sukhbira
VIP
PUBLIC COMPUTERS IN ACTIVIST SPACES SHOULD USE LIVE DISKS, NOT HARD DRIVES!
A public computer running Microsoft Windows is a dangerous trap. Even a machine with Linux on a hard drive is vulnerable to recovery of “deleted’ history, cookies(as in EMAIL PASSWORDS?), and cache.
We all remember the infamous police raid on the Long haul Infoshop on the West Coast. One of the things the pigs did there was to steal hard drives from public access computers. THIS MEANS THEY CAN RUN DATA RECOVERY FOR EMAILS, PASSWORDS, ANYTHING!
You can’t use encryption to stop this because all users would have to be given the password, meaning an undercover could get it with ease.
Even if you use home-on-ram or firefox-on-ram scripts, an attacker could crack the root passwords remotely, then enter the activist space and replace the scripts or stop them from running at boot time. Therefore, hard drives of any kind are an unacceptable security hazard for activist public access computers.
As a result, the Long Haul Infoshop chose not to replace those hard drives. Instead, Linux live disks(I don’t know which distro) were dropped into the CD drives, guaranteeing that the computers could not save ANYTHING. Next raid gets nothing, reducing the chance of any more raids.
HOWTO:
While Ubuntu and many other linux distros install from a live disk, these live disks are painfully slow to boot and use, as they are not designs for speed. Knoppix, however, and especially the DSL(Damned Small Linux) varient of it, are another story.
A public computer running Microsoft Windows is a dangerous trap. Even a machine with Linux on a hard drive is vulnerable to recovery of “deleted’ history, cookies(as in EMAIL PASSWORDS?), and cache.
We all remember the infamous police raid on the Long haul Infoshop on the West Coast. One of the things the pigs did there was to steal hard drives from public access computers. THIS MEANS THEY CAN RUN DATA RECOVERY FOR EMAILS, PASSWORDS, ANYTHING!
You can’t use encryption to stop this because all users would have to be given the password, meaning an undercover could get it with ease.
Even if you use home-on-ram or firefox-on-ram scripts, an attacker could crack the root passwords remotely, then enter the activist space and replace the scripts or stop them from running at boot time. Therefore, hard drives of any kind are an unacceptable security hazard for activist public access computers.
As a result, the Long Haul Infoshop chose not to replace those hard drives. Instead, Linux live disks(I don’t know which distro) were dropped into the CD drives, guaranteeing that the computers could not save ANYTHING. Next raid gets nothing, reducing the chance of any more raids.
HOWTO:
While Ubuntu and many other linux distros install from a live disk, these live disks are painfully slow to boot and use, as they are not designs for speed. Knoppix, however, and especially the DSL(Damned Small Linux) varient of it, are another story.
