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School Spyware (sh.itjust.works)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/privacy@lemmy.ml
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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.

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[–] 37 points 2 years ago (1 child)

Don't tamper with hardware that somebody else owns. If you get caught, you could be fined a lot more than 50€ and expelled. School administrators often like to "make an example" of kids that they think are "hackers" even if you're just booting Linux from USB. They don't understand the difference between that and real hacking, so don't risk it.

You can only achieve true privacy on hardware that you own. A cheap laptop to boot Linux isn't a bad idea.

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  • [+] -13 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    Can you truly own any hardware, though?

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  • [–] 6 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    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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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago* (3 children)

    By my question I mean:
    Any hardware is made by some other people. Any hardware is work under a firmware, made by other people.

    All that is a) regulated by licenses b) never can be trusted fully to work as you think it should work. Even if it based on open source - due to the "problem of untampered compiler".

    If you have no total control over your hardware, can you say you truly own it?
    What percent of control is acceptable? How to measure it?

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 child)

    Exactly. There could not be true / full ownership of hardware.
    And yet that's fine for me.

    Now about that:

    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.

    Even in that case you can never be sure what a compiler did with the code. You can say: go look at the code of that compiler. But then how can I be sure it's code had been compiled without malicious modifications. And so on.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Lol hit the bong one time for me bro

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    My pleasure

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    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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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 child)

    As of August 2023, the best way to avoid the problem of

    untampered compiler

    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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