Haley

Yeah the real point was that those systems have things in place we could stand to learn from, to do better, and continue to keep people protected. It’s a learning lesson we could stand to be more careful.

I’m cynical of it mostly due to the way people respond when you suggest it in cases like the AUR malware. Speaking of mobile permissions I’m impressed with Voyager (my Lemmy client), it asked for literally nothing!

It’s really hard to quantify an answer to that final question, because realistically, any OS connected to the internet leaves itself more vulnerable than any OS air gapped, so that’s already inherently a tradeoff. If I go purely on a purity test? TempleOS. It’s not daily driveable, but it technically wins due to the fact that Terry did not code any network support at all into it.

You’re definitely right about the convenience tradeoffs, but some of that shit is just blatantly egregious, particularly with Arch and the AUR, yet Linuxtubers still swear by it and still tell new converts they don’t need to be careful, which is ignorance at best and negligence at worst. Even worse are the ones that openly advocate you use an LLM to figure this stuff out. That kind of mindset toward new users hurts us more than many realize.

SecureBlue doesn’t claim to be the most secure option, its whole model is trying to strike a balance between security and convenience. It’s just that a lot of distros are so far behind that their ideas seem extreme. I ran a Lynis audit on my Fedora system recently and I got a 77/100 score. That’s probably enough for the average person, and that was after downloading their sysctl rules from their github, commenting out about 3 or 4 options that I didn’t really need, and importing them all into my configuration.

Do people even still use Facebook or has it completely been taken over by bots at this point?

Yeah you had some very good suggestions though, much appreciated :)

Many desktop Linux distros have poor security defaults. Fedora even disables the restrictions on ptrace by default, which is strange considering the browser sandbox needs ptrace restrictions in order to function properly. Debian and Ubuntu default to apparmor which is very insecure (remember crackarmor?) and Arch has basically no security ootb and the AUR is essentially NEEDED in order to use it for most things, despite how unvetted and messy it is. Kali is not for daily driving, for the record.

I implore you to read SecureBlue’s documentation which is where the bulk of my knowledge has been from. Even Android is not as secure as it could be, there is a reason that GrapheneOS, the pinnacle of Android security, doesn’t even consider their build of Android secure enough.

Well, it’s more so that I wished the open source community wasn’t as averse to implementing a security model that wasn’t heavily reliant on the systems being obscure. Security through obscurity is a horrid way to do such things, but it seems like that’s the way things were done before I got here.

It would be nice to see the vision of the SecureBlue project come through elsewhere in the desktop Linux world, but any time someone so much as hints at fixing the flagrant security issues of something like the AUR, all they get is dismissal and knuckle dragging in response. I’m not a blind shill for corporate products by any means, I just would like for the community to quit treating security as an afterthought, because it’s truly needed if we want to keep the new converts safe from the looming threats that are coming day after day.

Acknowledging the successes of projects that just so happen to not be community driven isn’t shilling inherently and I’m a little perturbed at that conclusion you immediately jumped to.

At the moment I’ve settled on Fedora with cherrypicked SecureBlue hardening, to me that is a lot more balanced for my needs. Tails is something I’ve dabbled with, but I’m not sure I need total anonymity, I basically never use Tor for anything but it’s nice to have something like that on hand just in case the need arises.

Qubes is definitely an interesting project though as well, my last ex girlfriend daily drove it and somehow managed to get gaming working on it, and I wish she was still around to teach me how she did it.

I mean the bar is in hell anyway

This is why we should all migrate over to Codeberg for sure

I personally think it’s bullshit that these things are happening to begin with, not that people are ringing the alarm to our new reality. The latter is just us doing our part to fix this.

I’m exhausted of all this. The data centers have been so pervasive that some communities have been thinking about rationing electricity to get around the requirements. That’s… a dystopia future if Ive ever seen one.

Yeah my primary aim is closer to something secure enough to be protected as long as I am careful, but still usable for modern stuff. My desktop setup has finally gotten to a place I like, but mobile has been really difficult for me, and I genuinely wish I had the privilege to get into the GrapheneOS world.

Suppose this is a fair point. The stuff that is exposed seems to be quite helpful, such as already integrating features like Global Privacy Control long before Google.

As for SecureBlue… a lot of it seems quite extreme even for me but they’re doing good work overall. I was maining their browser for a bit until I realized I was fighting against the current to make it usable for my use case and I felt kind of dirty doing all that to their excellent baseline. But I did grab their sysctl config, commented out 3 or 4 that I didn’t need, and inserted it into my own. I like having more control, but I’ll gladly take a more secure option if it doesn’t affect usability significantly, so I cherrypick fixes liberally from their setup.

I mean I guess following the messaging of one of the only explicitly security-focused Linux distros is considered “astro turfing” then? Hmm.

From their site directly:

secureblue is for those whose first priority is using Linux, and second priority is security. secureblue does not claim to be the most secure option available on the desktop. We are limited in that regard by the current state of desktop Linux standardization, tooling, and upstream security development. What we aim for instead is to be the most secure option for those who already intend to use Linux. As such, if security is your first priority, secureblue may not be the best option for you.

If security is your FIRST priority, they outright say their work is limited. So… that’s where I’m getting it from.

Ngl, I can’t blame most for flocking to Gmail. It’s a lot more of a pain in the rear to self-host something like that, and it’s just plain convenient.

It’s the same reason a lot of the people leaving Gmail go to essentially the Privacy Google (Proton) as the replacement.

I’ve been on Linux for the last year, that’s definitely something I learned the hard way multiple times on the path. I’m very nervous about the move towards “AI” handling a lot of that stuff.

My source is primarily the GrapheneOS team’s praises for how Apple handles iOS, particularly in Lockdown Mode. There was also a recent situation where they warned their users of “mercenary spyware” attacks.

It’s also a position that many in the SecureBlue community would agree with, which is where I’ve learned the majority of my recent security stuff from.

I never really got into OS modding until recently, so that could be why everything felt smooth until the end. Looking back I suspect a lot of my good experience chalked down to luck.

What is a turfblaster? I’m confused but maybe someone can explain that to me

MacOS, iOS, GrapheneOS (and even then, Graphene doesn’t believe themselves to be doing enough due to the fundamental limitations in AOSP)

There is one distro trying, and even they make it clear that they’re bound by the limitations of the Linux desktop’s security model at the moment (SecureBlue).

It is also technically possible to harden Windows to become nearly bulletproof but that usually requires third party software like ThreatLocker.