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Will ParanoidLinux Protect the Truly Paranoid?
ruphus13 writes "There are still places on the world where having anonymity might mean the difference between life and death. Covering one's tracks is considered to be of such paramount importance that we are now witnessing the rise of a Linux distro catering to the most paranoid. The 'alpha-alpha' version of ParanoidLinux is now out. But is this the best way to protect oneself? Couldn't it be easily circumvented? The article asks, 'Why is it necessary to put the applications and services designed to protect anonymity, to encrypt files, to make the user nameless and faceless, all together, in one distribution? Let's think in a truly paranoid manner. Wouldn't it be far easier for a nefarious government organization to target that distribution's repositories, mirror that singular distribution's disk images with files of its own design, and leave every last one of that distribution's users in the great wide open?' What should truly paranoid user do?"
1. Always borrow random open wifi access points,
in a geographic pattern not centered around your habitual location
2. Get a new unknowing assistant to type in roughly what you want to say each time. There are pattern detectors for your ways of expressing things.
3. Establish online identities such as gmail that have no tie whatsoever to any of your identity info or financial info
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Ken Thompson talks about using untrusted compilers in his lecture, "Reflections on Trusting Trust".
(See also: this)
What should truly paranoid user do?
get help?
get BSD?
Seriously, there is already an OS aimed at security... OpenBSD:
"Our efforts emphasize portability, standardization, correctness, proactive security and integrated cryptography."
"Audit Process:
Our security auditing team typically has between six and twelve members who continue to search for and fix new security holes. We have been auditing since the summer of 1996. The process we follow to increase security is simply a comprehensive file-by-file analysis of every critical software component. We are not so much looking for security holes, as we are looking for basic software bugs, and if years later someone discovers the problem used to be a security issue, and we fixed it because it was just a bug, well, all the better. Flaws have been found in just about every area of the system. Entire new classes of security problems have been found during our audit, and often source code which had been audited earlier needs re-auditing with these new flaws in mind. Code often gets audited multiple times, and by multiple people with different auditing skills."