John Richard

Well, first they are lying to you. You don’t have to hand out certificates manually and that isn’t how Intune does it either. They are provisioned using SCEP generally, which has its own security drawbacks. You can get these certificates from a SCEP server using a tool like Certmonger.

Most companies that say they don’t officially support Linux already have you sign an acceptable-use agreement to only use company-provided hardware and approved software. And while they may act like they’ll make a special exception for you, you better make sure you got it in writing and in a way that would comply with your other employment agreements. One thing most IT employees don’t have the privilege of is negotiating the legal terms of their employment. There are already multiple US cases of employees being criminalized for breaking their employer’s AUP.

I wish you the best of luck, but feel like you’re prob in for a harsh reality.

You can use Wi-Fi certificates on Linux without needing Intune. Is the real issue here that your workplace doesn’t want to give you the info you need to use Linux?

What would having Intune offer you personally? Are you a smart Linux user or barely know enough to be dangerous?

Go to your IT department or management and tell them you want to use Linux for work if that is what you want, and if they say no then make up your mind if you’re willing to become a braindead zombie for the company, or if you’d rather be doing something actually useful and meaningful with your time.

Won’t be long before politicians give them permission to start killing Americans on America soil for being against genocide

Such a security risk though, but still better than curling scripts into sudo

This is what NameCheap does too. It’s freaking stupid. Domain registrations should not be managed by corporations.

It means that questioning decisions or problems is seen as negative in the community generally and that everyone else must be wrong for not using NixOS.

As I used to say. The Nix community acts more like a cult of people willing to support flat earth.

deleted by creator

I use Hyrpland, and so there are times where I need to use GTK or Qt tools. I generally don’t like KDE-based tools though because they are dependency-heavy.

So does many of the GTK tools though… so, again… why use Qt at all if you want to save memory.

I like some of LXQt tools, but at one point do you decide if you’re going to use Qt… why not just go all out and use KDE?

Why is it that it seems like Gnome seems to be implementing Windows bad practices? The last thing Linux needs is a Windows registry. One of the greatest benefits of Linux IMO is the ability to configure applications in config files… not having to use some custom tool to manage the configuration.

I kept waiting for them to do something like this.

At this point Linux really needs a web tool (like Cockpit) that can show and manage these types of settings regardless of the distribution.

Proton stores an encrypted blob.

It doesn’t matter that your private key is stored on their servers encrypted/hased or whatever. If you were simply storing it there, that would not be an issue. The problem is that you’re also logging in and relying on whatever JS is sent to you to only happen client-side.

Probably we misunderstand what “transparent” means in this context. What I mean is that the average user will not do any PGP operation, in general. Encryption happens transparently for them, which is the whole thing about Proton: make encryption easy and default.

Most users aren’t sending emails from their Proton to other Proton users either. Furthermore, the users that want encryption seek it out. They don’t need to use Proton for encryption, especially when it would be easy for them to get an unknowing users decryption password.

Again, as I said before, they control the JS, they can get the decrypted data without getting the password…? You always trust your client tooling. There is always a point where I trust someone, be it the “enigmail” maintainers, Thunderbird maintainers (it has access to messages post-decryption!), the CLI tool of choice etc.

Yes, you have to trust source code somewhere, but with Thunderbird or other mail clients that is open source and their apps are signed or you can reproducibily build from source. However, once that is built it doesn’t change. With Proton, everytime you visit their site you don’t know for sure that it hasn’t changed unless you’re monitoring the traffic. A government is much more likely to convince Proton to send a single user a custom JS payload, than to modify the source code of Thunderbird in a way that would create an exploit that bypasses firewalls, system sandboxing, etc.

I mean, their clients are open-source and have also been audited?

You mean their PWA/WebView clients that can still send custom JS at anytime, or their bridge?

Care to share any practical example/link, and how exactly this means not having a fat client that does the encryption/decryption for you?

First, explain what you mean by a fat client? GnuPG is not a fat client.

Right, because *DAV protocol are so secure. They all support e2ee, right…? There is a security benefit, and the benefit is trusting the client software more than a server, especially if shared. You can export data and migrate when you want easily, so it’s really a matter of preference.

Being able to export things is a lot different than being able to use Thunderbird for Calendars, or a different Contacts app on your phone. DAV is as secure as the server you run it on and the certificate you use for transport.

if the server never has access to the keys or the plaintext of messages (or calendar events, etc.), then you need a client tool to handle decryption and encryption operations.

Proton stores your keys, and you have the decryption password. How do you think they handle password-based logins? Only the user should ever generate and store the private key. All they need now is your decryption password & they can read your messages. This is reason #1 not to trust Proton.

They use PGP, and they have implemented this feature in a way that it’s completely transparent to the user to make it mainstream.

It isn’t transparent, because most users aren’t running their own frontend locally and tracking all the source code changes. They’ve already violated the first rule of PGP privacy by having your private key. Now you’re merely trusting them to not send you a custom JS payload to have your decryption password sent to the server. How many users are actually utilizing their hidden API to ensure that decryption/encryption is only done client-side? If they have your private key, how many users do you think are using long enough passwords to make cracking their password more challenging? This is reason #2 to not trust Proton.

PGP tooling sucks hard and it’s extremely inaccessible for the general population.

This is just entirely inaccurate and you’ve failed to provide any "proof’ for your generalizations here.

This means that you need a fat client, whatever you do, or otherwise the server will have access to the data and there is no e2ee.

If you actually understood PGP you’d know you can generate and use local-only keys with IMAPS and have support to use any IMAP client. Furthermore, the other apps by Proton like Proton Pass, Calendar, etc… all use undocumented APIs that they have yet to implement in their bridge using standard protocols like CalDav/CardDav/JSON or whatever else in order to be able to integrate with local tools. There is no security benefit in their implementation other than to lock you into a walled garden and give you a false sense of security.

Go ahead and explain what you mean. I don’t believe you & think you’re just parroting their corpo speak.

I don’t have any friends really 😥 and the unlimited storage with Google Workspace was $25/mo. I think it will cost me about $125/mo. now to get enough pooled storage with Google, but it is doable at least in the short-term. I guess I need to make some friends with fiber connections.

That’s rad… I have a set of Ansible playbooks/roles/collections already for most system-wide settings. I have a love-hate relationship with Ansible though, but it gets the job done. I may try for cloud-init first until I reach its limitations. I’ve gotten pretty good at the Arch install too, although setting up the disks with LUKS was the most challenging part. Fortunately, the few times I’ve broke things I’ve been able to boot the installer ISO and mount my LUKS volumes from memory, but I couldn’t tell you how I set them up in the first place. 🤣 However I do it, I really just want to automate the process so that I can add new nodes and expand should I decide to rent out colocation space someday.

Thanks. I believe TrueNAS does ZFS as well… maybe by default. If I want to keep it simple this will probably be the route I go.