• 6 Posts
  • 122 Comments
Joined 10 months ago
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Cake day: December 27th, 2023

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  • Sure, but in my experience it’s not that hard to convince people to get on Signal. (Maybe because here in Europe everyone already has like 15 messengers on their phone, so it doesn’t bother anyone to download another one)

    If you use SMS, you can argue that Signal has much better photo and video quality, it can be used from a tablet or a computer and it’s basically just like iMessage but for all platforms.


  • I would recommend you to try out Linux in a virtual machine and play around with it. You can watch this video if you don’t know how to set this up. You can do much more with a VM than with WSL. It allows you to basically try any Linux Distribution, whereas WSL only supports a few distros. In a VM you also get a desktop environment by default, whereas WSL mostly restricts you to the terminal. Sure, you can run graphical apps in WSLg, but you still don’t have a Linux desktop. Lastly, it’s much easier to take a snapshot of a VM, and roll back in case you break something.

    After you get comfortable in a VM, maybe try booting a Live USB of some Linux distribution. That way you will be able to try it out on your actual hardware.

    After that, you can set up dual boot. That way, you can still keep your Windows installation, but also use Linux without any restrictions or limitations.




  • I recommend the following section of this article:

    Rooting your device allows an attacker to easily gain extremely high privileges. Android’s architecture is built upon the principle of least privilege. By default, only around 6 processes run as the root user on a typical Android device, and even those are still heavily constrained via the full system SELinux policy. Completely unrestricted root is found nowhere in the operating system; even the init system does not have unrestricted root access. Exposing privileges far greater than any other part of the OS to the application layer is not a good idea.

    It does not matter if you have to whitelist apps that have root — an attacker can fake user input by, for example, clickjacking, or they can exploit vulnerabilities in apps that you have granted root to. Rooting turns huge portions of the operating system into root attack surface; vulnerabilities in the UI layer — such as in the display server, among other things — can now be abused to gain complete root access. In addition, root fundamentally breaks verified boot and other security features by placing excessive trust in persistent state. By rooting your device, you are breaking Android’s security model and adding further layers of trust where it is inappropriate.

    A common argument for rooting is that Linux allows root, but this does not account for the fact that the average desktop Linux system does not have a security model like Android does. On the usual Linux system, gaining root is extremely easy, hence Linux hardening procedures often involve restricting access to the root account.