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I read the article. It makes no mention of the fact that this isn't any guarantee your laptop hasn't been tampered with. Was it asinine to call this "another f

I read the article. It makes no mention of the fact that this isn't any guarantee your laptop hasn't been tampered with. Was it asinine to call this "another false sense of security" and "humans have invented ways around every lock in existence"? It felt very much like people were going out of their way to misread me, so I replaced my comment with one that was absolutely clear that I was saying "this provides no guaranteed way of detecting tampering." Which is true, no? I recently promised the mods that I'd try hard to be less inflammatory, and I was legitimately shocked to see my comment downvoted to oblivion when it seemed to contain no mistaken ideas. I'm doing my best to learn from this experience, but no one is providing anything for me to learn from. All I've learned is not to warn people about invalid security assumptions...

pessimizer 13y ago
When somebody gives you tips on getting free food from restaurants, or saving money on your taxes, detecting whether someone has tampered with your computer, or X - arguing that you can't "trust that this is an absolute guarantee" of X is always going to be a strawman argument. You should save those arguments for people who actually claim that you can trust that their method Y is an absolute guarantee of X. Hint: the words "absolute" and "guarantee" will be in the post. edit: the only occurrence of "absolute" in the article: >Short of keeping a machine with you 24/7, there is little you can do to be absolutely sure these things don’t happen[....]
- sillysaurus2 13y ago
  Ah. Makes sense, thank you. I'm sorry if I set up a strawman, and it's worrisome to think I'm doing this without realizing it. In order to not do that anymore, I'll need to figure out how my argument was a strawman. It seems like the only reason people are interested in this is because they're believing it provides some sort of security; else it wouldn't be interesting by definition. So it seemed reasonable in turn to point out that this method isn't reliable. I suppose that's literally the definition of a strawman (they never claimed it was absolutely reliable) but I'm trying to understand why it was bad to infer people would see this as a protection mechanism rather than a detection mechanism. I'll be careful about this sort of thing in the future though.
e12e 13y ago
off topic: as hn lacks comment history, it's advisable to not use "edit" as a "rewrite" button. I don't know if the only editing you did to you original comment above was add the single paragraph prefixed by "edit" -- or if you first changed the comment substantially, possibly without any indication -- as the first reply seem to indicate. Generally I'd just go with "delete" if something came out really wrong and/or doesn't contribute anything worthwhile as written -- possibly following up with a fresh reply/comment. Prevents others from having to spend time reading something that doesn't really contribute to the conversation. On-topic: This does sound like a great way to get a false sense of security. Who's to say some firmware hasn't been replaced? You could ofcourse transform your entire mainboard to an epoxy blob - but still - how good are you at telling epoxy blobs apart? Using some rare colours and strange patterns might raise the bar - but an average system could probably be broken into various pins ons sockets and whatnot (pci bus/firewire/...)

pessimizer 13y ago

When somebody gives you tips on getting free food from restaurants, or saving money on your taxes, detecting whether someone has tampered with your computer, or X - arguing that you can't "trust that this is an absolute guarantee" of X is always going to be a strawman argument. You should save those arguments for people who actually claim that you can trust that their method Y is an absolute guarantee of X. Hint: the words "absolute" and "guarantee" will be in the post. edit: the only occurrence of "absolute" in the article: >Short of keeping a machine with you 24/7, there is little you can do to be absolutely sure these things don’t happen[....]

sillysaurus2 13y ago
Ah. Makes sense, thank you. I'm sorry if I set up a strawman, and it's worrisome to think I'm doing this without realizing it. In order to not do that anymore, I'll need to figure out how my argument was a strawman. It seems like the only reason people are interested in this is because they're believing it provides some sort of security; else it wouldn't be interesting by definition. So it seemed reasonable in turn to point out that this method isn't reliable. I suppose that's literally the definition of a strawman (they never claimed it was absolutely reliable) but I'm trying to understand why it was bad to infer people would see this as a protection mechanism rather than a detection mechanism. I'll be careful about this sort of thing in the future though.

e12e 13y ago

off topic: as hn lacks comment history, it's advisable to not use "edit" as a "rewrite" button. I don't know if the only editing you did to you original comment above was add the single paragraph prefixed by "edit" -- or if you first changed the comment substantially, possibly without any indication -- as the first reply seem to indicate. Generally I'd just go with "delete" if something came out really wrong and/or doesn't contribute anything worthwhile as written -- possibly following up with a fresh reply/comment. Prevents others from having to spend time reading something that doesn't really contribute to the conversation. On-topic: This does sound like a great way to get a false sense of security. Who's to say some firmware hasn't been replaced? You could ofcourse transform your entire mainboard to an epoxy blob - but still - how good are you at telling epoxy blobs apart? Using some rare colours and strange patterns might raise the bar - but an average system could probably be broken into various pins ons sockets and whatnot (pci bus/firewire/...)