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Comment by julienb_sea | Hacker News Reader

There are approaches that can deliver large portions of this; run an open source linux distribution, running open source browser with open source tracker blocking software. You can run this on an inexpensive system and wipe out all external communication except what you specifically want.

This is obviously unrealistic for most people. You can toggle off automatic feedback & updates in a modern OS and you can install Firefox with tracker blocking and you are 99% of the way there, plenty enough in practice.

I want to point out both of these approaches introduce legitimate security holes (either from not using a production grade OS or from disabling updates on it) which are vastly more likely to have real impact on your life versus privacy tracking.

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> This is obviously unrealistic for most people

I think this is an inherent contradiction - if you want to be in total control of your computer while not knowing how totally control your computer, you are never going to get what you want. You are always going to have to put your trust in someone else to manage your computer. Some of those people might be more trustworthy than others, but you are still trusting in someone else to manage your computer.

Even if a browser is FLOSS, I wouldn't say a user can truly "own" a browser any more than an absolute ruler can govern a country alone. Browser engines are complex beasts that have grown beyond what anyone can hope to understand, re-create, or even maintain without billions of dollars of annual funding.

Software needs to be simple for users to be in control.

(Plug: a section of an article of mine covered this previously. HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25982860)

If anyone is interested in an extremely secure linux distro: https://tails.boum.org/

Great for specific purposes, but not exactly a computer 'you own' and want to do things with.

Tails always starts from the same clean state and everything you do disappears automatically when you shut down Tails.

Ie, nothing persists, which means you loose everything each time.

OpenBSD is also an extremely secure operating system. But also not terribly practical as a long term desktop environment.

Plus it doesn't solve issues with underlying hardware trusts.

Can you please comment a bit about why you think OpenBSD is impractical as a desktop OS?

Qubes is a great distro for this, so is Kali; but support boot to USB. But even anonymizers like the TOR Router can still have their entrypoints snooped by hostile nation states to target dissidents. It is extremely hard without the help of non-US ISP to be completely anonymous and un-identifiable. And let's not forget your chips may have Intel Managent Tech which is spyware you really can't shut off that monitors/injects directly into the north/south bridge (I forget which).

One of the fun parts about hitting DefCon every year is how easy it is to learn about what's new in this space. I hope they don't cancel this year: the social information sharing aspect is the best part.

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