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School Spyware
(sh.itjust.works)
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this post was submitted on 18 Aug 2023
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Privacy
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Don't tamper with hardware that somebody else owns. If you get caught, you could be fined a lot more than 50€ and expelled. School administrators often like to "make an example" of kids that they think are "hackers" even if you're just booting Linux from USB. They don't understand the difference between that and real hacking, so don't risk it.
You can only achieve true privacy on hardware that you own. A cheap laptop to boot Linux isn't a bad idea.
Can you truly own any hardware, though?
You're out of your element, donny
What do you mean?
Absolutely yes, if you buy hackable and repairable hardware you can do whatever you want with it. Especially if you install software on it that is FOSS.
By my question I mean:
Any hardware is made by some other people. Any hardware is work under a firmware, made by other people.
All that is a) regulated by licenses b) never can be trusted fully to work as you think it should work. Even if it based on open source - due to the "problem of untampered compiler".
If you have no total control over your hardware, can you say you truly own it?
What percent of control is acceptable? How to measure it?
It depends how far down the rabbit hole you're willing to go.
Today you can make sure the source code is truly what you intend, by running Linux on PC and GrapheneOS on Android. You might not have the ability to audit those, but others (like me) do, and are doing so.
Whether you believe us or not is more philosophy - but join us in the rabbit hole and see what you find. You'll find detailed public technical discussions of security and privacy. You can find some of that for closed software and hardware too, but we can never do as good of a job in that discussion without the source code.
If you want open auditable hardware, you can stick to Raspberry Pi.
There's an open hardware project for phone too, but it's more of a proof-of-concept, today, as far as I understand.
If you want the TL;DR version of where I landed - I posted this from a Pixel running GrapheneOS.
Graphene on a pixel 5 here my brother
Exactly. There could not be true / full ownership of hardware.
And yet that's fine for me.
Now about that:
Even in that case you can never be sure what a compiler did with the code. You can say: go look at the code of that compiler. But then how can I be sure it's code had been compiled without malicious modifications. And so on.
You can compile your compiler from source.
Edit: Here's how: https://www.linuxfromscratch.org/
Edit 2: I know you can hear the rabbit hole calling to you. Join us. Follow the rabbit trail.
But seriously, it's cool, you're curious about it, and the pay from the jobs it leads to tends to be pretty great.
Lol hit the bong one time for me bro
My pleasure
This reminds me of the times i and my friend had deep philospohical discussions... at 2am. During a weekend party, while drunk, in highschool.
Anyway, don't go down any rabbit holes in which you can't see the bottom. Walk away. While whistling, if it helps.
Yeah, I know dangers of it, so this question for me is purely theoretical.
OK. So, what's the worst case if they "catch" you asserting your privacy rights?
Based on that you can decide if it is worth doing it.
As of August 2023, the best way to avoid the problem of
AFAIK Is using an MNT Reform With GNU Guix as its OS, I really liked this article "The Full-Source Bootstrap: Building from source all the way down". This approach could, potentially, solve the problem of the untampered compiler. Damn, maybe it already does.
As for the MNT Reform, the only thing I'm not sure is open is the actual processor firmware, but the schematics for its usage are available and even the Wifi firmware is open, so there remains the problem of actually verifying the hardware you get is actually the hardware you ordered, but that is a bit more complicated I think.
To be sure you should build processor from a scratch and then write your own compiler directly in machine code.