but maybe only for emails from outside, not for emails from within protonmail? haven’t read any specs of protonmail yet…

well for e2ee you obviously have to let one e encrypt the data for the other e. (good luck with newsletters then) for usual services kindly asking them to support either s/mime or gpg for outgoing emails, that would at least make them know the wish, but good luck there too.

i think the already mentioned solution with encrypting incoming messages on your side just before mda to your inbox should be the closest possible to what op wants. one would need to check if the message is already encrypted and skip encryption for those.

if you only want the admin of that email (imap) server to not be able to read all emails, maybe placing a separate encrypting server (smtp+encrypt+forward) inbetween outside world and your email imap server could be a solution.

one should have a look into the logfiles too as some mailers might log message subjects and of course sender/recipients along with ip adresses of incoming/outgoing servers which the op might not want to be readable as well (i dont know protonmail that much)

also gpg IMHO allows for sign-then-encrypt hiding the signature within the encrypted data which could be wanted. also one might want to look exactly what parts of the messages contents and its headers are encrypted or plaintext on the server before feeling safe from the threat one wants to be protected from.

but then the admin can still read the mail while it arrives ;-)

you’re welcome.

what i’ld suggest… a general rule that i like to always follow is to use a test system for everything new. but that does not need to be a full separate system every time.

lets say you have your mailbox and want to try getting new mails from it using fetchmail. first you can use uidl mechanisms to only fefch every mail once and besides that leave them all on the server, but i like it a bit more secure: create a second email adress/account at your mail providers service only for testing. thus you can do whatever you like to to test the mechanisms only without even touching your real inbox (maybe even fill it up with large emails and look how the system reacts, i once had an email account with a cheap provider that deadlocked the inboxes when full…). then when everything is as you want it, switch the account and password (or create another config file for fetchmail) and your’re done. every change (not only fetchmail things) could go tested this way before going live with the changes. filtering could be done with procmail for example, but when the mda that is called by procmail somehow exits with success when the email really isn’t delivered, then the email might get lost forever depending on the settings of course. so fiddling with new stuff always carries the risk of not fiddling correctly ;-)

have fun !

Its possible to tell your mta (like postfix) to use another mta for all mails, or only some domains etc, so using a third party to play the internet facing service then getting the mails by fetchmail, storing them in a dovecot server is easy. on the sending part you could use your standard email client (i.e. thunderbird on pc or k9-mail on smartphone) to send it to your postfix instance that also sits on the server hosting your dovecot service. the mta there takes the mail and delivers it by rules which could just be using the mta of your freemailer using username/password of your account for all outgoing emails. i am doing this but the “external” mail system are my servers as well, i just don’t want emails to stay too long on VMs in the datacenter where i have no access to the physical disks in case something goes wrong.

a raspberry pi is sufficient for such a aetup (i am using a pi4 currently but for emails only i’ld say a 3 or older would do too), adding a disk via usb makes storage huge and cheap then, i use two usb ssd’s in a raid1 for storage… that server could be only accessible through vpn if you whish, depending on your skills and needs (i mainly use ssl client certificates that are supported by k9mail and thunderbird so it fits seamless to be connected through a haproxy that authenticates these before proxying the plain connection to the pi) clients like thunderbird can offline-store all emails (configure download-or-not per imap folder) making searches easy and quick while my k9 client can search locally or on the server if needed.

maybe adjust maximum mail size of your own mta to exactly match (or slightly less) that of the freemailer you use to prevent surprises of big but later then unsent emails.

its possible to have a nextcloud instance on that same pi that acts as an email web mailer just in case of (i really dont need it, but i’ve set this up anyway). nextcloud is also great for syncing/backup files pictures, contacts notes todo lists and calendar of your phone (where i use davx5 opentasks and foldersync for). there are other webmailers available but installing /using nextcloud is not a too bad idea either ;-)

i suggest also setting up some automatic offsite backup with snapshots of that pi then to cover emails and the setup and its configs ;-)

looks like that company seriously suffers a huge lack of experts, maybe if you didnt get an answer, just resend your application as a word document with your salary expectation just “tripled” for … compensation purposes. whatever company still “depends” on microsoft still has heaps extra money it can easily divert to you without any real loss, so don’t waste that chance!

one example of a program that did multiple things is sfdisk, it used to make the kernel reload the new partition table but that was not its main job, only changing them. the extra functionality moved to blockdev which is nearer to doing such as it also triggers flushing buffers and i think setting read/write status. i am fully ok with that change as it removes code from a program that doesn’t need it to another that already does similar things so that other partitioning programs like gdisk fdisk or parted could go the same way so that maintainers of the reread-partition-table things can concentrate on one solution at one place (in userspace) instead of opening issues at an unknown number of projects that also alter partitioning. the “do one thing” paradigma is good for developers who maintain the code and i pretty much appreciate their work. if you are up to only want one-day-flies that either die or take huge amounts of resources only for keeping them alive (image of a mayfly in an emergency room and a heart-lung machine attached while chirurgs rushing around trying to enlenghten its life a few seconds more) then you are good with monolithic tools that could hardly be maintained and suck allday as no one wants to fix any bugs or cannot without creating new ones due to the tightened dependency hell it has internally.

the point is not a lack of examples doing wrong but where one wants to be heading towards.

Lol what???

wouldn’t that be the definition of stable?

the computer on voyager 2 is running for 47 years now, they might have rebooted some parts meanwhile but overall its a long time now, and if the program is free of bugs the time that program can run only depends on the durability of the hardware, protection from cosmic rays (which were afaik the problems the voyager probes faced mostly, not bugs) which could be quite long if protected from hazardous environments and maybe using optoelectronics but the point is that a bug free software can run forever only depending on hardware durability and energy supply, in any other way no humans are needed for a veery long time ;-)

However, systemd makes the system much more secure and reliable as it is

less secure and less reliable day-by-day you meant? systemd introduces needless dependencies ever since as if that was it sole intention ever from its very beginning, which already were used for wide attacks, and exactly those attacks that the people working hard to remove unneeded dependencies for security reasons meant to prevent by things like “do one thing only” (but security was not the number 1 reason for this one i think), systemd instead: ‘lets add another level of that exponential dependency tree from the insecurity hell’ felt like they did this stupid thing intentionally every month for a decade or more.

and stability… if you don’t monitor what systemd does, you’ll never know how bad it actually is. i’ve made custom scripts to monitor systemd’s failures (failing in doing a very primitive of its job) and there are hundreds (actually varying around 200 to 300 sometimes more) of such per day on all our systems for one particular(!) measurement only that was breaking service stability and i wrote a measure-and-fix+monitor workaround. other fixes were not monitored however, only silently fixed by workarounds, thus just unnumbered systemd bugs/instabilities in the dark that stole a lot of work capacity…

if you run distros with systemd, unreliability is your daily experience unless you don’t really care or have never experienced stability before - like running a service (a single process) for 8 years without any interruption then it suddenly stops and you go like “was it maybe an attack? the process died, how could that be? were there any connects from outside at that moment?” not talking about not updating something that long, but “stability” itself CAN be like if you dont stop it, it’ll still run in 10000+ years maybe millions, more likely that humans extincted themselves way earlier than of a process “just dying” by a bug… while systemd even randomly stops things that were running well for no reason (varying) once a month more or less (also varying in what it actually randomly stops, sometimes (2 times) it even stopped ssh on my servers, me asking myself if i should create yet another workaround for systemds buggyness to not locking me out again from network or ratjer go for the real solution for most* of all systemd problems - *see below) on the few standard installs i personally have as i didn’t have the way to automatically replace provider installed distro on VMs in the DC. i want this replacing automatically for the same reason why i don’t like systemd, it causes manual work for a thing that should go automated. however due to systemd’s perpetuated instability i now managed to have this way, and every second working on getting rid of systemd is worth it 100k times. this however does not solve all systemd-introduced problems as the xz attack showed (a systemd-dependency on xz made the infected xz library beeing useful-for-the-atracker during compiletime of sshd binary with which then the attacker could infect the newly built sshd binary),one could still be attacked through systemd’s dependency hell even if one does not use systemd by oneself, but the build machines used for your distro could be affected/infected by systemd’s needless dependencies when “also” compiling for systemd-affected distributions thus there is the risk of becoming a victim of needless-systemd-dependencies while not using systemd at all. however the attack through systemd dependency (and that the public solution was not the removal of needless dependencies only included as source for superflous third party “needs”) made clear that systemd is an overall problem for security that will not be solved quickly but stay just like all windows insecurities will stay as long as they whish to push them to their “users”.

systemd reducing overall security and its unreliability combined with some builtin impediments (i.e. when debugging its defects) is what drove me away from systemd. there are solutions way more stable and way more secure (and way better documented btw) that do not call in for needless dependencies, reducing risks, attack vectors and increases overall debuggability i.e. by deterministic behaviour as an easy example. and none of its important (to me) promises have been fulfilled yet by systemd, drop-in-replacement? have heared that lie thousands of times, but in the last decade i have not experienced it a single time in a distro and it does not seem to be included/finished any more.

for windows users or windows admins a linux with systemd on it IS an improvement in stability, security and of course for updating, yes. but all of that does not come from systemd, rather the opposite is the case, systemd reduces it month by month, thats my experience and thats the most important experience for me, idc what lies whitdepapers tell or what broken promises are believed by anyone or the masses, i want secure and stable servers and services and systemd does not fit in for any of these goals and the time it was still “young” and early problems could be accepted in the hope they get fixed soon are gone, but without those fixes having ever appeared.

maybe try to find a linux user group near where you live. if there is one, usually you get help there, but its usually kinda different sort of help, you don’t get “the solution” to get your personal whishes come true ready prepared in bite-sized piezes for easy consumption but just the help by advices or suggestions that those there can give you or directly would try out.

open source is about sharing knowledge and todays mainstream OS distributions are way more complicated than long ago so the learning curve to adjust things in ways the distribution didn’t prepare (which is often a lot) might be high but always worth a try at least for the learning.

for a lightweight desktop environment that is somehow similar to the old windows98, i’ld say give XFCE a try. i think on debian/ubuntu trying out could be as easy as installing the xfce (or xfce4?) package (or maybe an xfce4-desktop-environment paclage) i don’t remember the exact package name but there is one meta package that depends on all needed stuff, i did it like 4 years ago… when installed you could try it by logging in and (your distro should have a login manager that allows this, or you’ld have to change that too) choosing xfce as desktop environment at login time, thus if you don’t like it, logout again and login with the other again.

i am using xfce because it is clean, lightweight, it does its job, does not invent new unneeded features every few month (like it felt when i used kde long ago) and is adjustable enough for me. i removed the lower task bar and put the open windows components into the bar above adjustedbthat a bit, thats basically what i changed and i think it is quite similar to what win98 was (but thats not the reason for me to have it that way)

also, it is possible to change the window manager (that handles how windows are placed), the desktop manager (like task bar, application menu, maybe widges, logout buttons) and of course also one could change x.org to wayland and back without changing the other components. the login window could come from gnome project but after login one could use a complete different projects toolset.

“can” does not mean that every distro makes that an easy task. also mixing things will likely end in a fuller disk for lots of “needed” components that are maybe mostly unused. (i think i once used gnome but installed kde only for their printing dialog *lol)

when using the big distributions it is likely that no 3rd party downloads are needed to try other window managers or desktop environments, maybe search for such keywords in aptitude , apt search, or such. but new fancy stuff also often first comes from unknown 3rd party websites (or git*.com which is the same security risk as 3rd party websites) before it gets into main repositories after years (or maybe even never)

Closest thing I found was TwisterOS. […] and the fan in my case stops working. Aye-yi-yi!

maybe “TwisterOS” tries to invent air movement by software? it might be a random unrelated incident and the fan is simply broken, it might also be that it enabled some fan control and the fan would start if you only heat up the system enough which might not happen with a lightweight distro and the maybe not cpu consuming programs you use (?). “stress” is a program that could artificially create such cpu consumption for testing (but with a broken fan it might be not a good idea to actively and unnecesarily heat up the cpu, but also cpus usually have failsafe shutdown mechanisms so they dont overheat but that might be like a sudden power down so maybe expect unsaved work to just vanish) another test could be to just give the fan another power source and see what happens, and put abother fan that works in place to see if that changes something

You can use

also there is:

./configure && make && make install

just to mention ;-)

the OS was not the comparison, but the hardware it runs on (just as @Freefall said) but also you seem to be wrong with your other assumption:

And both those devices are tied to a specific OS.

Which seems not to be the case as install instructions for another OS can be found here (i didn’t try it though) for the mentioned device:

https://wiki.lineageos.org/devices/pdx215/

lineage os still is an “android”, but another vendor with clearly different approach than the original firmware and what hinders you from writing bsd drivers and compiling a bsd kernel for it instead? So i count the Xperia 1 III as NOT bound to any OS or OS vendor.

But despite the way longer possible support/security, freedom of choice and endless other possibilities that often come along with free OS choice, this pure and great advantages weren’t even mentioned there, thus it wasnt an OS comparison as it also wasn’t a bound-to-an-OS vs. absentness of vendor-lock-in-limitation-jungle comparison.

ads with install buttons always are traps. and traps are always bad (except snmp traps, those are good but unreliable)

same way ads at download pages stating “proceed to download” are traps.

also ads at search result pages stating " 1 2 3 4 … next" are traps too.

for the “sponsored” note: there is no boundary here that makes it really clear for what that ‘sponsored’ is meant for. without any boundary it could be for something above it, below it, on the side or maybe even something that opens when you click on “sponsored” itself (seen it this way once). it could be for an ad that just failed to load (noticed the free space above that “sponsored” text? maybe the ad loads a bit later just to shift the real contents down so you “accidently” click on the ad that loads intentionally late for this very accident to be likely to happen?) if you use adblockers - which you should do for security reasons anyway - then you’ll see “sponsored” or “advertising” often even without the ad it was meant for after full load of the page. so a single “sponsored” without a clear boundary showing what would be that sponsored content, does not state anything to be an ad, it is purely meaningless and the lack of such boundary always is intentional to distract the user from what he wanted and trap him somehow.

a clear thumbs-down for ‘zoho assist’ from me here just for paying for (or trying out for free or such) such an advertising type.

And in most cases ads simply beeing ads are traps too. by the very concept of ads.

around 80 % of all things i actually still wanted after i bought them were recommendations by people i met in person. 15 % are things recommended by real persons i met on the internet. around 5% are things i bought without it beeing recommded by anyone (not even an ad) things i still wanted after i bought it due to an ad are nearly not existant. ok, i have stopped viewing television in 1997, have a sticker at my postbox that forbids to throw ads in (works where i live), use dns entries to remove most ads in my network, use browsers/extension that remove most crapjunkwastelitterrubbishads and skip webpages that still show too many ads or too offensive cookieterrorbanners. i use google search only sometimes for comparison of results, but near to zero for actual searching. i feel safe to say i am not that much distracted by ads. (however open source projects and authors do get money from me on a monthly basis, where i want to support them, either direct lly sent from my bank account or indirect).

for me personally an ad just saying “you might like this” drives me away from that product, if it needs or wants an ad, i don’t want it, even more so the more it states how difficult and horrible my life would be without the product or how easy it’ll be with it, go away ad-needing products, get recommended personally by those who actually use it, not by those who want to sell it. period. there is no better ad than true recommendation and its also free, no marketing monkey needs to get payed for bs, only an actually good product is needed… and there we go what types of products actually need ads…

once in my life i discovered a product that i first explicitly not bought for a decade because of the awful ad for it, but bought it another decade later by an absentminded accident and found it to be a good product despite its awful ad. then they increased packaging/reduced the product within to cover up a price increase in trade of more waste production, so i abandoned that product again and found something cheaper more eco friendly instead, yes, the cheaper one is really not as good, but i feel better with it and especially less betrayed by the vendor, so the eco one is the better one alltogether. and also i think its better to buy products where you don’t see ads for cause this behaviour could actually fix this advertising storm in the long run, so in this way its the better choice to buy products that don’t have ads for it.

again:

An ad with an install button is always a trap, even more so when the real install follows a single misclick on it. il’d say it would be quite fair to downvote/zerostars an app for how foulish-sneaky it was positioned in the search results if it is shown like an actual result with a f’ing install button. as its advertising type is always also part of the brand and the product itself. maybe make a sports out of that, klick the clickbait install buttons only to downvote the app for beeing intrusive and deinstall it again without even starting the app once, just to train advertisers to do it right instead of wrong next time. maybe. but for security reasons better don’t do that (at least not with a device with sensitive data on it)

please do not blame users to fall for ads. advertising industry now had centuries to learn to trap users and literally thousands or millions of marketing guys, designers, psycologists, neurologists or whatever only to learn and establish new abusive ways to distract and trap users. but a user only has his own lifespan to counteract that and learn to avoid those manipulations, and he also has to do other important stuff in his life too.

please don’t blame users for beeing humans. blame the industry where they are intentionally abusive, inhumane and/or counterproductive.

maybe there was a mixup of individual datapoints and individual persons.

lets see if that could fit.

as far as i read things in this thread, the whole security is based on exactly these datapoints: Full Name, Date of Birth and SSN (three datapoints) plus username and password for 3 sites (six datapoints) makes 3+6= 9 datapoints per person.

2.9 billion (us) should be 2.900.000.000 (correct me if i’m wrong, but where i live one “billion” is actually “1.000.000.000.000” thus a “bit” more)

divided by 9 those 2.9billion would be ~ 320 million.

on wikipedia they say the us had 331 million people in 2020…

that would fit like an ass on a bucket! lol just to mention that.

have a nice day!

you should definitely know what type of authentication you use (my opinion) !! the agent can hold the key forever, so if you are just not asked again when connecting once more, thats what the agent is for. however its only in ram, so stopping the process or rebooting ends that of course. if you didn’t reboot meanwhile maybe try unload all keys from it (ssh-add -D, ssh-add -L) and see what the next login is like.

btw: i use ControlMaster /ControlPath (with timeouts) to even reduce the number of passwordless logins and speed things up when running scripts or things like ansible, monitoring via ssh etc. then everything goes through the already open channel and no authentication is needed for the second thing any more, it gets really fast then.

The whole point of ssh-agent is to remember your passphrase.

replace passphrase with private key and you’re very correct.

passphrases used to login to servers using PasswordAuthentication are not stored in the agent. i might be wrong with technical details on how the private key is actually stored in RAM by the agent, but in the context of ssh passphrases that could be directly used for login to servers, saying the agent stores passphrases is at least a bit misleading.

what you want is:

• use Key authentication, not passwords
• disable passwordauthentication on the server when you have setup and secured (some sort of backup) ssh access with keys instead of passwords.
• if you always want to provide a short password for login, then don’t use an agent, i.e. unset that environment variable and check ssh_config
• give your private key a password that fits your needs (average time it shoulf take attackers to guess that password vs your time you need overall to exchange the pubkey on all your servers)
• change the privatekey every time immediately after someone might have had access to the password protected privkey file
• do not give others access to your account on your pc to not have to change your private key too often.

also an idea:

• use a token that stores the private key AND is PIN protected as in it would lock itself upon a few tries with a wrong pin. this way the “password” needed to enter for logins can be minimal while at the same time protecting the private key from beeing copied. but even then one should not let others have access to the same machine (of course not as root) or account (as user, but better not at all) as an unlocked token could also possibly be used to place a second attacker provided key on the server you wanted to protect.

all depends on the level of security you want to achieve. additional TOTP could improve security too (but beware that some authenticator providers might have “sharing” features which could compromise the TOTP token even before its first use.

My theory is that you already have something providing ssh agent service

in the past some xserver environments started an ssh-agent for you just in case of, and for some reason i don’t remember that was annoying and i disabled it to start my agent in my shell environment as i wanted it.

also a possibility is tharlt there are other agents like the gpg-agent that afaik also handles ssh keys.

but i would also look into $HOME/.ssh/config if there was something configured that matches the hostname, ip, or with wildcards* parts of it, that could interfere with key selection as the .ssh/id_rsa key should IMHO always be tried if key auth is possible and no (matching) key is known to the ssh process, that is unless there already is something configured…

not sure if a system-wide /etc/ssh/ssh_config would interfere there too, maybe have a look there too. as this behaviour seems a bit unexpected if not configured specially to do so.

https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/82ule/will_code_html_for_food_pic/

not only devs 😜

a public room is public. anyone could and should be able to enter it at any moment start recording and uploading everything to $terrorist@/or$three-letter-agency or such. The idea that someone else could also get the same already public data later is not threatening, as that data is already considered public as in “everyone in the world could have it a second after the data came into existance”. and also as removing from the public is not considered possible, uploading that already intentionally published data again does not pose a greater threat than its first publication, but uses just a bit of bandwidth, not more. if you are very sensitive about visibility of who you talk with, maybe don’t enter “public” rooms in the first place.

if you join a private room, you already want to share with the other participants that you are f***ing talking to them, including when and who you exactly encrypted the data for, when, and to which servers they have to be forwarded. i expect the server of all participants to forward messages to the recipients. for this the server needs to know this type of information. Of course awareness, which data is used to make i.e. routing decisions is a good thing, but a “nightmare” would be teams zoom icq, whatsapp and similar. i am sure that messengers exist that could be less traceable for participants, but full anonymity to who you are communicating with so that even the servers know nothing about what happens in a room is imho not even a goal of matrix for the future.

Not a “nightmare”, but what a nightmare it must be to find out that a system that looked so promising did not fulfill “every” dreamexpectation one had with options that are even the opposite of ones dreamexpectation like “public rooms”. that are meant to be public! how horrible!!!(lol)

by the way -as it seems possibly noteworthy here - if you exchange emails with someones @gmail address, then google has all of your mail histories metadata, as well as the server of your provider has. just to mention, do not send emails to @gmail.com if you dislike google knowing about it. and if you share a document with edit history, then the edit history is likely also shared ;-) As “rooms” in matrix are meant to have a state that changes from the beginning sometimes possibly with every message and one can answer to a message which would reveal the existance of that message later when answered on, including at least a hint of what it was about, such information is imho meant to to be rather complete than hidden. maybe 1:1 chat solves this issue for you, as every chat with a new other person would start empty.

i might be wrong, but matrix already is one of the most robust systems when it comes to “compromised servers”. so very far away from a nightmare. that is unless you are either a true criminal bastard or a true world saving hero, then every leaked byte might be the deadly one, that is true.

So in case you are a true world saving hero: Maybe use a self build raspberry pi mesh proxy chain mounted on rooftops delivered by drones at night to proxy the signal of an in-memory-only-tasks-raspi to a free wifi, where the raspi that has its orders is using battery (like the rooftop proxy chain) but is hidden in a public transport to reach the proxy mesh by the transportations timetable. just to give a paranoic one some ideas and some work to do ;-) If you’ve build everything, then upload the code to github and designs to thingiverse so that “anyone” could have placed the proxy mesh to a free wifi on the rooftops, so you be more secure from beeing suspected ;-) lol btw a mesh system to accomplish this already exists, i think they named it b.a.t.m.a.n. (no joke) protocol, so the main struggle should be handling of solar power vs wifi signal strength, distances, humidity and windproof mount design beeing able to be deployed by manually controlled quadrocopters. good luck!

hm you have a point that it might not have been removed completely, but the problem with that point that i personally have is that this reached me too late to just believe it was really never removed. For some reasons i would not believe blindly in “evidences” that are in control of the one that is in question and could manipulate it later for such claims and also was experienced to not be trustworthy for what they say…

saying that, there are ways to check if something was there at a time or not. the one source i know that could help here only seems to store records from 29th jun 2023 18:44:33 onwards which is too late for this.

https://web.archive.org/web/20240000000000*/https://abc.xyz/investor/google-code-of-conduct/

you are right, it does not make a difference in if they can be trusted, but it makes a difference in why not and what to expect if you do so despite the red flags or -as a gov- just let things go on. A person who by accident was speeding should maybe be treated differenrly than a person who intentionally(!) does so while risking others lifes. and what would be more proof of intention than a written statement or removed canary? thus such a statement does make a difference in terms of they just cannot handle their stuff, don’t care at all or maybe even have evil intentions.

examples:

some kids making a fire in the forest cause they don’t know the risks

vs.

some young adults making a fire in the woods cause they just don’t care despite knowing the risks

vs.

a company making fire in the woods because its cheaper to do stuff there and they lack the resouces to do it safe and someone else will pay the firefighters anyway.

vs.

a company stating to want to do so cause they like it despite they could afford doing it secure but just no one could or would sue them anyway.

while i don’t want to say google is like no.4 here, to me these examples all make huge differences, no matter if the woods actually cought fire or not.