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Comment by CelestialTeapot | Hacker News Reader

>> soldered-to-the-motherboard, everything-utterly-encrypted approach is that it's almost impossible to do data recovery

>Well, that's kind of the point.

Not that I don't appreciate a security-minded platform, it just seems overkill for 99% of the people who'll purchase them, and do nothing but cause heartache when the internal SSD fails. And fail they do. it's rare, but I've had several SSDs (Toshiba and Crucial, if it matters) fail within 1-2 years of moderate usage. No warning there was an issue, the drives just disappeared one day and I was left looking for backups.

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> Not that I don't appreciate a security-minded platform, it just seems overkill for 99% of the people who'll purchase them

No man is an island. If my mom is insecure, then all the messages I sent her are leaked, too, no matter how secure I try to be. If my boss is insecure, then I'm even worse off than that.

Also, if high-security stuff is normalized, then you don't wind up stuck in a place where you have to choose between "the secure option" and "the option that can actually run the apps I need." E2E encrypting the whole world is also the best defense against the government passing laws that make E2E encryption illegal.

>E2E encrypting the whole world is also the best defense against the government passing laws that make E2E encryption illegal.

The government doesn't need to pass laws to ban encryption (at least in America) since they design the encryption standards themselves. It's basically common knowledge at this point that everything NIST cranks out is vulnerable to differential cryptanalysis beyond the domain of public understanding. Apple, Google, Facebook and the other top dogs all help create the illusion of choice in exchange for keeping the SEC off their backs.

>It's basically common knowledge at this point

What is asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.

And what's really annoying is that you are doing a bad job of arguing for a position that I actually kinda agree with. NIST has published a backdoored elliptic curve-based RNG[1]; don't trust them. Encryption algorithms need some sort of verifiable provenance for where those numbers came from.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_EC_DRBG

On that note, it's unfortunate that T2 can only create ecdsa-sha2-nistp256 secret keys. Right now I use Secretive but I might resort to a different utility that generates ed25519 and stores it within keychain, if there is one.

> 99% of the people

I think you underestimate this number. Most businesses are going to want security/encryption over ability to recover data to prevent leaking secrets in the case of a lost/stolen laptop.

as for everyone else, backups really need to become the norm for everyone because as you say any HDD/SSD can fail for any reason anytime beyond any possible recovery apple laptop or not.

I recently learned that my hard drive was encrypted with Bitlocker, had I not been attempting to get Genode running off a USB stick, I might have gone on for a year or to in blissful ignorance of how remarkable insecure my stuff was as a result of this.

It took about 12 hours to decrypt it, and restore sanity.

Availability is part of security, if it's encrypted, and you don't (or can't) boot just the way Microsoft wants, all your data is gone.

If it is so, your data will go. Backup backup backup. Otherwise unencrypted data cannot save you.

Well, the main reason I was upset is that if I dual boot something else, even if it supports NTFS, my data is unavailable to it.

> it just seems overkill for 99% of the people who'll purchase them

There are many places in the world where information on your laptop even criticising the government can end up in you going missing e.g. China, Hong Kong, Saudi Arabia, Myanmar etc.

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