jutty

this is beautiful, and sobering

Mint is a glorious debloat of Ubuntu with several extras and are strategically wise in having LMDE ready and in production. They fill a very important role as an user-friendly not-DIY distro suitable for someone completely unfamiliar with Linux. I wouldn’t describe Fedora that way. It changes too fast for that use case and compared to Mint comes with not much preinstalled.

I wrote a small script that takes a query as its single argument and if it finds a matching filename in a given directory it shows that in a pager. If it doesn’t, it uses ripgrep to search inside that directory and returns the filenames in a picker. If I prepend the filename with e, it opens that file (either existing or new) in an editor. Then I track that directory with Git.

This way I have a quick way to store, find and retrieve notes from the terminal itself.

Yeah more like safety in numbers than reading every line of code you run, which is impractical and only warranted for the most extreme threat models.

I don’t think plugin devs add such features too often. More likely will focus only on their functionality. Plugins are better avoided if you are concerned. They are often abandoned and possibly bound to weak auth systems as compared to the main program source channel. The advantage is their code is usually much much shorter and easier to check out yourself.

Can vary a lot from project to project. Usually there is a bottleneck where new code is certainly getting looked at before being merged, not that things can’t go unnoticed. Depending on the size of the project, full audits can be performed by third parties. If it’s popular enough or there are bug bounties up, random people might be looking for issues as well. In general, the less popular, the less likely it is someone has recently taken a look at the code.

I think the goal is to be a browser for daily use for privacy-conscious people who are willing to do some work in telling the browser what information to keep/give and to whom. That means it’s likely not meant for the general public, more like privacy nerds and those so inclined to see the browser as a more fine-grained tool to access information rather than a pragmatic, straightforward interface into various web services.

Privacy, like security, is usually at odds with convenience. I agree with you it could be made more convenient, and as I said I think the first time you start LibreWolf it should tell you about some of its convenient features such as the address bar toggles.

So yes, Mullvad is not meant for daily use doing all your browsing, much less Tor Browser. I think you can use LibreWolf as your main browser, particularly if you use several browser profiles. You can e.g. have a separate “work” profile, where you might need to keep/allow more things from corporate systems from personal browsing, where you can block more aggressively and access mostly things you trust. This way you don’t need to have an all-or-nothing approach to your privacy.

I don’t think storing passwords, cookies and other information should be the default. In fact that is one of my favorite features in LibreWolf. I think it’s an excellent default, but it needs some adjusting to in how you think about the browser. That’s why I think it should have a screen on the first run for the first profile explaining its controls, because it does make all this convenient in some ways, but one has to discover that convenience by themselves and at that point frustration might have already overcome them.

I think it’s neither. Mullvad and Tor are a bit more extreme in their defaults, but LibreWolf is not as vanilla as your average browser. I think a welcome screen explaining the address bar controls for toggling data storage and disabling fingerprinting protection on broken trusted sites would make it much more practical.

That’s already configurable in Settings > General > Share Links.

I’m focusing on the lock screen as having one single job to do well: protect the session from any access not granted exclusively through the password.

You posit this as if the attacker and the killing of the lock screen were connected: the attacker can only kill if they already have malware, so “it doesn’t matter”. But the point is, if the lock screen won’t relinquish access upon receiving the kill signal, even if the attacker had compromised this vector, or if there were some other cause behind the lock screen dying, crashing, whatever, access would not be granted in the first place. It stops at that layer.

Thinking in terms of “if they already can access the system, whatever” is different from thinking about security in depth/layers. So its not so much about the cause of the problem, but where you can contain it. This threat (a physical access attacker) is pretty extreme, but if we are going there, then yes, it’s not unfeasible to think that they could leverage this weakness to go from a possibly limited shell access to a fully unlocked physical session where you could have unrestricted access to e.g. a browser or unlocked password manager or other in-memory information.

But the two things don’t really need to be connected. The lock screen having a secondary way to allow access that does not require the password is a weakness in itself, that the attacker could exploit, but that should not have been there in the first place.

Not all processes that can send a kill signal to another process have the same degree of access as physical access. The fact they are already running inside the session doesn’t automatically imply they have unrestricted access. In fact, you could argue no access at all a process has can compare to physical access. So that’s quite an escalation.

If killing your lock screen unlocks the system, that signals there is actually little protection. Killing a lock screen should kill the session and log you out, or at least render the session unusable.

If you still want to go that route, you could wrap your hibernation process in a script or use a slightly more complex service setup to kill it once, by inspecting system/service state and enqueued systemctl operations, you determine hibernation is done (not pending)

a singularity

at this crossroads in time it’d be better to boost this lest we celebrate one of F-Droid’s last birthdays

Just fiddled with it to see how it works. And sorry, I’m not aware of any reviews to recommend.

https://radicle.xyz/ fits your description

Yes, Fossify came precisely as a continuation for the Simple apps. The https://github.com/FossifyOrg org and the website https://www.fossify.org/ are linked from the F-Droid metadata so they should be legit as well.

See also: https://f-droid.org/2024/01/04/twif.html

I think the ethos of open source flips this thinking. You should not trust. Microsoft may not be noting down your banking details, but you actually don’t and can’t know if it is. What it is doing is storing other personal data, because that is in its policies. Now, to what extent it takes advantage of this capability and permission, it is again unknown and unknowable.

Microsoft may be a big corp, but some distros are the backbone of highly critical systems, and collectively they run the vast majority of servers.

You don’t “trust” your distro. Or your laws. Everything being done is in the open, so you can see for yourself. If you lack the knowledge to do that, there are others who are doing it and many are sharing what they find. You will “trust” on some level, because of its reputation, how established it is, but trust here means something very different from letting a huge blob of unknown code do whatever it does because I trust you.

what even was that about freedom zero? as if freedom zero meant all free software must be accepted in all repositories?? you are still free to run it regardless

I got number two on LibreWolf, last spotted five seconds ago

That’s the best, safest way. By the way, you can do the same thing from a flash drive too, if it has enough space to hold the system. I don’t mean as a live temporary system, I mean you can just point the installer to a second flash drive as the install disk and it won’t care.