Hacker News Reader

I bow to your paranoia. Although I have often wondered if retro computers will become more valuable in the future as the final bastion of electronic privacy.

View on HN

If your tinfoil hat isn't too thick, you can take a modern computer and set it up behind a hardware firewall, or connect over serial...

And then monitor the tons of weird ass encrypted traffic coming in and out of it, hoping that those requests to AWS are some program getting updates and not the contents of your L2.

Firewalls are great, and you should have one, but you have to constantly watch and understand everything coming in and out of it. Works ok as a full time job, terrible when you have other things to do.

If this is too much trouble, you can connect over serial, like 25+ years ago. Transfer files with zmodem from an internet-connected host. A Raspberry Pi with a serial port would be perfect for this.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com