Ah, okay. I do have thinkpads for work, same at my previous employer, I'd say they're pretty forgettable, not sure I'd buy Lenovo for anything that needs to be particularly secure, just read the English wiki entry for Lenovo about security incidents, but I'd be more careful when procuring for work, especially in certain fields.
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Excuse my smugness, but being excited for your premium laptop maker to bring back a feature that is standard basically everywhere (all of my four laptops have HDMI, and out of those, my two non-work ones also come with DisplayPort) is such an Apple thing
It's like these people claiming that you need that connectivity for a lot of work were right.
So this is a retaliatory tariff and not actually one that makes particular sense otherwise.
It’s also creating demand for trucks that are terrible at doing truck stuff.
Yeah, they're garbage.
Saying “the market demands big trucks” ignores the billions they spend making the market demand big trucks.
It's probably some kind of feedback loop.
On the other hand, if just marketing budget created demand, they'd advertise these more here as not a lot of people own one. But someone figured out that that marketing budget would probably not yield an RoI, as opposed to the US. Though they're are probably practical factors at pay, like gas prices and road size.
That could also be, I'm not American so I don't know all the details.
However, watching from the outside, it clearly comes off as some kind of statement.
I don't know, is that particular tariff already in effect?
I'm not saying they're always good, bit that they can be a strategic instrument. The example you brought up makes no sense, I agree. But I'm sure if carmakers saw a market for a class of cars, they'd take the opportunity - maybe not on their core brand (like I don't think Ford would build one under that brand in the US).
Yeah, the fact that every sporting event's commercials rotate between dick pills, beer, and giant trucks totally doesn't have anything to do with it.
I think this rather proves my point, they're lifestyle products targeting a specific demographic under the guide of being a utility.
I think this is rather an issue with what the majority of the market wants. If carmakers saw a bigger profit in offering smaller transport vehicles (pickup trucks in my opinion aren't even particularly good at transporting a lot of stuff), they'd manufacturer and sell them.
But the truth is pickup trucks are often just lifestyle products (when I need to transport something, I just rent something adequate) and as such, there is a much larger customer base than for sensible options, which makes the others commercially risky.
Working tariffs make importing goods so expensive that manufacturing them nationally is viable. There are definitely areas where tariffs make sense, e.g. you have or want to build an industry that's competing against a subsidized industry from another country. Tariffs are one way to help with that.
But we all know that's way too much thought for him, which probably boiled down to "China bad"... which I'm not necessarily disagreeing with fully... but for reasons that tariffs aren't necessarily an answer to.
The way I do it with webservices is that I serve them all from virtual hosts. Scan my IP on port port 80? 301 moved permanently to same host port 443. 443? Welcome to nginx! Which webservice is actually served depends on the hostname being requested. The hostnames are just part of a wildcard subdomain with a matching wildcard certificate, so you can't derive the hosts from the blank landing page's cert. Though one option would be to disable https when no matching virtual host is found.
I know this isn't protection against sophisticated attackers, but nobody uses my home services except me when I'm not home so the exposure is very limited.
Anyhow, with Plex you have a central provider who, if I'm not mistaken, knows a lot about how their customers use their product. The angle of attack is different.
Realistically, no.
Theoretically, if you enable Secure Boot and a boot password through UEFI, it might be OK for some purposes, as an attacker clearing your Secure Boot settings would also reset the boot password, which you'd probably notice.
If you're concerned about Evil Maid attacks, use Secure Boot with a TPM. If your only concern is getting the device stolen with you losing access, Secure Boot from my point of view is only a convenience feature for stuff like easier unlocking
EDIT: it should be mentioned that technically, Secure Boot doesn't require the TPM and just checks the signatures. However, you'd need to check on each boot whether it's actually enabled with the correct settings and that your device has not been reset. The automation of this is sometimes called Measured Boot, which the TPM is used for. Secure Boot by itself doesn't protect you against sophisticated physical attackers. But the boot measurement gets thrown into the term because it makes sense.
At least that's my understanding.
Clearing CMOS clears it, but you will lose the TPM attestation, which indicates tampering
Are you talking about TPM 2? Because I don't think that makes classic ransomware more difficult. Also it doesn't have to be strictly a motherboard feature, e.g mine comes without a fixed hardware TPM, but my processor supports fTPM, which has up- and downsides. But it works as a TPM.
Also MS: Sadly, if your tech doesn't have these features you cannot upgrade and it will be insecure because I will not make updates for it.
Technically, this isn't true, MS will continue to update Windows 10 and even individual users can receive these officially through the Windows 10 ESU program: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/whats-new/extended-security-updates
Not that I'm in favor of what they're doing, I think they should rather support older hardware with Win 11 and require modern features only on modern systems. But from a security standpoint, their decision is actually good, as it builds a secure foundation. Most private users will just do whatever on that foundation (e.g. run random stuff from the Internet), but I think going forward, this is the right choice, though probably for the wrong reason of doing Intel a favor.
I was about to write something similar. You're just pushing the problem down the stack, and argon2 doesn't fix that particular one anyways.
The facts are:
- You always need an unencrypted entry point, so encryption can't be your secure anchor (though it could never be anyways, you're looking for authenticity there, not confidentiality)
- As the original post states, making sure an attacker never has physical access to your boot or EFI partition works against that particular evil maid attack. It won't protect from other threats however and isn't very practical.
- You need to authenticate your whole boot chain for actual protection, including initrd, which the linked article also rightfully points out
- The only system available to normal users to provide authenticity protection mechanisms is Secure Boot (with implementations not always perfect)
- In practice, you need to enroll your own keys to sign your initrd and have a mechanism to actually check it, or use something like a signed UKI
- In your actual system, make sure your boot partition is only available to root - EFI mandates vFAT which doesn't support owner attributes, so put on a restrictive mask (0077)
- Your UEFI needs to be protected by password so that an attacker can't just disable Secure Boot and replace your protected files
With all these in place, you should set up booting from an encrypted partition where they key is loaded from the TPM with sufficient PCRs bound and a PIN or something similar. I'm unaware of current solutions to easily have a kernel check against the registers during boot, so in case your system won't decrypt with the PIN as your input alone, you know that your boot process has been altered (not necessarily malicious, could be a firmware update, but still).
Real security is hard, there is no easy solution if the vendor doesn't control the hardware (which both Apple and Microsoft do), most users don't care that much that distribution would push for it. You rather still have the unhealthy "open source is secure and TPM / secure boot is a Microsoft tool to lock out other operating systems" attitude.
PS. this is not meant as a guide for setting up a secure system, just some considerations when considering the approach.
TPM can be the fix, but it needs to be integrated into the boot process correctly.
https://0pointer.net/blog/brave-new-trusted-boot-world.html mentions some or most of the pitfalls
The problem I have with this is that there's no definition of what "owning" means. Never have individuals bought a game and then owned all rights associated with it. It was always a license that included personal use and nothing much else.
However, due to how media distribution worked, this license was generally valid forever and could be transferred to another party, and these two factors - especially the first one - make a good point: why would I enter such a license if the other side can factually nullify it at any point, while I lose that option after a certain time?
Apart from that, media piracy was never stealing in the first place. It's about unlicensed usage and distribution of media. And rightholders can't be surprised if people don't license it if the construct is so stacked to their disadvantage.
I think if LetsEncrypt went away, so would ZeroSSL's free offer.
However, I do think not having limitations on the API is good; automation is good practice and I guess this is a concession to customers /users who have no automation in place (though this is a sad state by now). LE doesn't offer anything comparable AFAIK.
Never used them, but they state at https://zerossl.com/features/acme/ that their free acme certs include wildcards.
Maybe ZeroSSL
It's like every generation loses the ability to do something in computer technology that was just abstracted away somehow. I as a millennial have never soldered a PC mainboard (modding an Xbox doesn't count), but I'd say that otherwise, my understanding is pretty good. And I think all of my friends understand the concepts of files.
I recently asked someone about 10 years older if he knew what partitioning and formatting means in the context, and he knew, despite initially saying he has no clue about computers, to show someone 10 years younger (who didn't know) that such knowledge was just basically required back in the day. And it's not like these terms are obsolete, the concepts are still the same, even though we went from MBR to GPT and from FAT32 or whatever to better filesystems. It's no different for phones, but not required and even hidden.
I'd say generally, the technology userbase broadened while average knowledge in the group declined, however I'm not sure whether the absolute numbers of people with a certain knowledge level actually went down.
I dislike fanservice because it often seems shoehorned in, adding no value outside itself whatsoever and as such taking away from the rest.
Mind you if I want smut,I just watch smut. Simple as
Their higher-end models seem of nice build quality at least, but that's something I just expect at a certain price point.
Linux isn't even an option at my current job, it's WSL if anything. And that on the development machines only. Office work machines are Win 10 without any privileges, which I'm fine with. Employer pays for the time I take longer for certain things. His choice.
Unfortunately, there aren't that many great European options, so buying somewhat domestic is hard.