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BusKill – A USB kill cord for laptops

buskill.in

31–40 of 339 posts

Re: BusKill – A USB kill cord for laptops

#31

> Buy with Monero I bet they'd go crazy if someone accused them of this being designed for illegal activities

That's... because it isn't? How would a dead man switch be illegal?

I mean it may, hypothetically, be used to hide illegal activities, but if you go that way you go down the slippery slope and will be advocating for weakening or backdooring encryption just in case it's used for illegal activites.

Re: BusKill – A USB kill cord for laptops

#33

Maybe I'm "spoiled" because in Germany there's a need to publish an imprint on all websites that are somehow "commercial" (having ads on it would be enough), but this is highly "dubious". No contact information (as in "who runs this?") is provided on the site. Privacy policy is not GDPR compliant (no contact information provided), no names, nothing. This might be fine for a personal blog, but for doing business this…

Would you be happier if the site prevented you from viewing it?

I would. It would save me the time spotting the red flags and backing away anyway.

Though a couple of relevant regulations state this should not be done, and no site is going to send away a potential customer by saying “we don't want to follow your laws/regulations so can't do business with you” when they can instead just get away with just ignoring, or in the case of sites run from elsewhere in the world claim to have no no knowledge of, those regulations.

Re: BusKill – A USB kill cord for laptops

#35

Maybe I'm "spoiled" because in Germany there's a need to publish an imprint on all websites that are somehow "commercial" (having ads on it would be enough), but this is highly "dubious". No contact information (as in "who runs this?") is provided on the site. Privacy policy is not GDPR compliant (no contact information provided), no names, nothing. This might be fine for a personal blog, but for doing business this…

If they wanted to be dubious, they could've put up some fake/stolen information.

Then you wouldn't question it, which just makes the whole thing rather useless.

I always found it funny how people trust Stiftung Warentest. It's the German equivalent to "Which?", but at least Brits know they're full of shit.

Re: BusKill – A USB kill cord for laptops

#36

Feel like this something similar can be accomplished for Macs using AirTags/Apple Watch proximity to do specific actions via Shortcuts App, instead of just locking/erasing remotely using 'Find My'.

Isn't that already a thing? IIRC you can configure your Mac to unlock if your Watch is in close proximity, so it should be possible to do the opposite when it goes out of range.

Probably something the Shortcuts app could do, I couldn't find a Watch specific entry when creating one though. So it's just lock/unlock for now.

Re: BusKill – A USB kill cord for laptops

#39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's probably better to be beat up or tortured by a state actor than to rot in prison for the rest of your life if they get hands on proof of your culpability. Besides the USA is not Al Qaida, there is a chance they would respect the Geneva convention: https://ccrjustice.org/home/get-involved/tools-resources/fac...

What I'm saying is that they wouldn't get a chance to use the kill switch because they would have focused on "containing" the suspect before they could activate it.

In theory, I agree. But it is somewhat akin to saying - why use strong encryption since a three letter agency can just brute force your device. If you're in that deep, maybe it won't help. But for the average reporter in a hostile zone, keeping the local police from snooping on their machine would be preferential.

Re: BusKill – A USB kill cord for laptops

#40
There are mentions in this thread about false positives, risk of data loss, others. This made me think of Star Trek's use of a self destruct phrase. Obviously their method is too slow, but you could have a "duress" phrase and a "all clear" phrase.

User-Defined Phrase: "Please dont kill me", activates "duress" mode.

- A daemon listens in the background for a phrase of your choice. When detected, your laptop makes a sound effect that is not out of the ordinary for others to hear, but not something you would expect it to play when self destruct is activated. Git repos are committed/pushed with a duress demarcation code to an alternate branch. Your encrypted volumes are dismounted, buffers and caches cleared, camera and microphone start sending small chunks of audio/video to a destination of your choosing. Instructions for playback from your cloud of choice are emailed to emergency contacts. If you do not give the "all clear" in a user-configurable time period, the laptop does user-defined things like wiping encrypted volumes after giving an optional warning sound, optionally sending eeprom codes to brick the BIOS or replace the BIOS with a tracker and setting the screen to say "Stolen From User-Defined String, User-Defined Phone Number" after giving an optional warning sound. All of these actions could be optionally spaced apart based on risk, probably defined in a key-pair text file or json file.

User-Defined Phrase: "Computer, disable self destruct" disables "duress" mode.

- Giving the all clear code disables this behavior and your ship does not self destruct. The system plays a sound to acknowledge "all clear". Emergency contacts are emailed the all-clear, but audio/video continue to upload for user-defined time in the event your were forced to give the phrase.

Perhaps newer cars could also have this feature? Are there any existing open source projects that could be adapted/bent to accomplish these things?

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