(Free) Software

During the last year hell seems to have frozen over: our corporate overlords neighbours at Apple, Google and Facebook have all pushed for crypto in one way or another. For Facebook (WhatsApp) and Google (Allo) the messenger crypto has even been implemented by none less than the famous, endorsed-by-Edward-Snowden anarchist and hacker Moxie Marlinspike! So all is well on the privacy front! … but is it really?

EDIT: A French version of this post is available here. I can’t verify its correctness, but I trust the translators to have done their best and thank them for the effort!

Since posts like these often helped me setup some device, I thought I’d write one as well this time. Also it is advertising for a good free operating system.

TL;DR

Everything works almost perfectly, good hardware, good software! You should give it a try :)

Hardware

I have got a fairly high-end config:

• Intel® Core™ i7-5600U

• 16GB RAM

• 1920x1080 Display, non-glare, non-touch

• 512GB Samsung SSD

• Intel LAN + WLAN

Last summer I blogged about secure messaging and why FSFE cares about it (and why you should, too!). Since then a few things have changed, and I want to give you an update on the situation.

The conclusion of my last article was:

TextSecure and Kontalk are both good apps in our eyes, however, TextSecure has a much larger adoption and its protocol has gone through more reviews. The protool is integrated into CyanogenMod, recommended by leading security experts and the project just recently gained lots of media attention and $400.000 funding. So we believe if we are to have a chance at migrating people away from WhatsApp than TextSecure is the way to go.

We knew that TextSecure depended on Google Play Services last year, but we were hoping that this was a temporary problem, as virtually every other messaging app in existence has a fallback mode for delivery that does not require proprietary (Google) components. Unfortunately we were wrong: nearly a year later the development of a websocket based version of TextSecure has stalled. Lead developers at WhisperSystems have stated repeatedly that it is not important to them, and the many requests, tests and code contributions from external people did not result in the situation now being any better than it was a year ago.

Most you have probably set your system aliases to receive root’s e-mail, and that of course is a very good idea so you are kept up to date. On the other hand you do send a lot of information about your system through the wire, often package diagnostics with information about locally installed vulnerable software and many other things that might help a person or entity gain access to your computer. Now living in a world, where we know that all unencrypted mail is automatically parsed and possibly filtered and stored that is something you might want to avoid. The natural answer is to encrypt the mail which is what I am going to explain in the following.

I finally managed to update graphics/luminance to 2.3.1. Thanks to lme@freebsd and pawel@freebsd for feedback and commit.

This is last version that runs with Qt4. As we recently got Qt5 into the ports I will try to update the port soon again. I also have some new ports coming and hope to get around to fixing/updating my other ones. Stay tuned.

I am making strong use of RedPorts now. In case you don’t know the service, I really recommend it.