Kyle Rankin @kyle@librem.one

Many people don't know that @purism offers an anti-interdiction service for laptop orders. In this post I describe what the service is and some of the measures we put in place, including some new ones based on our PureBoot tamper-evident boot process.
https://puri.sm/posts/anti-interdiction-services/

Five years from now: "Whoops, it turns out we trained our AI on existing staff so it finds white men most trustworthy. Sorry everybody, we were told AI was unbiased." https://www.maketecheasier.com/face-scanning-ai-judge-job-applicants/

@aral @purism Yes we had a very limited supply although, hmm, there's a chance as the Librem 5s continue to roll out that some internal devkits might free up. I can't promise anything but if one did, would you still be interested?

@aral There was that one time with the @purism devkit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0V8q59UKmAQ

Two interesting tidbits:
1. Actual enforcement of the penalty clause for abusing DMCA takedowns.
2. He could use DMCA takedowns to get a person's home address!

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/10/man-agrees-to-pay-25000-for-abusing-youtubes-takedown-system/

I've gotten some questions about Packagekit and why we don't provide interactive signing during package updates. I talk at length about some of the challenges with that approach here: https://github.com/osresearch/heads/issues/533

I wrote an article about best practices (including travel tips) for PureBoot, @purism 's #FOSS tamper-evident boot firmware that allows the user to control all of the keys and secrets used for the signing process. Check it out here: https://puri.sm/posts/pureboot-best-practices/

Hey! Hackers disrespecting me?
Take 'em out.
You gotta keep 'em separated.
Hey! Pager's calling after me?
Prod is out.
You gotta keep 'em separated.
Hey, they don't pay no mind,
If they're not on a pager won't be working overtime.
Hey, come out and play.

By the time you hear the pager,
It's already too late,
Some untested code pushed to Ruby on Rails,
One server's wasted and your uptime's a waste.
It goes down the same as the thousands before,
No one is getting smarter,
No one's learning the score.
The neverending spree of hacks and simple mistakes
Is gonna tie your own rope tie your own rope tie your own.

Hey! Pager's calling after me?
Prod is out.
You gotta keep 'em separated.
Hey! Hackers disrespecting me?
Take 'em out.
You gotta keep 'em separated.
Hey, they don't pay no mind,
If they're from a different country won't be doing any time.
Hey, come out and play.

Like the latest fashion,
Like a spreading disease,
Devs will login all the way to production,
Getting root shells with the greatest of ease.

Pentests staked out your whole network locale,
And if they pop your Jenkins then it's all over pal.
If one dev exploit gets a shell in Linux,
They're gonna bash it up, slash it up, hack it up, prod's not up.

Inspector Gadget is a cautionary tale about a tech-obsessed gadget geek dealing with the consequences of buggy voice recognition software.

That said, if I ever do use a voice assistant, I'm changing the trigger phrase to "Go Go Gadget."

@pedro@social.linux.pizza Yes, and without effective state oversight or regulation.

Translation: PG&E has neglected maintenance and upgrades for so long that even with the spotlight on them it's going to take a *decade* to catch up.
"California Can Expect Blackouts For A Decade, Says PG&E CEO" https://n.pr/31oc020

@Amgine Thanks for the suggestion, I'll add it to the list!

@laura One of the interesting points in Snowden's autobiography was his description of the Internet of his childhood vs. today. Back then he could try on and dispose of personas and there was a stronger distinction between "real life" and "online life" that allowed one to make mistakes, mature, change ones mind, etc.

He makes a pretty strong case that many of the problems with the modern Internet are rooted in companies wanting to link real identity with online identity for ad targeting.