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State considered harmful: A proposal for a stateless laptop (2015)

blog.invisiblethings.org

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Re: State considered harmful: A proposal for a stateless laptop (2015)

#2
It's frustrating that the author is using the word "stateless" because it usually means something different in the context of computer-related topics. Maybe the title of the paper should have been something like "A proposal for an ephemeral-storage laptop" or something along those lines.

Re: State considered harmful: A proposal for a stateless laptop (2015)

#3
Of course, even with a truly airgapped computer, people have developed side channel attacks to exfiltrate information by listening to things not generally considered to be part of the "networking" portion of the computer, such as radio signals generated by the operation of the processor.

Re: State considered harmful: A proposal for a stateless laptop (2015)

#6
post #5

This was in 2015. Did he ever develop a stateless laptop? It would be useful to have one. Too many governments want to snoop on your devices at border crossings.

1) they or she 2) they are software people 3) There is a laptop out there with 'open' firmware you can find. flash all the chips to your liking, and have it somewhat better than this situation. That being said of course you would have to develop your own operating system and user space for it otherwise it would be useless to go through the trouble... which is the part these people are mainly working on, since it's more practical to begin with.

I hope with innovations in fpga and other types of programmable hardware ideas perhaps for low resource secure computing we can have some alternatives (for personal communciations etc.) while for high performance computing it will be ways to go before such a vendor would release something completly open and auditable. (intellectual property protection is too important (businesswise, not human-wise) in such a market unfortunatley to survive as a company who needs to invest years worth of revenue just to put up an assembly line...)

Re: State considered harmful: A proposal for a stateless laptop (2015)

#8

I actually would like a stateless computer. A pure functional laptop. It could store state on the cloud as a series of changesets, and each boot would be a "checkout" of the top state. Then as you compute, you make to make new changesets.

You might be in the market for a Chromebook. Keep in mind that this isn't really what the author is talking about, though–a significant part of her paper is a desire for the ability to keep her information private, which includes measures such as removing wireless functionality.

Re: State considered harmful: A proposal for a stateless laptop (2015)

#9
post #5

This was in 2015. Did he ever develop a stateless laptop? It would be useful to have one. Too many governments want to snoop on your devices at border crossings.

I know it's not exactly the same thing but you could check out something like the Purism laptop[1] and you could run Tails from a USB key[2]

P.S. I wouldn't assume that someone called Joanna is a 'he' LOL

[1] https://puri.sm/learn/why-purism-computers-are-better-than-p...

[2] https://tails.boum.org/

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