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Search - "got a good free vpn?"
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I've got a confession to make.
A while ago I refurbished this old laptop for someone, and ended up installing Bodhi on it. While I was installing it however, I did have some wicked thoughts..
What if I could ensure that the system remains up-to-date by running an updater script in a daily cron job? That may cause the system to go unstable, but at least it'd be up-to-date. Windows Update for Linux.
What if I could ensure that the system remains protected from malware by periodically logging into it and checking up, and siphoning out potential malware code? The network proximity that's required for direct communication could be achieved by offering them free access to one of my VPN servers, in the name of security or something like that. Permanent remote access, in the name of security. I'm not sure if Windows has this.
What if I could ensure that the system remains in good integrity by disabling the user from accessing root privileges, and having them ask me when they want to install a piece of software? That'd make the system quite secure, with the only penetration surface now being kernel exploits. But it'd significantly limit what my target user could do with their own machine.
At the end I ended up discarding all of these thoughts, because it'd be too much work to implement and maintain, and it'd be really non-ethical. I felt filthy from even thinking about these things. But the advantages of something like this - especially automated updates, which are a real issue on my servers where I tend to forget to apply them within a couple of weeks - can't just be disregarded. Perhaps Microsoft is on to something?11 -
Long rant ahead.. 5k characters pretty much completely used. So feel free to have another cup of coffee and have a seat 🙂
So.. a while back this flash drive was stolen from me, right. Well it turns out that other than me, the other guy in that incident also got to the police 😃
Now, let me explain the smiley face. At the time of the incident I was completely at fault. I had no real reason to throw a punch at this guy and my only "excuse" would be that I was drunk as fuck - I've never drank so much as I did that day. Needless to say, not a very good excuse and I don't treat it as such.
But that guy and whoever else it was that he was with, that was the guy (or at least part of the group that did) that stole that flash drive from me.
Context: https://devrant.com/rants/2049733 and https://devrant.com/rants/2088970
So that's great! I thought that I'd lost this flash drive and most importantly the data on it forever. But just this Friday evening as I was meeting with my friend to buy some illicit electronics (high voltage, low frequency arc generators if you catch my drift), a policeman came along and told me about that other guy filing a report as well, with apparently much of the blame now lying on his side due to him having punched me right into the hospital.
So I told the cop, well most of the blame is on me really, I shouldn't have started that fight to begin with, and for that matter not have drunk that much, yada yada yada.. anyway he walked away (good grief, as I was having that friend on visit to purchase those electronics at that exact time!) and he said that this case could just be classified then. Maybe just come along next week to the police office to file a proper explanation but maybe even that won't be needed.
So yeah, great. But for me there's more in it of course - that other guy knows more about that flash drive and the data on it that I care about. So I figured, let's go to the police office and arrange an appointment with this guy. And I got thinking about the technicalities for if I see that drive back and want to recover its data.
So I've got 2 phones, 1 rooted but reliant on the other one that's unrooted for a data connection to my home (because Android Q, and no bootable TWRP available for it yet). And theoretically a laptop that I can put Arch on it no problem but its display backlight is cooked. So if I want to bring that one I'd have to rely on a display from them. Good luck getting that done. No option. And then there's a flash drive that I can bake up with a portable Arch install that I can sideload from one of their machines but on that.. even more so - good luck getting that done. So my phones are my only option.
Just to be clear, the technical challenge is to read that flash drive and get as much data off of it as possible. The drive is 32GB large and has about 16GB used. So I'll need at least that much on whatever I decide to store a copy on, assuming unchanged contents (unlikely). My Nexus 6P with a VPN profile to connect to my home network has 32GB of storage. So theoretically I could use dd and pipe it to gzip to compress the zeroes. That'd give me a resulting file that's close to the actual usage on the flash drive in size. But just in case.. my OnePlus 6T has 256GB of storage but it's got no root access.. so I don't have block access to an attached flash drive from it. Worst case I'd have to open a WiFi hotspot to it and get an sshd going for the Nexus to connect to.
And there we have it! A large storage device, no root access, that nonetheless can make use of something else that doesn't have the storage but satisfies the other requirements.
And then we have things like parted to read out the partition table (and if unchanged, cryptsetup to read out LUKS). Now, I don't know if Termux has these and frankly I don't care. What I need for that is a chroot. But I can't just install Arch x86_64 on a flash drive and plug it into my phone. Linux Deploy to the rescue! 😁
It can make chrooted installations of common distributions on arm64, and it comes extremely close to actual Linux. With some Linux magic I could make that able to read the block device from Android and do all the required sorcery with it. Just a USB-C to 3x USB-A hub required (which I have), with the target flash drive and one to store my chroot on, connected to my Nexus. And fixed!
Let's see if I can get that flash drive back!
P.S.: if you're into electronics and worried about getting stuff like this stolen, customize it. I happen to know one particular property of that flash drive that I can use for verification, although it wasn't explicitly customized. But for instance in that flash drive there was a decorative LED. Those are current limited by a resistor. Factory default can be say 200 ohm - replace it with one with a higher value. That way you can without any doubt verify it to be yours. Along with other extra security additions, this is one of the things I'll be adding to my "keychain v2".11 -
Mann i will always be a newbie to the world of linux, but running cmd on it, its always scary. Like one purge command and it went on deleting so many packages i didn't knew even existed at the first place.
I feel like a blind man following the blogs hoping to god that no wrong shit happens. And the blogs are also like "do step1 then step2 then step3, you will see x , do y and it will work" , and surprisingly it works!.
Linux is a beautiful mystery.
And why the hell is almost every browser in linux broken?
- Netflix, hotstsr and Spotify won't run on any versions of opera or chromium because opera didn't got some widevine installed.
- chrome runs but no good free vpn(i prefer hola/1click) works
- firefox is weirdly slow.
And yet this is the world's most lovable platform for web dev5