Security Saturday - Update!
It is time for me to look for a new laptop, so I am going to write about laptops. My current laptop has all kinds of issues. When I say the current one, I really mean the one I use for most of my activities. I have four laptops laying around:
1. Yami
Yami is my main laptop, it is the spiritual successor to Sirius A (a desktop) and Sirius B (a laptop). Sirius A was an AMD Athlon system, Sirius B was a Dell laptop with a Core i5 and some AMD/Ati graphics card. Their successor, Yami, has a Core i7 (2nd or 3rd gen) and an NVidia GeForce 860M. It still hold up well, but the power management hardware is pratically shot. I can no longer travel with it. It has been getting blue screens more frequently and as such I decided it really is time to find a good replacement.
2. Hikari
A counterpart to Yami, bought from my father's employer for 10% of the original value. Outfitted with a Core i5 and a simple intel onboard graphics card, it is not the beast that Yami is. But it certainly performs in a more stable manner. I use this to do my security work and whenever I need to visit people with hardware equipped.
3. Peregrin
A 12-year old laptop with an intel Celeron processor, which is the host for my Pi-Hole setup (DNS based adblocker). It is currently inactive because it lost power for a while. It has not managed to restart.
4. [REDACTED]
Company laptop which I use for my work as a security analyst. It has an i3 processor, and is probably the most stable piece of hardware
So with these four in mind, we should have an honest look. First of all, we need to ask what's up with Peregrin, and if he can be replaced. The answer, of course, is that Peregrin is too old and should be replaced. Managing a Pi-Hole installation (as the name suggestests) can be done on a Raspberry Pi. This can be either version 3 or 4, and it would probably perform more stable than Peregrin is anyways. This in turn would mean that we could also start using the Raspberry Pi as a file server, or a media station. In short, it opens op possibilities beyond just replacing the server.
Also note that a Raspberry Pi is perfect for hobbyists trying to learn linux, or program C on a system that is not their main system.
We can clearly replace Peregrin. Now, before moving on to Yami, let us consider Hikari. Hikari should at some point be replaced as well, since it is old. It is meant to be a secure laptop, not for games. Most preferably it should be replaced by a laptop that can run QubesOS (thanks for the tip, @neal_laugman), and with a strong battery. However, for now Hikari is fine being a LinuxMint laptop. Is linux secure? No. Not if you do not put in the work. It can be compromised much like Windows can. However, there are less attacks on Linux, since Windows has a greater market share. If a customer has issues in Windows, the risk of my Linux laptop getting infected in some way by (for example) sharing files in some fashion with this windows machine is significantly lower than when I use Windows.
This leaves us with Yami. For Yami too I have security requirements, but my view gets skewed because sometimes I like to play games that are on the heavy side. Not often, and maybe I should just stop playing such games to save both money (on the graphics card) and to elminiate the extra attack vector of game library systems (Steam, Origin, Uplay) and DRM software. Even more so, I might drop all games and leave Windows altogether. In that case the replacement for Hikari and the one for Yami would be the same laptop, with simply a powerful processor and a lot of RAM, but without any dedicated graphics card.
As you can see there is a lot of choice here, and most of it does not concern most people. However, with the limited resources I have available to me, choosing wisely is a real challenge. In the end it will likely come down to vices and devices. Probably I will buy something that can run my favorite games. Probably I will have to take some extra measures to make Windows 10 behave properly and not have it sell my soul to Microsoft. Probably just getting a simple laptop is the better choice in the long run.
But in any case, I will probably contact BTO when I decide. They are a great company. All those years ago they custom-made Yami, and they replaced parts when some of it's hardware failed the first time. Yami has served me for almost 7 years in total and I am convinved that this time too, whatever I choose, they will deliver in quality.
Below here, the links of all I wrote about in this article:
https://www.raspberrypi.org/
https://www.qubes-os.org/
https://linuxmint.com/
https://bto.eu
There is so much more to this one chapter, but it is so good already!
I had to cut it short because guests arrived, but this should get you started on your own study :)
@calvinrempel Thank you once again for the Theology Tuesday you did, I refer back to it in this one :)
@JamesDerian Congratulations with your Marriage :)
Next time there might (almost certainly) not be a Theology Tuesday, so the official next one will be February 22nd! I have a marriage to attend. As the groom. Our home is still half a project.
Fun times!
Alc and I talk about my book that is now officially finished. This is part 1 of 2. Parts have not been neatly cut. Part two will air 5 minutes after part 1 for coninuity!
Hope you enjoy :)
This is the third corner to have persistent discussions and talks in. I love tech, but especially once it transcends hardware a little. I have two degrees; a bachelor's in Software Engineering and a master's in Information Security Technology. My graduation thesis focused on assembly-level optimizations (that is, one level above the hardware level) and my free subjects were in formal verification. This is why I love programming in the security corner, or maybe it is the other way around.
I started going down the Security path because I early on saw that the world around us would become a dangerous cesspool of badly-implemented and hostile tech. Now I am one of the people that understands the field around that mess :)
So in here you can discuss secure phones, weird programming languages, sad truths about internet-connected fridges. Also about malware, adblockers, and so on and so fort!
A lot of tech talk I do over at the @Lunduke community, where a lot of nerds hang out and it is ...
Much like the reading corner, let's have a music corner! A few rules for this one, since some music can be provocative. I don't mind much but let's keep youtube links with risque thumbnails out of here.
Other music I might also mind. "Do you find that offensive?" might someone ask. Yes, there is some music I choose not to listen on principle, and I walk a thin line there sometimes. But do not worry, I have a wide taste otherwise so feel free to share almost anything :)
Either way, here is the music corner!
Many times when we talk about security, we mean to say "Digital security". In essence we mean to say that our hardware and software that we use stays safe no matter what we do. And even though the ISO27001 standard (and by extension, for example, the NEN7510 standard) make it abundantly clear that security is a people-domain problem, we usually take that as a process-like truth. Meaning, we think that being secure is a matter of regulating people.
The truth is very different. For example, while writing this I am pretty shot. I slept five hours and I an under influence of a bunch of painkillers and some alcohol. Before you ask what I was thinking, let me mention that I have a genetic defect in my spine that I am dealing with right now by taking measured doses of all three (and yes, to get the Bible into this conversation, there is even a biblical ground for the inebriation with alcohol - see proverbs and the letters to Timothy - , although I did not use red wine. But hey, I am still on top of ...
