Two interesting Linux distros

Tails

Tails or The Amnesic Incognito Live System is a security-focused Linux distro based on Debian. The main aim of Tails is the preservation of anonymity and privacy, being sponsored by the Tor Project. This is also the reason why it exclusively uses TOR to connect to the Internet. Tails has also been funded by the Open Technology Fund, Mozilla, and the Freedom of the Press Foundation.

It is designed to be booted off of a bootable USB or DVD drive, and will not leave any sign of its use on the machine unless the user wants to and decides to do so. Tails comes with the GNOME 3 desktop environment pre-installed, along with the bare minimum software to enable viewing/editing/printing documents/images and playing video files.

The word "Amnesic" in its name means that it runs purely in the computer's RAM and does not write to any persistent type of storage by default. The user can choose to do so, in which case the storage will be automatically encrypted (although it will be detectable). On shutdown, Tails also overwrites most of the RAM it used to prevent/avoid cold boot attacks.

It was released first in June 2009, being a successor to Incognito, which is a now-discontinued Gentoo-based Linux distro. Laura Poitras, Glenn Greenwald, and Barton Gellman have credited Tails as an important tool used in their work with the (in?)famous NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.

Puppy

The Puppy OS is somewhat akin to Tails in the sense both are quite lightweight, however, Puppy takes it to the next level. It only takes up about 300 MB of RAM for the 32-bit version, or 600 MB for the 64 bit one. It can also run on less than that, needing 128MB minimum to run from RAM and down to 48MB if some of the OS is run from persistent storage. Despite its small size, it includes some fairly basic software like AbiWord, Gnumeric and MPlayer.

The tool Woof can also be used to build a Puppy distribution from the binary packages of other Linux distributions. The supported distributions for this are Debian, Slackware and Ubuntu.

Puppy is generally well-liked thanks to its lightweight nature, being able to revive systems considered obsolete by any modern standard, making them usable for some light common desktop workloads.

The first release of Puppy was in June 2003, however, this was version 0.1, which, as suggested by the version number, was very barebones and lacked a lot of features such as a package manager or any ability to install applications. The full release, version 1.0 came out nearly 2 years later in March 2005. The latest release as of 25.04.2022 is version 9.5, which dropped support for 32-bit systems altogether as Ubuntu did so as well.

Conclusion

Tails and Puppy are two Linux distros that were made for completely different things – one for security, the other for its extremely light weight. They do share some similarities though despite their completely different use cases.

The hacker ideals in the modern world

Hacker culture

The hacker culture has been around ever since computers came around, and even preceded them by a little – but do the culture's ideals hold up in the modern world?

The ideals

1. Unlimited access to computers - and anything which might teach you something about the way the world works.

This has been a goal for most tech-literate people for a while now, and the world is inching ever closer to it. The practice of teaching kids to be somewhat versed in using a computer is fairly well-spread (although sometimes, the kids are already more experienced than the teachers!). This is also a pitfall in disguise – people tend to leave their young kids alone with their devices, open to the opportunities of the powerful Web, which is not exactly child-friendly in most of its content.

On the topic of "anything which might teach you something about the way the world works", while computers may be reaching ubiquity, information is not quite there.

2. All information should be free.

A lot of information has been made much more freely accessible with the Web becoming as widely used as it is today. Online encyclopedias such as Wikipedia, which anyone can edit, may not be the best source for any scientific work, but they are great for acquiring general level knowledge about a lot of topics.

Obviously, there still is a lot of secret information, mostly related to manufacturing processes or other things that might compromise a company's lead in its field if leaked. Unfortunately, making this information publicly available is fairly improbable, although it could help pave the way to the mentioned Capitalism 3.0.

3. Mistrust authority - promote decentralization.

The hacker ethic doesn't exactly mistrust all authority, but rather the misuse of authority. I think it is a good, if simplistic approach to a complex issue. On the topic of decentralization, the Internet has been quite decentralized from the start – and looks to be staying that way. New technologies, for example, blockchain and the cryptocurrency based on it, seek to expand the decentralization to the financial world. Judging by their success in the last few years, decentralization seems to be the way of the future.

However, social media along with a lot of the services people use online are often owned by a single tech giant parent company, which introduces concerns about privacy, data collection and more. The Internet isn't homogeneously moving towards decentralization at all.

4. Hackers should be judged by their hacking, not bogus criteria such as degrees, age, race, or position.

This is how it should be. However, in a lot of cases, it isn't. The problem is that fake or bogus "hackers" that have close to no idea about these ideals are a lot more prevalent on the internet than real, ethical hackers, so much so in fact, that the general public associates the word "hacker" with them instead.

For example, the most famous/infamous hacker group in the world Anonymous is frankly hard to take seriously. Before the war in Ukraine, all they did was post scary videos sometimes, but I must admit that their contribution to the war was something I did not expect at all.

Additionally, the idea of the internet being more equal than other channels of communication does stand, however even this has started to deteriorate, with all kinds of "ironic" -isms becoming prevalent in modern Internet humour.

5. You can create art and beauty on a computer.

Of course. Digital art is a large portion of the art being created today. Even I've tried my hand at it, and the power of computers in creating art is undeniable.

If you don't consider merely using a computer as a medium to create traditional art, actually "creating beauty on a computer", then I'd say a well-written piece of code is just as inspiring and beautiful. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, after all.

6. Computers can change your life for the better.

This is also very obvious – unless you are a Chinese sweatshop worker toiling away to assemble tech devices for a slave-like pay or a hopeless gaming addict, chances are computers already have affected your life in a positive way, whether you realize it or not.

Drastically changing one's life though is a little different, and I believe computers alone can't just "change" someone's life that deeply (unless you plop a person from a few hundred years ago into the modern times). The computer, in the end, is a tool, an extension with which you can change your life, but the existence of the computer alone won't.

Conclusion

The hacker ideals might not be prevalent in all of the general populace, but they still are relevant and absolutely followable in the modern world.

Online censorship and privacy

Online censorship

Online censorship is either blocking or limiting the data/websites viewable on the internet by some group of people. The level of censorship varies mostly on a country-to-country basis. It is a controversial topic, with most people agreeing that some sort of censorship should exist on the internet, however, the extent of this censorship is still debated.

The latest and most prominent example of internet censorship is the Russo-Ukrainian war – due to the nature and extent of the conflict (maybe not physically, but this conflict is politically much bigger than just the two countries). In this conflict, both sides have begun massively censoring each other's general media, labelling it propaganda. Russia has gone further and limited access to social media, more specifically Twitter, which is blocked in most regions, and Facebook and Instagram, which are blocked in the entire country altogether.

Even before the war, social media sites faced pressure from the Kremlin to remove "unfavourable" content. While this censorship has not developed far enough yet to be compared to the Great Firewall of China (since a VPN is still not that hard to find, and will bypass censorship), it isn't too far-fetched to consider it a possibility in the future.

Privacy

Privacy on the internet is another hotly contested topic, with many apps and services gathering data about their users, claiming it is to improve the users' experience. However, this is not always the case.

The Facebook and Cambridge Analytica data scandal was perhaps the biggest of its kind to date. In the 2010s, Cambridge Analytica obtained the private data of tens of millions of Facebook users. This was the largest known data leak in the history of Facebook. Cambridge Analytica then used this data to construct voter profiles to sell to political campaigns.

This scandal quickly blew up, with connections spanning from Trump's aide Stephen K. Bannon to Russia's Lukoil oil giant company (which had connections to the Kremlin).

In the end, it is estimated that around 87 million people's data was misused. The incident prompted people to be more concerned with their privacy online, and the phrase "You are the product on the internet." was popularized.

Conclusion

Censorship and privacy are two distinct yet connected topics on the Internet – and a complete agreement is to be reached on both of them. The future could hold dangerous things both in censorship and privacy.

Cyber security in Estonia

Introduction

Estonia has focused on cyber security for quite some time now and takes pride in its achievements in the field. It's a given then that the cyber security situation here is generally above the global standard.

NCSI

The NCSI or the National Cyber Security Index ranks countries based on their development level in several cybersecurity-related fields. According to the NCSI, Estonia currently ranks 5th in the world, only beaten by Greece, Lithuania, Belgium and the Czech Republic.

The top 5 countries. NCSI

They also provide a fairly in-depth analysis of what capabilities the country lacks to achieve a better score. The NCSI attributes these shortcomings to Estonia:

• No cyber security strategy implementation plan
• No PhD level cyber security programme
• No regulated requirements for cryptosystems 
• No specific government entity to combat cybercrime

Other than the aforementioned shortcomings, the NCSI gives Estonia an otherwise perfect score. Some notable points include:

• The inclusion of cyber/computer safety competencies in primary/secondary school curriculums
• The existence of a dedicated military cyber operations unit, and its active participation in exercises
• Hosting of an international cyber security organization in the country (CCDCOE)

It should be mentioned that the NCSI is based in Estonia, but they don't seem to be doing anything to make our country seem better than it is.

Conclusion

Estonia is punching above its weight in cyber security right now, with people being actively educated about the basics in schools (although some people from the older generations can still be sort of clueless). The Estonian international cyber security situation is a bit better than its internal one though. There is no top-level cyber security education, no cybercrime unit and some lacking regulations.

References:

https://ncsi.ega.ee/ncsi-index/