Simply put, I don’t trust Microsoft. Or Apple. The latter (Apple) worries me more, because the only place I use Windows is in hospitals. I can let the hospital have the lawsuit when (not if) the NSA hoovers up confidential medical data, and then are hacked….

I tend to use Fedora based distros now: Debian is good — I liked Crunchbang, and crunchbangplusplus continues that good work, but Canonical has made too many deals with Ubuntu.

There’s no way to turn off the “recovery” feature that sends your disk encryption keys to Microsoft by default, without notice — though you can (and should) ask Microsoft to forget the keys later.

The new disk encryption protocol in Windows 10 is in stark contrast with Microsoft’s Bitlocker product, a hardcore, Fed-infuriating full-disk encryption system that allows you to decide whether or not to escrow your keys with Microsoft.

Windows 10 has many unprecedented anti-user features: a remote killswitch that lets it disable your hardware; keylogging and browser-history logging that, by default, sends it all to Microsoft, and a deceptive “privacy mode” that continues to exfiltrate your data, even when you turn it on.

But one has to be careful here. Because the very nature of open source means it can be forked, and those forks can be evil.

Florian Grunow and Niklaus Schiess downloaded the sourcecode for Red Star OS, North Korea’s homegrown, paranoid fork of Red Hat’s Fedora, a flavor of GNU/Linux. The researchers analyzed the OS and presented their findings to the thirty second Chaos Communications Congress in Hamburg yesterday.

The OS is a marvel of paranoid terribleness, with lots of marvellously bad features. The one I was most interested in is its covert insertion of watermarks into every file that it touches, either on the OS’s launch disk or removable USB sticks. This is used to track down North Koreans who share illicit media files with their friends and mark them out for punishment in the country’s notorious gulags.
It’s nothing new that dictators force their citizens to use special operating systems. Back in 1999, China began developing Red Flag Linux, and Red Star OS in North Korea dates to 2002. Cuba also has its own Nova OS. The ultimate goal, aside from the above, is to ensure the populace is kept in line and isolated from any possible influence around the world.

All this, mind you, from open-source software that was originally designed to promote freedom. The irony is breathtaking.

In the idea world, one would buy a computer that is open source, open code, and secure. However, these are impossible to get in New Zealand: the simplest solution is to build a machine yourself or (if a laptop) replace the disk with a bigger SSD and then install what you want on that.

Avoiding malware. If from Fascists, or fascist corporations.