The Linux Experiment

Andy Yen, the CEO of Proton (Mail, Drive, VPN, Pass...) answered a lot of the questions you, the community, asked, in an interview that covers basically everything!

He discusses security, privacy, the origins of Proton, how they operate, Linux support, future projects, products and features, quantum computing, passkeys, and more!

Proton Mail: https://proton.me/mail/TheLinuxEXP Proton VPN: https://protonvpn.com/TheLinuxEXP

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#vpn #privacy #proton #onlinesecurity #protonmail

Timecodes:

00:00 Intro 01:16 How did Proton start? 03:24 Why start with email? 06:03 What is Proton's business model? 08:34 Why set up in Switzerland? 11:33 What data do you have on customers? 14:39 How is encryption important? 18:20 Do you always need to use a VPN? 20:47 Why focus on building an ecosystem? 24:55 Is an Office Suite planned? 26:29 What differentiates Proton from competitors? 30:26 Is Proton a viable alternative to big tech services? 33:31 Why expand to more products instead of finishing existing ones? 37:19 Does the general public care about privacy? 38:45 What's next for Proton services? 40:08 What are the plans for native Linux clients? 46:03 Will ProtonVPN offer dedicated IPs to everyone? 47:46 What's the environmental impact of Proton? 49:27 Proton on F-Droid, without Google Play notifications? 52:03 Why are code repos all separated and hard to find? 53:12 Why are addresses ending in ".me" ? 54:57 When will all apps reach feature parity? 56:24 Will SMTP relay be supported? 57:47 Will Proton focus more on businesses in the future? 59:50 Why put all your eggs in one basket with just Proton services? 01:01:00 Will Proton support passkeys? 01:03:21 Does E2E matter is the recipient isn't using it? 01:04:49 Will Proton disable port forwarding in VPN? 01:06:41 Is encryption enough to make email private? 01:09:06 What protects users from a change in Proton's code licensing? 01:11:14 How does Proton protect its infrastructure? 01:13:14 Impacts of Quantum Computing on privacy and security? 01:14:24 What's the future of Proton Bridge? 01:16:25 When will Proton photos be a thing? 01:17:17 Plans for Proton Notes? 01:18:20 Will VPN support the Apple TV? 01:21:12 Support the channel

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#Linux #OpenSource #TechNews #Ubuntu

Timecodes: 00:00 Intro 00:36 Sponsor: 10% off your first ebsite with Squarespace 01:33 Linus Torvalds talks about the future of Linux 03:58 Ubuntu might drop older CPUs 06:57 LXQt working on Wayland as well 08:33 Cosmic gets more improvements 09:48 GNOME & KDE updates 11:45 Gaming: Linux beats Windows, No Fortnite on Linux 15:17 Sponsor: Get a PC made to run Linux 16:24 Support the channel

Linus Torvalds talks about the future of Linux

https://www.zdnet.com/article/linus-torvalds-on-state-of-linux-today-and-how-ai-figures-in-its-future/

Ubuntu might drop older CPUs

https://ubuntu.com/blog/optimising-ubuntu-performance-on-amd64-architecture

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Ubuntu-24.04-LTS-Desktop-Plans

LXQt working on Wayland as well

https://lubuntu.me/noble-alpha-featureset/

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Lubuntu-24.04-LTS-Plans

https://lubuntu.me/noble-alpha-featureset/

Cosmic gets more improvements

https://blog.system76.com/post/the-spirit-of-cosmic-december-updates

GNOME & KDE updates

https://pointieststick.com/2023/12/15/this-week-in-kde-un-flashy-important-stability-work/

https://thisweek.gnome.org/posts/2023/12/twig-126/

Gaming: Linux beats Windows, No Fortnite on Linux

https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2023/12/fortnite-on-linux-steam-deck-not-until-tens-of-millions-of-users/

https://steamcommunity.com/groups/SteamClientBeta/announcements/detail/3860211327585452520

https://www.notebookcheck.net/Windows-11-scores-dead-last-in-gaming-performance-tests-against-3-Linux-gaming-distros.778624.0.html

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Murena 2 campaign (not sponsored, no affiliate commission): https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/murena/murena-2-switch-your-privacy-on

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#privacy #google #android

00:00 Intro 01:08 The Phone: Murena 2 02:36 Specifications 05:17 eOS on the Murena 2 10:46 Price and availability 13:03 Sponsor: Get a PC made to run Linux 14:08 Support the channel

This isn't the completely finalized design, so the back of the phone, and the protection that came in the box aren't completely final and might change a little.

The very point of the Murena 2 is to offer a privacy focused phone: it comes with /e/ OS, and it has a privacy switch to disconnect the cameras and microphone, and another switch to completely shut off any connectivity the phone has. The first switch, for the camera and mic is a physical one: it completely shuts off the connection to the camera and the mic.

The connectivity switch is purely software, and will just turn on airplane mode and will mute your phone, so it's more a "big do not disturb" mode than a privacy switch.

It comes with a mediatek CPU, with 4 performance cores at 2.1Ghz and 4 efficiency cores at 2 Ghz, it has 8 gigs of RAM, 128 gigs of storage, plus a micro SD slot. It supports dual SIM, and the OLED screen is 6.43 inches and a resolution of 1080x2400, plus a hole punch cut out for the selfie camera, which is 25 megapixels.

On the back, you get 3 camera lenses, one is the standard lens, at 64 megapixels, one is an ultrawide, at 13 MP and one is a telephoto lens at 5 Megapixels.

It has a 4000 milliamp hour battery, with support for high speed charging at 18W, it supports Wifi ac and bluetooth 4.2, and it's 4G, not 5G.

They also say they have a 6 out of 10 on repairability, and they'll offer spare parts and schematics for easy repair. They'll provide 5 years of support for the software at least.

On the Murena 2, /e/ OS runs OK. It's not perfectly smooth, animations can sometimes jitter a bit, but generally, the experience is what you'd expect from a mid range Android smartphone: it's not high refresh rate, buttery smoothness, but it's definitely not annoying. In some apps, you'll definitely notice stutters, like in the App Lounge when scrolling, but navigating the phone is good enough, and video playback and games run well.

Haptics don't seem to be perfectly configured yet, as typing on the keyboard provides a very tiny sort of clicky rattle instead of a nice vibration, and going back using gestures also doesn't feel super tactile, but that's probably because it's a pre production model.

The 2 privacy switches work perfectly, with the one on the right toggling airplane mode and do not disturb, and the one on the left shutting down the camera and the mic, both have a little LED as well to indicate that these switches are on, although handling of that could be improved, as launching the camera app with the privacy toggle on, will spit out an error, instead of a smoother message indicating your privacy toggle is on.

Testing the phone further, the screen is really nice and bright, with very vivid colors, it feels pretty damn nice to use, but that's probably because it's OLED.

The cameras are pretty basic, the telephoto had a very hard time focusing on anything for me, but the other 2 worked fine, although you won't find the same kind of post processing you'll get on most Android phones, so your pictures might not look as sharp or well balanced as on, say, a Pixel or even a Samsung A series phone. The front facing camera, though, is pretty solid, and produces nice pictures all things considered.

The speakers are decent enough for a phone, they won't blow you away or anything, but they get pretty loud without distorting too much or at all. They are bottom firing, there's no "stereo" speaker using the earpiece of the phone. The microphone isn't great though, your vocal messages and phone calls won't sound extremely crisp.

With the kickstarter, the phone is 399€, without it, it will be 499€.

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#Linux #security #cybersecurity

00:00 Intro 00:56 Sponsor: Proton Mail 02:32 Software and updates 04:04 Services and SSH 06:38 User management 10:10 Physical Security 11:35 SELinux, AppArmor, and firewall 14:04 Parting Thoughts 15:15 Sponsor: Get a PC made to run Linux 16:30 Support the channel

Password complexity tips: https://www.networkworld.com/article/2726217/how-to-enforce-password-complexity-on-linux.html

Tips to secure SSH: https://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/linux-unix-bsd-openssh-server-best-practices.html

The more software you use, the larger the attack surface for your Linux install is. It's always good to take a look at all the installed applications, and libraries, and remove what you don't use anymore. You can also remove packages that aren't linked to anything else and aren't used by anything.

On Debian or Ubuntu, for example, you can find these by running sudo apt autoremove

And on a desktop, you probably already apply updates, or your distro has auto updates enabled. But on a server, it's easy to let things slide, and forget to log in regularly and make sure things are up to date. I'm guilty of that myself.

And just like with packages, libraries, and apps, you should also make sure you only run the services you actually use. You can list all services running with:

systemctl list-unit-files

To stop a service you don't need, you can run

systemctl stop SERVICE

To stop the service from starting with the system, you can run

systemctl disable SERVICE

If you're on a server, the general rule of thumb is also NOT to run a graphical desktop on it. It will often be much more secure to use SSH to log in to the server remotely.

But you might also need to secure SSH first. If you have multiple users, make sure only the ones who need it have SSH access. To do that, you can edit the /etc/ssh/sshd_config file, and type AllowUsers then the names of the users that will actually have access to SSH.

Now, something that might be useful in general, for a server or a desktop, is making sure all the users are correctly handled. The first thing will be to disable root login.

If you decide to disable the root account, make sure at least one user has admin privileges though, or you'll have a system without any way to access any task with sudo. Once you're certain everything is ok, you can use the following method:

Edit /etc/passwd, and change the first line, by replacing /bin/bash, or whatever other shell root currently logs into, by /sbin/nologin (or /usr/sbin/nologin depending on the distro)

If you prefer, you can simply disable root login through SSH, so the account is still there if you want it locally, but remote attackers won't be able to login as root. To do so, you can edit /etc/ssh/sshd_config, and uncomment the PermitRootLogin line, and then set its value to no. Restart SSH with sytemctl restart sshd, and you're done.

To remove the ability to use USB, Thunderbolt or Firewire, you can add the following lines to their respective files (create them if need be). To revert this, just remove the lines that have been added in the various files by the commands.

Add: install usb-storage /bin/true to /etc/modprobe.d/disable-usb-storage.conf Add blacklist firewire-core to /etc/modprobe.d/firewire.conf Add blacklist thunderbolt to /etc/modprobe.d/thunderbolt.conf

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#privacy #security #mythbusting

00:00 Intro 00:27 Security = Privacy 01:51 Sponsor: Private and secure email with Proton Mail 02:52 Telemetry is evil 05:18 Tor is a honeypot 06:52 Big Companies are more secure 08:58 Incognito mode is private 09:55 VPNs are the only tool you need 11:02 Privacy is impossible 12:07 I have nothing to hide 13:27 Always research yourself 14:09 Sponsor: Get a PC made to run Linux

Security = privacy

This one is obviously not true. Security and privacy aren't linked in any way. The general best practice is to find the services you need that have a good reputation for security, and among these services, try and find one that is private enough for your needs.

Telemetry is always bad

This is simply not true. Telemetry isn't always bad. The image we have of telemetry is that of Windows or macOS, but there are plenty of other ways to do telemetry.

In itself telemetry is a very useful thing: it lets projects or companies identify what is important, what they should fix first. It doesn't mean this data is used to profile you, or being sold to anyone.

If the company or project is something you trust, and that has no current business in data collection, or advertising, then it's probably not a problem.

Tor is an NSA honeypot

TOR is regularly accused of being a honeypot for the NSA. Something that is completely false, as far as anyone knows**

Yes, TOR is based on code developed by the US Navy. Funding for Tor also came from the US government, mostly. The code, however, is open source, and audited.

Is Tor entirely safe? Of course not. It's not a silver bullet, nothing is, and it can be vulnerable to man in the middle attacks or to specific types of monitoring, but it's not an NSA project that's designed to trap you.

Big companies are more secure

This statement is debatable. It's true in some cases. A recent report shows that smaller firms are 3 times more likely to be attacked than big businesses. 60% of cyberattacks seem to target smaller companies. But that's likelihood to be attacked, not necessarily successful attacks.

What is also true is that not all big tech companies are very good on the security front. So, while yes, bigger companies can be more secure than smaller ones, it's not a one size fits all thing, and what you need to look for is what kind of security the company you're interested in for a specific service or app has put in place.

Incognito mode is private

It isn't. What incognito mode does, is make you private locally, on your device, as it doesn't store data on what you've visited, your credentials, and the like.

Incognito mode doesn't, however, prevent websites from tracking you, or fingerprinting you.

VPNs are the only privacy tool you need

VPNs aren't a magical thing that instantly makes you private. Using a VPN will change your IP address and make you harder to track online, that's true. They're a good tool, but you need to make sure that the company that provides the VPN service doesn't log everything you do, and doesn't give these logs to various other actors. If you log into a service or website while using a VPN, it still knows it's you, obviously.

Privacy is impossible

This one has to be the most nefarious myth ever. Privacy is NOT impossible. It's not easy, but it's not impossible. Generally, this statement just betrays a lack of motivation. It will never be 100% perfect, but you can limit immensely what is known or collected about you.

I have nothing to hide

This is complete bogus. First, if you think you have nothing to hide, you're wrong. Everyone has something that might not be illegal, but might be deemed immoral or unacceptable by someone else.

Second, you might feel this way now, but circumstances change, and the data collected about you doesn't go away. By leaving all these tidbits of data stored everywhere, you're basically giving ammunition to the future.

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#internet #ads #marketingdigital

00:00 Intro 00:44 Sponsor: Learn how to deal with ransomware attacks 01:32 The ad-based internet 04:08 Twitter: anything but the kitchen sink 05:46 Reddit: shooting themselves in the foot 07:14 Youtube: nickel and diming 08:58 Alternative platforms won't save us 11:43 Three possible outcomes 14:41 The Ad Based internet is on its way out 15:13 Sponsor: Get a PC that was made to run Linux 16:02 Support the channel

Google has shown that with enough scale, just running ads on a website is enough to keep the content free of charge. But of course, as with everything where money is involved, it went way too far. This limited the ad revenue, and so websites decided to add more ads.

To compound that, ads started paying less and less, so websites started chasing profits by making the internet worse for everyone.

Twitter's revenue is 89% ads. It has existed for more than 10 years, and has never made any money. So even at that scale, ads are just not working to sustain a company.

All the changes Musk is making to Twitter, like firing most of the workforce, charging for the API, limiting the number of tweets, Twitter Blue, it's all to try and turn a profit. So, the experience of Twitter is now ten times worse, because ads don't work.

Now let's look at Reddit. Reddit is about as popular as Twitter. And Reddit isn't profitable either. They're kept afloat by raising money from investors. And so Reddit charges for their API now. Reddit made their site worse for everyone: the regular users, and also everyone browsing the internet and landing on reddit to see a "this subreddit is private" message, making any web search ultra inefficient.

And we can also look at Youtube. Youtube is HUGE. And it's hard to know if youtube is profitable or not. The consensus seems to be that it is, but the actions of youtube seem to indicate that maybe it's not THAT profitable. For example, youtube seems to be planning some moves against adblockers. Youtube is also taking steps against third party frontends, like Invidious. They wouldn't do stuff like that if profit growth was awesome.

I love alternative platforms, but they'll probably never replace the giant ones: they don't offer a business model for people to create content on them.

As a user, you probably don't care about that. And the person running the instance of said platform maybe is ready to fund it out of pocket, but the people creating the content on these platforms? They're not making money from them.

And so as ad-based internet models start dying off, I have a feeling we're going to be faced with 3 options

First, the big platforms survive as-is with the ads, you can still have ads on your own website, but the platforms will start keeping more and more of the ad revenue.

This is where we're heading now. People are tired of ads and their privacy invasion, and the over abundance of them, but platforms seem to think this is the way to go.

Second option, the big platforms and websites evolve to another model, like paywalling everything behind a paid subscriptions like Youtube Premium.

It would basically kill off an entire portion of the internet, but it probably wouldn't be the worst portion to lose.

Third option, the big platforms and the internet as a whole can't find a new model to replace ad based ones, and big platforms and big websites die off. Content creation becomes a hobby mostly.

This is probably the best outcome for the internet as a whole, as it would probably kill off most clickbait, disinformation, AI generated crap. We would have far less things to read and watch, but a lot of if would be higher quality.

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#Linux #macos #windows

00:00 Intro 00:34 Sponsor: Try Proton Mail, the secure & private email service 01:48 Windows Data collection 04:33 Windows 3rd party requests 06:07 How bad is Windows? 07:05 Disable Windows data collection? 07:58 macOS data collection 09:37 Disable macOS data collection 10:34 How bad is macOS? 11:23 Linux Distributions 13:52 Sponsor: Get a PC that runs Linux perfectly 14:52 Support the channel

So if you've installed Windows 11 recently, you're familiar with the very lengthy setup process where you can uncheck a lot of toggles to try and limit what the OS collects.

What the OS will collect is the following:

• Microsoft Store Logs
• Network data
• Hardware information
• Accessory data
• Application-related data
• Event metrics

You'll also send complete words that you typed or wrote, not just statistics. You'll also send speech recognition data, and activity history, so every document you opened, website you visited...

But that's just what Microsoft tells you about. Recently, a youtuber called "The PC Security channel" analysed a completely fresh Windows install, using Wireshark, and what they found was is that Windows makes a few connections to third parties it never really told you about.

THEIR VIDEO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IT4vDfA_4NI&t=271s

• trustedsource.org.

• scorecardresearch.com

• Bing and msn.com

• privacyportal.onetrust.com

So what exactly can Microsoft do with all this data?

Well, they have more than enough to completely fingerprint your device, they can reliably tell what you use in terms of apps, and what type of content you watch, and they also basically can have a keylogger on your computer. And finally, Windows sends some data to third parties.

Fortunately, you can disable all the option stuff straight from the settings.You can go to the privacy and security options, and go into each category and disable everything there.

You can also completely disable the telemetry service. Just hit Windows + R, and in the run dialog, type services.msc. In there, look for something called "Connected user experiences and telemetry", double click that, and in the "General tab", you can set "startup type" to "disabled".

Apple talks a big game when it comes to privacy, but in the end, is it really true? Out of the box, macOS sends to Apple your IP address, location, and some usage patterns, like all the apps you run, and when you run them. Other telemetry data, out of the box, includes browsing history, search history, crash data, performance and diagnostic data, location information, health information if you use that on an iPhone for example, all the info you entered in your AppleID, the device serial number, payment information, everything you bought using that Apple ID, and potentially your government ID.

Fortunately, macOS lets you disable virtually everything that's being collected. You can just head over to the Security and Privacy settings, and in analytics and improvements, uncheck everything.

Now, how about Linux? Well, Linux based operating systems, or at least desktop Linux distributions don't collect any data out of the box, with a few exceptions.

The first one is Ubuntu, who will collect telemetry data out of the box, with no personal information at all. It's just hardware data, but it could still be used to fingerprint your device. Canonical doesn't currently have any ad server that I know about, so they probably only really use this to know what their users actually use and focus their efforts on that, but if you're uncomfortable with that, you can disable it at install.

Some Ubuntu derivatives that use the same installer might also have that kind of telemetry. On top of that, you have the ability to turn some entirely optional telemetry on in KDE's settings; and GNOME also has a telemetry tool that you have to install manually.

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#mastodon #fediverse #socialmedia

00:00 Intro 00:39 Sponsor: Extend the life of your Python applications 01:30 The Fediverse: a network of social networks 04:57 ActivityPub: all your social networks can talk to each other 06:44 How Mastodon works 08:33 How PeerTube works 10:19 How PixelFed works 11:39 Parting thoughts 13:02 Sponsor: buy a device that runs Linux perfectly 14:11 Support the channel

Join Mastodon: https://joinmastodon.org/servers Join Peertube: https://joinpeertube.org/ Join PixelFed: https://pixelfed.org/servers

PixelFed App for iOS: https://testflight.apple.com/join/5HpHJD5l PixelFed App for Android: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.pixeldroid.app/

List of Fediverse services: https://fediverse.party/en/miscellaneous/

Fediverse is a contraction of Federated Universe. It's basically a very large network of servers that form, well, a social network. But contrary to the ones you might be used to, like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and others, the Fediverse is composed of different services.

The more well known are Mastodon, a Twitter-like microblogging service, PeerTube, a youtube-like platform, or PixelFed, an Instagram-like social network, but there are a TON of others.

Each service is also decentralized, which means there is not one big server farm where everything is hosted: each service is split into instances, basically independent servers, with different goals.

ActivityPub is an open standard, that lets all services on the Fediverse talk to each other. How does that work? Well, in practice, it means you can use your Mastodon app to follow a Peertube channel, or someone that posts pictures on PixelFed, or see new articles from a Wordpress website.

And this goes a bit further: for example, if I comment on Mastodon on a post from Peertube, that comment will also appear on Peertube underneath the video.

Let's start with Mastodon. Mastodon is basically Twitter, but open source and decentralized. It lets you post messages with up to 500 characters, it supports images, videos, polls, content warnings, animated avatar pictures, emojis, links, mentions, hashtags, anything you're used to on Twitter. Mastodon has 1.5 million active users, which might seem small compared to Twitter, but it's more than enough to have interesting conversations with a lot of cool people.

To join Mastodon, all you need to do is pick a server, also called an instance. You can pick any server you like, and it will let you interact with everyone else on any other server.

And then, you can use Mastodon on the web, by typing the address of your instance in your browser, for example, for me, it's mastodon.social, or you can use a mobile app.

Now let's talk about PeerTube. It's a Youtube alternative, although it's much, much smaller. Peertube is also decentralized, being split into different servers, that are federated together, so you can follow people from different instances and still have a complete subscription feed. It also supports ActivityPub, which means you could subscribe to my peerTube channel from a mastodon account, and have a post in your timeline every time I publish a video.

And as a creator, it also lets you sync your youtube channel to it, so you can auto-publish all your videos to Peertube in a few clicks, which is also a great help.

To watch peertube, just type the address of your instance in your browser's URL, for me it's tilvids.com.

Another cool service on the Fediverse is PixelFed. It's basically Instagram, without all the crap they tacked on lately, like reels, or lives. It's just pictures and videos. It's free software, it also uses the ActivityPub standard, so you can follow PixelFed users on Mastodon, for example, and it's ad-free.

It also lets you add filters, just like Instagram, or crop, resize, adding alt text, and you can use hashtags, locations, or create collections, basically photo albums.