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Just How Paranoid Are You?
An anonymous reader writes "We all understand the need for security in a corporate environment. Personal computers, however, typically don't have nearly the amount of sensitive information (or it's at least less damaging if found). How far do you go to protect your computer? I recently went overboard on securing my information (at least as secure as Windows XP can be). I have a hardware firewall (GTA GB500), 30 character password, and all remotely personal information stored on a 256bit AES encrypted volume. How far do you go to protect your information against 'Big Brother' or even your family/friends?"
Like I'm going to discuss that here on Slashdot! You know who might be reading.
I have OpenBSD on my firewall and main work machine. Encrypted partitions too. GPG everything. My Windows 2000 game machine is locked tight and on a DMZ without IE being used. My monitor is wrapped in tinfoil, naturally, with a small cutout just large enough to have a 640x480 window viewable. I wrapped my mouse in tinfoil but that made it hard to use so I cut a hole in the bottom which allowed the light to hit the desk surface. Problem there was the desk was wrapped in tinfoil, too. So I made my own mousepad because I don't trust the ones made by The Man. It's made from a dead rabbit I found on the street. I flattened it out and dehydrated it. When I need a random number I pinch some fur and pull. however many strands of fur I get in that pull is the random number I use. Of course I need a new mousepad every few weeks as I never reuse the same tuft of fur twice. Never trust the PRNG in any OS, even OpenBSD. Theo is watching. Speaking of that, the other day I was installing OpenBSD 3.6 on a new machine and then I realized... CDs are a form of RFID tag. The unique bit patterns on them can be detected from space. So I wrap my CDs in tinfoil when not in use. Speaking of tinfoil, I find it best to buy the cheapest stuff from dollar stores. They don't usually use the UPC barcoding at those places. Just "$1.. $1.. $1..". Barcode readers don't use OpenBSD but I think Theo is trying to get in there. Speaking of barcodes, the other day I pulled a package of gum from my pocket and the person I was with said "Ohh... Spearmint!" I ran away. He obviously has a remote UPC scanner and knew that I had spearmint gum. He says the wrapper was in plain site but I think that's just an excuse.
Trolling is a art,
After all, doesn't everyone have my best interests at heart? Why, just the other day, a nice Nigerian man sent me an e-mail about a wonderful offer, and I don't even know him!
Hellooooo, Mr. Government Man!
Don't be a looter...and yes, I know that it's spelled with an "A" instead of an "E".
My computer is encased in Carbonite, and it is stored in a file cabinet in the basement with a sign on the door "Beware of Leopard". The password? I tore it to bits, put bacon grease on it, and fed it to the dog. However, these measures are not enough for security: the machine itself happens to be one of those cardboard replica PCs you find on furniture in the back of "Staples". No WAY you gonna hack this sucker!
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
I run only knoppix Live CD, and I incinerate my RAM after I am done just to be sure there's nothing left on that RamDisk. Kingston loves me now!
Thanks for letting us know you have a 30 character password. That'll be much easier to crack than having to deal with 1 - 29 and 31 - infinity length password.
-- There is no sig line, only Zuul.
I keep a bunch of nerds surrounding my house for security. I feed them doritos and keep them motivated by issuing fake Duke Nukem Forever press releases. When I see them becoming too docile, I toss Windows Magazine at them to get them all riled up.
I always save my last mod point to mod up a good troll. You people are too serious.
Who wants to know?
Oh, yeah......and I DO pay attention to my logs, so that dude at 67.13X.XXX.XX in Vancouver Washington who linked to my machine from Slashdot just now and is trying to get access, I am watching you as we speak . A little more work and I can have your GPS coordinates too. :-)
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
I made an end run on this whole problem. With some carefully executed electro shock therapy, I erased all of my personal information from my own brain!
Just try your evil identity theft tricks now!
Sometimes my arms bend back.
Never thought of effecting security by relocating my home server to the no-man's-land in the middle of the Korean peninsula. I think you may be on to something. No one would ever think to check there!
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
I pile my old computer hardware into a wall around the house, and from time to time pour gasoline and light it on fire. A hadware firewall. The neighbors don't appreciate it, but it gives me a lot of security
Turns out bad sex is better than no sex. I'll have to be more grateful for what I get with the next girlfriend.
...this is just a trick post to lure me out.
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How far will you go to protect your pr0n collection from your wife's prying, suspicious eyes? :)
Then you turn off his power, cut his phone line, and cause his gas oven to blow up. Ohh. wait.. real life doesn't follow movie rules about what "hackers" can do?
Anyone without a strong root password is likely to have a strong root password provided for them by an "outside consultant". :-)
Life is short: void the warranty.
I keep my data on a proprietary system of my own devising - the gibbon/pigeonhole arrangement:
Deep inside my personal mountain lair is my own manually operated paperbased datacentre housing a colony of approximately 6,000 intricately trained gibbons who perform the day to day roles of system administration and data archiving.
When I access my partitions from windows in the comfort of my home, I'm not browsing local hard drives, oh no. I have had one of my gibbons integrate his brain into the windows kernel so that he is at one with my filesystems. I call him Ook. When I read/write to the partitions, Ook interprets the commands and passes them on to a waiting messenger gibbon, using a custom developed encrypted adaptation of the gibbon language, unintelligible to other gibbons in case big brother trains some gibbons of his own and infiltrates my workforce.
Anyway, the messenger gibbons (who are hand picked in a rigorous training scheme for their incredible memories) scamper off to my mountain datacentre, passing through retinal, palm, and voice identification scans, before entering a 128bit hexadecimal password (case sensitive) into a keyboard that is not QWERTY in format, but is made up of blocks in the ground which must be jumped on to enter each character. The blocks aren't labelled as such, but are cryptically imprinted with pictorial representations of the alphanumeric characters they represent (eg: picture of toast, rhymes with ghost, ghosts are scary, scary rhymes with hairy, hairy has five letres, thereforce that block represents the number 5, see?).
So anyhow, once the messenger gibbon enters the secure area of my datacentre, he passes the message on to one of the worker gibbons, light in build and superb gymnasts, who moves to the appropriate pigeon hole in a 2D array laid out on a rock wall measuring more or less 1km square in surface area. Each 5cm^2 pigeon hole houses a piece of paper, on which is written a 32bit binary word. The worker gibbons are trained to encrypt and decrypt the binary strings, as the binary is not regular binary, but is instead shuffled according to a complex mathematical hashing algorithm. Once the gibbon has decrypted and either memorised or modified and re-encrypted the binary, he scampers back to the messenger gibbon and using a proprietary gibbon dance, reports either a fail or a sucess in the operation, along with any data requested for a read operation.
This all comes back up the chain to Ook, who has windows tell me that everything is fine.
I'm sure you can't deny that it's as secure as all get out, and it's pretty much transparent apart from the half hour access times, which makes playing counter strike quite the bitch, but for your everyday Word and Email, it's perfect.
My password's set to my dog's name.
My dog's name is currently 4$ter*Zf1, but I change it every 90 days.
bp
Ohh. wait.. real life doesn't follow movie rules about what "hackers" can do?
Shhhh... don't tell people that!!! I like the all-consuming power I have as a computer geek.
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30 character password
... [later:] bamm, fracking puter lands on the sidewalk.
Now, that;s not paranoid, just plain stupid. Just imagine, early in the morning, quickly checking mail before tumbling out the door going to work, and I mistype 1 character: bamm, type again, mistype 1 character again: bamm, type again,
Why would someone do such a thing to oneself, being sane to a very minimal extent ? Buy a darn iris scanner, or fingerprint authentication stuff, whatever floats your boat. But 30 chars to type just to get into your spyware-house ? Get a life.
Regarding the main question, i.e. being paranoid: one can efficiently and effectively protect even a Windows PC without becoming, well, posessed.
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
I google for 2 minutes and find a great instructional video on how to open said laptop lock with a piece of paper and some tape.
A few days go by, a new directive: "Please keep your laptop locked away in a drawer when you leave for the day."
So I have a dual homed laptop that is doing nothing but NAT, port filtering and routing using IPTables under linux. Is that a hardware or a software firewall?
09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0
Jesus loves you, I think you suck
Finally, someone explains what .NET is supposed to do.
~Idarubicin