I’m personally motivated in a non-commercial way to supply everyone with as much cybersecurity as possible in the interests of civlization, especially now. I’ve just finished what I wanted to releae as “set” 2 days ago and it’s time to announce them.
I’m the former Web Application Security Team Lead for the National Computer Center, Research Triangle Park, having been contracted to the EPA by the now defunct Computer Sciences Corporation.
If you have some extra hardware not really being used I would suggest perhaps a great use of it would be to create yourself a hardened platform, just in case, to protect your sensitive data on an emminently stable platform going forward.
Maybe you’ve always wanted to try a BSD, well now is a great time to do that. They are super stable, super reliable, community drive, and you are in control of everything.
I would also like to mention that if you’d like to go extra hard consider Hardened BSD. Another alternative is using grsecurity/PaX kernel patched Alpine Linux as a Desktop choosing crypt full disk encryption during setup + AppArmor.
Just as an example you can get your hands on a $250 Thinkpad T495 and installing GhostBSD on it is as simple to setup as Linux Mint and runs as fast as a brand new 2023 Windows laptop. If you choose Dragonfly BSD, the fastest BSD, on a T495 (the lastest year fully BSD compatible laptop), my repo will completely configure it for you, complete with all applications needed for a professional developer.
In addition to that I’ve created a Network Based Firefox hardening solution that wipes the extremely profitable, For-Profit, Mozilla Corporation off your Internet and easily combines with Arkenfox. It removes Mozilla servers from being contacted by any application or service on your machine and does not interfere with web page rendering.
I’ve created my own Git Repository using Gogs (which Gitea is based on) where you can get all the goods here:
Latest Software
Main Website
https://www.quadhelion.engineering
About
https://www.quadhelion.engineering/about.html
Backup GitHub
Backup BitBucket
https://bitbucket.org/quadhelion-engineering/workspace/repositories/
Yes, I’m serious about my mission statement in the beginning and I have some more ideas. First there is a Linux OS that installs all kinds of Educational Software, like Encyclopedia, Maps, Learning Tools that is all available offline in the full 17GB Full Version. It’s called Endless OS (no affilitions) and here is the excerpt.
Multi-language system, pre-loaded with apps in English including games, productivity software, reference materials like Cooking, Farming, Health, Travel, and educational materials like a robust Encyclopedia.
It would be great if all of us could have some of the civilization important databases on this BSD installation of yours. Please contribute a downloadable database file or file set you know of. I’ll start.
Downloadable Wikipedia Database Encyclopedia Britannica All Volumes
I’ve recently been looking into downloading offline copies of important data, since I don’t expect that today’s freely available information will continue to be freely available and accessible in perpetuity.
One problem I quickly ran into was that e.g. wikipedia downloads are not in an easily browsable format.
I found a project called Kiwix that packages datasets from a variety of free sources, like Wikipedia and Project Gutenberg, along with a reader application that can read these “zim” archives. The different data sources are available via torrents or direct downloads. https://wiki.kiwix.org/wiki/Content
I’m particularly interested in freely downloadable archives of scientific papers. A lot seems to be paywalled, or at least free-account-walled, even though the papers themselves are theoretically open-access. I would love to know of any sources out there to download an entire database locally.
I made a Hacker News post about human knowledge databases and got some interesting data I’d like to share back to this thread.
- Wikipedia Single 100GB File Thanks to @hersh@literature.cafe
- http://sci-hub.wf/
- Arxiv Download Script
- https://wholeearth.info/
- https://the-eye.eu/
Related:
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The Internet can be a really mean place, thank you for the kind words.
Thank you for taking the time to build and share this. I’ve dabbled in the BSDs from time to time and use TrueNAS as my storage solution at home.
I can’t recommend anyone who doesn’t even fully comprehend windows to install any Linux distribution for security purposes. Sounds like a disaster waiting to happen.
Oh yeah? How often are you able to prevent the windows installer from ignoring your partition tables that you just configured manually, with the fucking Windows partition tool?
Because I’m up to about 50/50, and I’ve installed more Windows, Linux, and BSD systems than anyone ever should.
Point is, can anyone really truly and completely understand the temperamental beast that is the Windows installer?
Also, this is BSD, not Linux. So there’s that…
I don’t think I’d necessarily agree with that, but just to note, op is recommending the BSDs, not Linux.
Ok, color me intrigued. I’ve got some general questions
- What is your stance on Universal Design as it applies to ethical engineering?
- Also, your site indicates you’re a fan of >1 level thinking. What risks have you anticipated in developing/providing these resources?
- Also, Is there any thinking around how you might measure or address bias in data and source selection, or engineering decisions?
Grsecurity stopped providing their kernel patches for free years ago. The alpine grsec patches are years old – like before spectre/meltdown. Don’t use them. Just use hardenedbsd/netbsd/openbsd.
You sound like a buddy of mine from high school. Great guy, I’d love to see what he’s up to now, but last I heard it was super secret, like he’s trying to build his own kernel and he doesn’t want anyone to copy him, I guess.
Anyways, ELI5? Any good reason I should use your system instead of Debian 12 and normal hardening practices? You talk about “Linuxification” like it’s a bad thing, can you expand on that idea? Most people use PCs for gaming or media purposes, how do you address that issue?
Also his (so far unsupported) shots against Mozilla. How does that help in a world where >90% of the Desktop world is still dominated by Microsoft and web and mobil by Google products?
solution that wipes the extremely profitable, For-Profit, Mozilla Corporation off your Internet
Mozilla should be removed from the entire internet but hey, it’s a beginning.
