privacy

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1. Gmail mangles .gpg files

   

   Why?

   I dont know

   If you change bytes in a .gpg somebody is bound to notice. Right?

   Im using a 3rd party to send a .gpg to a gmail account and the checksums before and after simply dont match

   I dont want to really assume evilness, since modifiying bytes on the attachments seems pretty sketchy

   Maybe im doing something wrong

   The fact that the checksums are okay if I send it to my personal server using the same 3rd party mail provider its a little suspicious tho

   Ive been told that

   [...], email and gmail are different things.  So I wouldn't be surprised if they are not 100% compatible ;-)
   

   Funny, or is it? google has most of my email because it has all of yours. They have a lot of leverage to define the email experience

   In the end, just renaming the .gpg to something else fixed it (What??)

   And while we are still ranting about google, lets finish with a pet peeve of mine

   I hate that they virtually remove the concept of domain or email address. Not that they are just the f*cking anchor point to security

   Security and, you know, knowing where the f*ck you are going or who you are trying to get in contact with

   Instead they hide this info as much as possible in labels so you learn to trust them, instead of learning to trust something as simple and as ubiquitous as a domain or an email

2. Virus, Qubes-OS and Debian

   

   This is the virus venn diagram. Its pretty accurate and many people, including people that gets along with technology, is oblivious to it. Voluntarily installing crap by installing random programs you just googled in your computer hardly counts as a virus

   Sometimes they overlap tho. What I call “trawling viruses”. Using some very old exploit that should hardly work on anybody and spamming it, you can still get lots of people that never update. In this case, you dont care about anything, you just try get a quick profit and you dont really care if you slow down the target machine

   But by and large, virus try to be as invisible as possible, do their bussiness and go undetected for as long as possible. If they can make an optimization to your system, like patching how they got in, they will

   Using debian is one way to protect yourself… but they still fall short because it still uses a very old authorization model

   

   Its no secret that the authorization model in computers is really old

   Qubes-os is a system that tries to mitigates that problem quite sucessfully. Qubes-os 4.0 rc1 has been released recently. Im currently testing it on my mediabox, and will probably use it in my main machine soon

   Holger gave a talk a few weeks ago named “Using qubes os from the pov of a debian developer”. In debconf fashion you can watch it online

3. quote on privacy

   “Google is an over-eager octopus, but Facebook crosses the line into hentai”