus on network devices, but some people use it on a desktop as well.

    If you have many different systems, and just want to learn to operate them all, maybe NixOS might be interesting. Using flakes, you can configure multiple machines from just one repo, and share configurations between them. But getting up to speed on NixOS might not be so easy, it has a steep learning curve.


  • What’s ACC?

    ACC - Advanced Charging Controller, which allows to set charge limits, thus extending the battery life, which should have been part of Android from the beginning,

    Anyway I would strongly discourage using root under Android as it breaks the security model.

    Security isn’t a binary, security works like an onion, you have multiple layers of security and multiple decisions to make on every level. Currently you might be right, that having root access to a device might compromise it in some ways, but that isn’t necessarily so and depends on how it is done.

    You should find ways around using root and if you can’t you probably shouldn’t be doing on your phone anyway.

    This kind of thinking is the ‘I know better than you’ mentality, that I sometimes see around people advertising GrapheneOS. Having ‘root’ permissions to the device is owing it, I want to decide what to do with it, not the vendor of the ROM, or who ever else. They aren’t me, they don’t know what I want to do with it.

    The goal of security models is allowing me, the owner, to do what ever I want with my device, while preventing others, non-owners, un-trusted applications or the internet from doing what they want with my device. If the security model doesn’t allow me, the owner, to do what I want, then it failed its job at least partially.

    Root is very dangerous as it can survive a factory reset.

    Why is that dangerous? The first thing I do, when I get a new phone is boot into the boot loader, and overwrite the whole partition, then the system is trusted again, at least if I trust the vendor of the boot loader. When I want to do a factory reset, I do the same, overwrite the flash with a fresh OS image.

    IMO, there are other reasons why the current implementation of root are dangerous: They currently considered binary and I think they could be implemented more gradually. Like one application having root over individual other applications, e.g. accessing their files. Allowing/Disallowing individual privileged system calls, or access to specific system files, etc. All of this could be hidden behind a switch in the developers menu. Maybe only allow applications to gain root access when using a registered hardware token, etc.

    As for MicroG, it is sandboxed but it does require device admin for full functionality. It isn’t running as root but it requires a lot of device permissions. You can turn off the permissions you don’t need but that could break things.

    In order for MicroG to work full, you need to fake the signature, which requires a patch to the system, or root privileges.