The Greatest Linux Blog on the Internets. » archive for December, 2007

Encrypt your laptop’s /home directory before Christmas

  • December 11th, 2007

Command Line Warriors is running a campaign to get Linux users to encrypt at least their /home directory by Christmas 2008. It’s a really good idea, since if your laptop gets stolen, without encryption the thief may gain lots of personal data about you or others … possibly enough to steal your identity. And that would suck more than losing your laptop.


Encrypt Home By Christmas

Before you get around to encrypting your /home (and other “data” partitions if you keep sensitive stuff outside /home), here’s a tip that is quick and easy to implement right now. If you use Firefox, turn off saving passwords and forms, or secure your saved passwords with a Master Password. You can do it by going to Edit-Preferences-Advanced-Encryption(tab), click on the “Security Devices” button and select “Software Security Device” from the tree-list and enable it, set a password. This way if your machine gets stolen, the thief won’t be able to simply start Firefox and retrieve the passwords to all your valuable online accounts.

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The Future of Reading (with a Kindle)

  • December 5th, 2007

Initially when I saw this new Kindle ebook reader thing from Amazon, it sounded mildly exciting (although currently too expensive for me). But thinking about it a little more, I suspected this could be a nasty case of lock-in like iTunes store/iPod or the Wii Virtual Console service.

Mark Pilgram has written this nice little piece, entitled the “Future of Reading”. It highlights various parts of the of the Kindle Terms of Service alongside some quotes from Jeff Bezos (Amazon CEO), as well as some more ominous juxtapositions with some parts of Orwell’s 1984.

The Kindle is DRM infected crap. This is another one of those cases where you can choose convenience or Freedom-with-a-capital-F . . . . I’ll be sticking with dead trees, plain text from Project Gutenburg and maybe the odd unrestricted PDF for the moment.