7 ms·

I'm running Debian, so I have LUKS full-disk encryption running; I consider it a sine qua non of running a personal computer. I wish it were a bit easier to en

by zeveb 10y ago

I'm running Debian, so I have LUKS full-disk encryption running; I consider it a sine qua non of running a personal computer. I wish it were a bit easier to enable per-user encrypted home directories as well (yes, layered: CPUs are fast, and security is worth the cost), but … I'm lazy.

ansible 10y ago
I don't understand... If you've got the requisite ecryptfs packages installed, you can just run something like: "adduser --encrypt-home newusername" and there you go. It works on top of any filesystem, because it encrypts on a per-file basis.
- zeveb 10y ago
  Yeah, but (last time I installed) that wasn't an option at install time.
  - oarsinsync 10y ago
    Ubuntu has that as an install-time feature, but then Ubuntu is definitely not Debian. Then again, Debian isn't really either given the systemd fiasco that is Jessie. How has that whole debacle impacted you? I still have several squeeze(or whatever oldstable / jessie-1 is) boxes that I'm loathe to upgrade, and considering just biting the bullet and switching to either Ubuntu, which has a more mature systemd seutp, or some other distro entirely (OpenSUSE seems to be the place to be when it comes to bleeding edge secure rolling releases), but the familiarity I have for Debian continues to make that difficult to make the leap.
    - stakent 10y ago
      Can you write more about systemd fiasco in Jessie? I've very reluctantly upgraded to Jessie with systemd few months ago and, to my surprise, it simply works. Cursory googling returned entries from 1-2 years ago, so my google fu is not sufficient.
    - zeveb 10y ago
      Actually, I don't mind systemd anymore. I hate the philosophy and attitude of the maintainer, but I haven't had any operational problems using systemd. It works, and it works pretty well. I just hate that I had no choice.
  - ansible 10y ago
    So then just don't create your main user account at install time. I'm usually creating an 'admin' user at that point anyway. The main thing to watch out for is to add new users appropriately to some system groups like sudo, cdrom, audio and such.
    - zeveb 10y ago
      > I'm usually creating an 'admin' user at that point anyway. Why create an admin user when root already exists?
      - ansible 10y ago
        It is handy, if you are setting up the system for someone else. You can always delete the user account you created at install time too, after you have set up the root account with a password.
coherentpony 10y ago
For others: Sine qua non is an indispensable and essential action, condition, or ingredient. It was originally a Latin legal term for "[a condition] without which it could not be", or "but for..." or "without which [there is] nothing".
- gaur 10y ago
  If a phrase is so foreign that you feel the need to italicize it, don't use it.
  - 0942v8653 10y ago
    On the other hand, it's quite nice to be on Hacker News where someone will post the definition :) ... now I know what that phrase means when I hear it in another context.
    - na85 10y ago
      Nah, it's just the standard HN-ian modus operandi of misusing Latin phrases like a priori which doesn't actually mean "prior" or "prior knowledge" despite the incessant use here on this site. How else would I attempt to appear superior? :^)
      - naedish 10y ago
        Except he used it correctly here, didn't he? He could have said condicio sine qua non but my understanding is that either would be accepted usage.
      - Jugurtha 10y ago
        If f is a function with the domain of thoughts and the codomain of the words used, f is almost never injective. You can't always know the thoughts based solely on the words. There's almost never a one-to-one mapping. You can't always read minds. Think about it like this: I understand that it might be perceived by some English speakers as "sophistication" (more on that later), but for a lot of others who speak other languages, there is absolutely no pretense of sophistication in using latin expressions for this is both how we have always talked and what we picked up along the way in life. Expressions such as "a priori", "grosso modo", "primo/secundo/tertio/quarto", "sine qua non", "ad nauseam", "a fortiori", "a contrario", "status quo", "de facto/de jure", are very common in colloquial French. Others, for example: "quod erat demonstrandum", "reductio ad absurdum", and some of the aforementioned mostly were picked up inmaths classes/books. I learned most of this stuff as a child because people just talked like that around me. Do I have to appologize because someone thinks I'm doing it to appear superior? That's similar to some people who think someone is arrogant just because he's good looking. Doesn't this feeling tell them more about themselves than about the hypothetical arrogance/sophistication attempt? Think of it another way: If I work in the sun and get a tan, why on earth would you assume that my tan is pretentious? Seems silly to connect the two, right? But they were connected in the past: the expression blue blood, after all, that is used to describe nobility came from the fact they were so pale their veins we apparent, contrary to the peasants who had to work in the sun and were tanned.. What used to indicate "low-birth" now has become attractive. We're funny that way. To get back to what I said, this is not unique to English speaking people. I was raised with two languages home + one street language + one school language. Other children from poor families (one street language + one school language) preceived this as a sophistication attempt because they perceived me as someone coming from means. I wasn't. They associated speaking that language with wealth; I didn't. It didn't even cross my mind. Then again, it's not even about wealth: they didn't mind someone like them (farmer) having money.. but they loathed people they considered "fancy" (for them, educated meant fancy). Some people here have this stereotype (the correlation is that they're mostly people from poor neighborhoods) because they don't understand basic logic: "A implies B" doesn't mean "B implies A". They think "People from wealthy fancy families speak French", so they go the other way around and say "People who speak French come from wealthy fancy families". But then again, it's not about latin phrases, wealth, or french, for some people in France would consider someone speaking in English as attempting to appear superior. And it's not even about France for some people in Egypt think people who speak English try to seem superior. How 'bout that! You wouldn't consider English fancy, would you?. But a lot of people around the world do. What's the conclusion? The conclusion is that this isn't about the other, it's about us and our thought processes, our insecurities and assumptions. The conclusion is that if you perceive what someone says to be an attempt to be sophisticated, maybe you can start with an assumption check: can you for a fact read minds? Does your assumption tell you something about yourself more than it does about the other? It does. I'm not being judgemental, I just find the way we think fascinating. I spend a lot of time trying do destroy my own arguments and prove myself to know nothing. I also play pool against myself, keep score, and laugh at myself when I botch a shot.
discordance 10y ago
May I ask a hypothetical? If you were stopped at a border crossing and asked to unlock your drive for inspection, would you do so?
- maerF0x0 10y ago
  No. I'd be calling my company's lawyer to obtain their counsel first. Its not up to me to disclose information I dont own to BPS.
- PhantomGremlin 10y ago
  If you were stopped at a border crossing and asked to unlock your drive for inspection, would you do so? It's not necessary to cross a border anymore with anything "interesting" on your laptop. Just push everything of value to the cloud before crossing. Carry a USB drive with an OS on it. Format your laptop before crossing. Let them have fun "inspecting". Oh, and I'd advise doing something like dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/rdiskX bs=1m before loading the clean OS. That way there's nothing of value on the drive even if forensic tools are used to look for previous data. Or maybe just use a Chromebook. They can't force you to unlock access to any cloud accounts, can they? Certainly not as a pre-condition for crossing a border? With a court order, yes, but then you definitely need to get an attorney involved to protect you.
  - srean 10y ago
    The fly in that ointment is that govts tend to have these deniable 'deals' with these major cloud providers. So make sure whatever you push is encrypted well.
  - Tomte 10y ago
    Usually you don't have any right to enter a country, unless you're a citizen. So they can make unlocking any of your accounts a prerequisite for entering.

by zeveb 10y ago

ansible 10y ago

I don't understand... If you've got the requisite ecryptfs packages installed, you can just run something like: "adduser --encrypt-home newusername" and there you go. It works on top of any filesystem, because it encrypts on a per-file basis.

zeveb 10y ago
Yeah, but (last time I installed) that wasn't an option at install time.
- oarsinsync 10y ago
  Ubuntu has that as an install-time feature, but then Ubuntu is definitely not Debian. Then again, Debian isn't really either given the systemd fiasco that is Jessie. How has that whole debacle impacted you? I still have several squeeze(or whatever oldstable / jessie-1 is) boxes that I'm loathe to upgrade, and considering just biting the bullet and switching to either Ubuntu, which has a more mature systemd seutp, or some other distro entirely (OpenSUSE seems to be the place to be when it comes to bleeding edge secure rolling releases), but the familiarity I have for Debian continues to make that difficult to make the leap.
  - stakent 10y ago
    Can you write more about systemd fiasco in Jessie? I've very reluctantly upgraded to Jessie with systemd few months ago and, to my surprise, it simply works. Cursory googling returned entries from 1-2 years ago, so my google fu is not sufficient.
  - zeveb 10y ago
    Actually, I don't mind systemd anymore. I hate the philosophy and attitude of the maintainer, but I haven't had any operational problems using systemd. It works, and it works pretty well. I just hate that I had no choice.
- ansible 10y ago
  So then just don't create your main user account at install time. I'm usually creating an 'admin' user at that point anyway. The main thing to watch out for is to add new users appropriately to some system groups like sudo, cdrom, audio and such.
  - zeveb 10y ago
    > I'm usually creating an 'admin' user at that point anyway. Why create an admin user when root already exists?
    - ansible 10y ago
      It is handy, if you are setting up the system for someone else. You can always delete the user account you created at install time too, after you have set up the root account with a password.

coherentpony 10y ago

For others: Sine qua non is an indispensable and essential action, condition, or ingredient. It was originally a Latin legal term for "[a condition] without which it could not be", or "but for..." or "without which [there is] nothing".

gaur 10y ago
If a phrase is so foreign that you feel the need to italicize it, don't use it.
- 0942v8653 10y ago
  On the other hand, it's quite nice to be on Hacker News where someone will post the definition :) ... now I know what that phrase means when I hear it in another context.
  - na85 10y ago
    Nah, it's just the standard HN-ian modus operandi of misusing Latin phrases like a priori which doesn't actually mean "prior" or "prior knowledge" despite the incessant use here on this site. How else would I attempt to appear superior? :^)
    - naedish 10y ago
      Except he used it correctly here, didn't he? He could have said condicio sine qua non but my understanding is that either would be accepted usage.
    - Jugurtha 10y ago
      If f is a function with the domain of thoughts and the codomain of the words used, f is almost never injective. You can't always know the thoughts based solely on the words. There's almost never a one-to-one mapping. You can't always read minds. Think about it like this: I understand that it might be perceived by some English speakers as "sophistication" (more on that later), but for a lot of others who speak other languages, there is absolutely no pretense of sophistication in using latin expressions for this is both how we have always talked and what we picked up along the way in life. Expressions such as "a priori", "grosso modo", "primo/secundo/tertio/quarto", "sine qua non", "ad nauseam", "a fortiori", "a contrario", "status quo", "de facto/de jure", are very common in colloquial French. Others, for example: "quod erat demonstrandum", "reductio ad absurdum", and some of the aforementioned mostly were picked up inmaths classes/books. I learned most of this stuff as a child because people just talked like that around me. Do I have to appologize because someone thinks I'm doing it to appear superior? That's similar to some people who think someone is arrogant just because he's good looking. Doesn't this feeling tell them more about themselves than about the hypothetical arrogance/sophistication attempt? Think of it another way: If I work in the sun and get a tan, why on earth would you assume that my tan is pretentious? Seems silly to connect the two, right? But they were connected in the past: the expression blue blood, after all, that is used to describe nobility came from the fact they were so pale their veins we apparent, contrary to the peasants who had to work in the sun and were tanned.. What used to indicate "low-birth" now has become attractive. We're funny that way. To get back to what I said, this is not unique to English speaking people. I was raised with two languages home + one street language + one school language. Other children from poor families (one street language + one school language) preceived this as a sophistication attempt because they perceived me as someone coming from means. I wasn't. They associated speaking that language with wealth; I didn't. It didn't even cross my mind. Then again, it's not even about wealth: they didn't mind someone like them (farmer) having money.. but they loathed people they considered "fancy" (for them, educated meant fancy). Some people here have this stereotype (the correlation is that they're mostly people from poor neighborhoods) because they don't understand basic logic: "A implies B" doesn't mean "B implies A". They think "People from wealthy fancy families speak French", so they go the other way around and say "People who speak French come from wealthy fancy families". But then again, it's not about latin phrases, wealth, or french, for some people in France would consider someone speaking in English as attempting to appear superior. And it's not even about France for some people in Egypt think people who speak English try to seem superior. How 'bout that! You wouldn't consider English fancy, would you?. But a lot of people around the world do. What's the conclusion? The conclusion is that this isn't about the other, it's about us and our thought processes, our insecurities and assumptions. The conclusion is that if you perceive what someone says to be an attempt to be sophisticated, maybe you can start with an assumption check: can you for a fact read minds? Does your assumption tell you something about yourself more than it does about the other? It does. I'm not being judgemental, I just find the way we think fascinating. I spend a lot of time trying do destroy my own arguments and prove myself to know nothing. I also play pool against myself, keep score, and laugh at myself when I botch a shot.

discordance 10y ago

May I ask a hypothetical? If you were stopped at a border crossing and asked to unlock your drive for inspection, would you do so?

maerF0x0 10y ago
No. I'd be calling my company's lawyer to obtain their counsel first. Its not up to me to disclose information I dont own to BPS.
PhantomGremlin 10y ago
If you were stopped at a border crossing and asked to unlock your drive for inspection, would you do so? It's not necessary to cross a border anymore with anything "interesting" on your laptop. Just push everything of value to the cloud before crossing. Carry a USB drive with an OS on it. Format your laptop before crossing. Let them have fun "inspecting". Oh, and I'd advise doing something like dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/rdiskX bs=1m before loading the clean OS. That way there's nothing of value on the drive even if forensic tools are used to look for previous data. Or maybe just use a Chromebook. They can't force you to unlock access to any cloud accounts, can they? Certainly not as a pre-condition for crossing a border? With a court order, yes, but then you definitely need to get an attorney involved to protect you.
- srean 10y ago
  The fly in that ointment is that govts tend to have these deniable 'deals' with these major cloud providers. So make sure whatever you push is encrypted well.
- Tomte 10y ago
  Usually you don't have any right to enter a country, unless you're a citizen. So they can make unlocking any of your accounts a prerequisite for entering.