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Comment by exceptione | Hacker News Reader

  What I want is Little Snitch on steroids built 
  into the OS where every process,

You cannot trust an OS you cannot build yourself. That's why I see Linux as the only option for professionals and privacy minded people.

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That assumes people actually have the capacity to examine the source to do so and make the requisite adjustments.

The real answer IMHO is to control your networking stack outside of your computer instead. Firewall that and you have way better security

How do you do packet inspection when they're all encrypted?

You can still inspect whether you’re having packets sent when you add text or just when you click on certain options

You could add large amounts of text and see if the packets increase proportionally.

You can perhaps analyze which apps or extensions are sending packets.

This post doesn’t provide enough information of value

> You can still inspect whether you’re having packets sent when you add text or just when you click on certain options

Batching very commonly obscures this kind of UI interaction reporting.

You install a proxy server that MITMs all connections and reencrypts data with your own certificate that you install in your system.

TLS MITM. But you better be 100% sure your middle box is not compromised.

This. Not so hard to do and lots of corporations already do it.

But yeah - whatever you are running on that box better be legit!

Yeah, this is a strange take to me. Akin to catching the fox guarding your hen house eating the hens and reacting by having the fox install and monitor a security camera for the hen house. The problem is still the fox and he'll just turn the camera off when he wants the hens.

This analogy makes me smile, it's a good one!

With the compiler that you verified and built yourself :)

I believe this is a reference to: http://wiki.c2.com/?TheKenThompsonHack

Itself built with a compiler you verified and built yourself.

It's self built compilers all the way down

How do you know there are no outside efforts to log linux activities? There's a lot of source code to go through and is it possible there are callbacks even within OSS that most people are not aware of?

At least its possible _in principal_ and many people out there can at least look at the code even if you can't dig through yourself. With Windows or OSX you're just out of luck.

OSS is necessary, but (as you point out) not sufficient.

Well at least with open source, you CAN verify it. There are people and companies who do audit You're replacing a big and unstoppable problem with a smaller one that can be mitigated

It all depends of course on the level of your paranoia/threat model.

To prevent standard data leaking or rather stealing like in this case, linux is a quite solid choice.

But if you think you are a high profile target, you should probably learn how to deactivate Intels ME and co.

And if you are really paranoid, you should assume that there are hardware backdoors. But what do you do then? Build your computer from scratch?

Layers. It's all about layers.

I don’t need to go through all the source code myself. The fact that Apple itself, for example, relies on Linux for most of its servers and has not raised any alarms about bits of Linux phoning home is a pretty powerful heuristic that it’s relatively safe.

Multiply that by all the multibillion dollar other companies, the tens of thousand open source focused smaller and large companies, the hobbyists, the enthusiasts, the CS professors, the CS undergrad and grad students, the PHD candidates who would be thrilled to discover a flaw on the basis of which they could write their thesis, etc. and I think one can have a fair degree of confidence.

There’s still a decent chance something would be missed. But it’s much smaller than the chance that the proprietary OS owners, whom we know for a fact phone home and have been trying to collect increasing amounts of data, are sending stuff we may not know about.

> The fact that Apple itself relies on Linux for most of its servers is a pretty powerful heuristic that Linux is relatively safe [paraphrased by me]

Many world-class companies depend on Windows, so does that mean you think Windows is safe?

An individual does not have the same access to custom tools, and teams of competent people, that ensure their usage of the Linux ecology is secure.

A recent example: I was investigating using CloudFlare Functions, because I think CloudFlare has world-class security and that “serverless” product avoids many security issues I might have with other solutions. Yet one setup step suggested piping in a script from curl to shell (commonly suggested for install steps!). Even worse, https://github.com/cloudflare/wrangler2 is their CLI tool to help development, and Wrangler is based on the node ecology, which is completely insecurable as an individual developer IMHO (trillion dollar companies can probably secure the dev environment). I use a VM to provide some sandboxing, but it still leaves me feeling icky.

In fact, you cannot trust an OS you DIDN'T build yourself. And there are only two of those: Linux from scratch and Gentoo.

How do you know that the compiler that was used to compile your compiler was not backdoored (or binutils/glibc/bash)?

You may instead want to look at the bootstrapping work done using stage0, m2-planet, GNU Mes, etc.

https://bootstrapping.miraheze.org/wiki/Stage0

https://guix.gnu.org/manual/en/html_node/Reduced-Binary-Seed...

It starts with a hex monitor of less than 500 bytes and bootstraps all the way up to gcc, all from source.

In fact, you cannot trust an OS you DIDN'T build yourself

... with a compiler you wrote yourself. In assem-- uh, in hexade... no. With toggle switches.

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