I *am* rolling my eyes. And when I roll my eyes, the guy rolling his eyes has consulted on computer security to some of the biggest banks and telcos in the world.PaulBx1 wrote:That's the starting point, yes. Then everyone and their grandma around here take it and make different flavors of it.Puppy has the goal of being a useful desktop for older machines and of leaving as small a footprint as possible.
I'm glad people are thinking about security, even if others have to roll their eyes.
There are operating systems that are designed from scratch to be secure. There are operating systems that are designed to be easy to use and to work on pretty much any kind of hardware. (Insert "Linux distro" in place of "operating system" if you like.) Trouble is that the goals are largely mutually exclusive. And even if you want to layer security onto something insecure, you need a good model for what you're trying to achieve.
I think what you guys are doing with encrypted pup_saves is brilliant. I think that a NOSWAP boot option would be an excellent idea.
I think that simply saying "Steve Gibson says we all need to break standards to keep ourselves hidden and then everything will be good" and posting links to randomly chosen sites is a hopeless endeavour. Which is why I suggested that the OP spend effort on helping you guys with your work, because one can EITHER start by developing a detailed security model (with the inevitable conclusion that Puppy would not be the starting point to choose - and I say this speaking as one of Puppy's greatest fans) OR one can work on building useful components of security mechanisms that can be added on as useful to individual users.
Finally, I am quite familiar with police states, I've lived in one that was such when I lived there (and is no longer) and in another that is well on its way. Which is why I prefer to be where I am now. Secure systems are a good thing. Puppy is not a secure system. Does that make Puppy a bad thing? Of course not. One judges systems by how well they conform to their design spec. For Puppy, that design spec was not based on security.
Cheers,
Mark