Hi. My school just started issuing devices last year, and they have this Lightspeed spyware on them. Last year I was able to remove it by booting into Linux from a flash drive and moving the files to a separate drive and then back at the end of the year. This year I have heard from sources that they have ways of detecting someone booting from Linux so I am hesitant to do that option. My only other idea is to buy an old laptop off eBay that looks like it and install Linux on it. I could probably get one for about 50€. Does anyone have any cheaper ideas?
Oh also talking to IT isn’t an option.
Absolutely yes, if you buy hackable and repairable hardware you can do whatever you want with it. Especially if you install software on it that is FOSS.
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Lol hit the bong one time for me bro
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This reminds me of the times i and my friend had deep philospohical discussions… at 2am. During a weekend party, while drunk, in highschool.
Anyway, don’t go down any rabbit holes in which you can’t see the bottom. Walk away. While whistling, if it helps.
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OK. So, what’s the worst case if they “catch” you asserting your privacy rights?
Based on that you can decide if it is worth doing it.
It depends how far down the rabbit hole you’re willing to go.
Today you can make sure the source code is truly what you intend, by running Linux on PC and GrapheneOS on Android. You might not have the ability to audit those, but others (like me) do, and are doing so.
Whether you believe us or not is more philosophy - but join us in the rabbit hole and see what you find. You’ll find detailed public technical discussions of security and privacy. You can find some of that for closed software and hardware too, but we can never do as good of a job in that discussion without the source code.
If you want open auditable hardware, you can stick to Raspberry Pi.
There’s an open hardware project for phone too, but it’s more of a proof-of-concept, today, as far as I understand.
If you want the TL;DR version of where I landed - I posted this from a Pixel running GrapheneOS.
Graphene on a pixel 5 here my brother
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You can compile your compiler from source.
Edit: Here’s how: https://www.linuxfromscratch.org/
Edit 2: I know you can hear the rabbit hole calling to you. Join us. Follow the rabbit trail.
But seriously, it’s cool, you’re curious about it, and the pay from the jobs it leads to tends to be pretty great.
As of August 2023, the best way to avoid the problem of
AFAIK Is using an MNT Reform With GNU Guix as its OS, I really liked this article “The Full-Source Bootstrap: Building from source all the way down”. This approach could, potentially, solve the problem of the untampered compiler. Damn, maybe it already does.
As for the MNT Reform, the only thing I’m not sure is open is the actual processor firmware, but the schematics for its usage are available and even the Wifi firmware is open, so there remains the problem of actually verifying the hardware you get is actually the hardware you ordered, but that is a bit more complicated I think.
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