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Comment by jads | Hacker News Reader

Some good suggestions in this list, but some of this is a bit "tinfoil hat" (reinstall OS X every month? What about resorting data from a backup? Seems so unnecessary to suggest users wipe their Mac each month)

Any reason the author insists on spelling it "OS/X" or is this just their personal preference? It shouldn't, but this bugged me when reading the article.

Edit: in fact, most of this is tinfoil hat. I'm all for safety and security but some of this is pretty extreme. "Don't trust third-party Mail providers like Gmail?" Not sure the author realizes a good number of people they're emailing use these services, so should people not converse with Gmail users?

This entire list of suggestions and "explanations" is straight-up FUD.

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Yeah, the author seems to confuse "security" and "privacy". They are not always interchangeable. Certainly not in the case of email - "private" email services are almost always far easier to crack into than gmail.

Author also seems to think reinstalling the OS somehow makes you less vulnerable. And that compiling source code magically makes the resulting binary safer.

And just a giant LOL at the suggestion to upload files to virustotal at the end of that wall of paranoia-driven privacy tips. Contrast, man.

> Author also seems to think reinstalling the OS somehow makes you less vulnerable.

Depends on the context you're working in. I wouldn't recommend anyone actually do that, but it sounds like a poor-man's readonly-system solution. If you want to ensure that your system doesn't (for example) preserve rootkits across system restarts, you've got a few good and bad choices: r/o system r/w (or no) data, restarting from golden image, wiping machine clean, file integrity checkers.

But the point is that wiping the OS isn't preventative. Wiping a clean system is pointless, and wiping an infected one without knowing how it was infected isn't just a recipe for getting infected again, it also gives a completely false sense of security and can get you to start skipping actual preventative measures because "the system will be gone in a couple of weeks anyway".

(for the record, I'm not saying this is a good idea for personal desktops, just discussing the theory) No, it's not preventative. But wiping an infected one is not pointless either. Especially if you can upgrade all the relevant applications after each reinstall, potentially closing previous issues. In some contexts (small town library without IT staff, shared computer, no knowledge how to do stateless terminals), it would be an improvement over what's currently happening.

Agreed, it's not a bad idea for shared desktops.

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