Yeah, I don’t think there are many benefits when keeping the key on the same drive. Other than a bit of obfuscation. It does still help with erasing, as you can wipe the keyslots (rendering the key useless) but with modern storage media deletion is fairly hard to ensure. But still better than unencrypted.
The short answer is that Docker (and other containerization technologies) share the Linux kernel with the host. The Linux kernel is very complicated and shouldn’t be trusted to be vulnerability free. Exploitable bugs are regularly discovered in the Linux kernel (and Windows and Darwin). No serious companies separate different tenets with just container technology. Look at GCP, AWS, DigitalOcean… they all use hardware virtualization which is much simpler and much more likely to be secure (but even then bugs are found on occasion).
So in theory it is secure, but it is just too complex to rely on. I say that docker is good for “mostly trusted” isolation. Different organizations in the same companies, different software that isn’t actively trying to be malicious. But shouldn’t be used to separate different untrusted parties.
IMHO Arch is actually a great choice. They do have a minimum update frequency you need to maintain (I don’t recall exactly, I think it is somewhere between 1 and 3 months) but if you do, and read the news before updates (and you are usually fine if you don’t, usually the update will just refuse to run until you intervene) things are pretty seamless. I had many arch machines running for >5 years with no issues and no reason to expect that it would change. This is many major version updates for other distros which are often not as seamless.
That being said I am on NixOS now which takes this to the next level, I am running nixos-unstable but thanks to the way NixOS is structured I don’t need to worry about any legacy cruft accumulating from the many years of updates.
And after all of that I don’t think it really matters. I think any major distro you pick, weather stable, release-based or LTS will be fine. They all have some sort of update path these days. (unlike in the past where some distros just recommended a re-install for major updates).
Only if they gain possession when the device is running with the drive decrypted and they keep it running the whole time. That is a lot higher bar then being able to turn the machine on at any time and then recover the key. For example if this is a laptop that you are flying with. Without auto-decryption you can simply turn it off and be very secure. With auto-decryption they can turn it on then extract the key from memory (not easy, but definitely possible and with auto-decryption they have as long as they need, including sending the device to whatever forensics lab is best equipped to extract the key).
Security is always about tradeoffs. On my home server unattended reboots are necessary so it needs to auto-decrypt. But using encryption means I don’t need to worry about discarding broken hardware or if I need to travel with the server were it may be inspected. For my laptop, desktop and phone where I don’t need unattended reboots I require the encryption key on bootup.
Depending on the attacker of course. If they can read your RAM after auto-decrypt they can just take the encryption key.
I hope they are using more than just docker for isolation 😅 Each user should be running in a different VM for security.
That’s true. And I’m not saying B2 is bad, it is just something that you should be aware of.
Their automatic replication isn’t quite as seamless as GCS or S3 though. For example deletes aren’t replicated so you will need a cleanup strategy. Plus once you 2x or 3x the price B2 isn’t as competitive on price. My point is that it is very easy to compare apples to oranges looking at cloud storage providers and it is important to be aware.
For me B2 is a great fit and I am happy with it, but I don’t wan to mislead peope.
I think it depends on your needs. IIUC their storage is “single location”. Like a very significant natural disaster could take it offline or maybe even lose it. Something like S3 or Google Cloud Storage (depending on which durability you select) is multi-location (as in significantly distinct geographical regions). So still very likely that you will never lose any data, but in the extreme cases potentially you could.
If I was storing my only copy of something it would matter a lot more (although even then you are best to store with multiple providers for social reasons, not just technical) but for a backup it is fine.
I’ve been using Restic to Backblaze B2.
I don’t really trust B2 that much (I think it is mostly a single-DC kind of storage) but it is reasonably priced and easy to use. Plus as long as their failures aren’t correlated with mine it should be fine.
Strongly reminds me of Old MacDonald Had a Barcode, E-I-E-I CAR. Basically put a standard anti-virus test string into various sorts of barcode and see what breaks.
Robot vacuum cleaners aren’t great a cleaning, but they are very effective at keeping the dust down. You will still want to clean occasionally but with a robot vacuum running regularly you can do it much less often and the house feels cleaner in the meantime.
I’m also lucky enough to be able to afford house cleaners now. It is such a nice gift to our family to not have to worry about doing these things. We can spend that time doing stuff together rather than cleaning and we don’t think about how dirty the house is and dread cleaning it nearly as often. If you can afford it I would highly recommend it. It definitely isn’t cheap but many people have more expensive habits that bring less joy IMHO.
For me the biggest benefit is the ease of applying patches. For example in Nix I can easily take a patch that is either unreleased, or that I wrote myself, and apply it to my systems immediately. I don’t need to wait for it to be released upstream then packaged in my distro. This allows me to fix problems and get new features quickly without needing to mess with my system in any other way (no packages in other directories that need to be cleaned up, no extra steps after updates to remember, no cases where some packages are using different versions and no breaking due to library ABI breaks).
Another benefit that you are pointing at is changing build flags. Often times I want to enable an optional feature that my distro doesn’t enable by default.
Lastly building packages with different micro-architecture optimizations can be beneficial. I don’t do this often but occasionally if I want to run some compute-heavy work it can be nice to get a small performance boost.
It completely depends on the context.
Ads can range from like 1 for relatively subtle ads that are separated from the content and have little to no tracking to 8 for ads that pop-up and obscure the content (I just go back when I see these).
CAPTCHAs can also range from like 3 for reasonable to complete puzzles put at reasonable locations (like signing up for a free account that may be used to spam or similar) to 9 when I have been a customer for 14 years and have purchased hundreds of dollars worth of stuff from the site and they slap them in random flows on the site when I am logged in.
I’ve started turning away from so many sites because they have a CAPTCHA. There are a few sites that are worth it enough to do demeaning work but as I get more fed up they get more rare.
Of course I probably show up as a “blocked threat” on these site’s dashboards. So they probably aren’t getting the message.
There are very few legitimate usage for CAPTCHAs, but fear mongering CAPTCHA services are trying to convince non-technical people that they are required.
it’s mostly solved already
I wished I believe this. Or I guess I agree that it is solved in most software but there is lots of commonly used software where it isn’t. One broken bit of software can fairly easily take down a whole site or OS.
Try to create an event in 2040 in your favourite calendar. There is a decent chance it isn’t supported. I would say most calendar servers support it, but the frontends often don’t or vice-versa.
As with most of these things it is pricing based on value.
require a separate device that looks like a calculator to use online banking
To be fair this actually provides a very high level of security? At least in my experience with AIB (in Ireland) you needed to enter the amount of the transactions and some other core details (maybe part of the recipient’s account number? can’t quite recall). Then you entered your PIN. This signed the transaction which provides very strong verification that you (via the PIN) authorize the specific transaction via a trusted device that is very unlikely to be compromised (unless you give someone physical access to it).
It is obviously quite inconvenient. But provides a huge level of security. Unlike this Safety Net crap which is currently quite easy to bypass.
YAML is fine as a configuration language and ok data input language.
YAML is absolutely cursed as a programming language. As in Ansible has created a really shitty programming language inside of YAML. Should be burned with fire.