Ask HN: How do you trust that your personal machine is not compromised?

I would also assume the fact that their vertical integration all the way down to silicon is an advantage here as well.

Not always, but often I prefer development on remote VPS’s. For anything deep learning I pay Google a little bit of money every month for Colab notebooks, save a ton of my own time, and don’t worry about trying random 3rd party libraries. I don’t have this use case anymore, but I used to use very large memory VPS’s with SBCL Common Lisp and Emacs to work on an old project that required lot’s of data in memory - VPS’s are really cheap if you turn them off when not in use.

In the 1980s and a bit into the 1990s, I did most things in X Windows - I have thought about how good that would be for secure remote development, but text with tmux, Emacs, etc. is so much less hassle.

That is... I don't trust my machine.

I take reasonable precautions, but at a certain point you have to just live your life and deal with people who violate your boundaries in meatspace.

I talked to a security researcher specializing on Android at a conference and he didn't sound like he'd agree.

While I personally think ChromiumOS does a good job, I think a huge problem is that the issue is in how liberally complexity is added. And complexity is typically where security issues lurk. This has been seen again and again.

It's also why I think projects such as OpenBSD do such a great job. Their main focus seems to be reducing complexity (which they are sometimes are criticized for). A lot of the security seems to come from the reduced attack surface you get. And then the security mechanisms build, which typically are more easily implemented, because of said simplicity are the next layer.

And I think OpenBSD has reached a sweet spot there, where it's not some obscure research OS, but an OS that you can install on your server or desktop, run actual work loads, heck, even play Stardew Valley, or a shooter on, but have all the benefits in terms of security or simplicity that you can from research OSs, Plan 9, etc.

So maybe not mainstream, but mainstream enough to actually work with it. There's sadly many projects that completely ignore reality around them, also because their goal is to simply be research projects and nothing more. Then we have those papers that rarely everyone ever looks at on how in a perfect world all those big security topics could be solved. Unless some big company comes along and puts it into some milestone.

ChromiumOS seems like the limitations you get are similar, probably even more severe than what you get compared to OpenBSD's flexibility. That's something many de-google projects struggle with as well. At the same time the complexity remains a whole lot bigger. Of course goals and target groups are hugely different.

I think both Android and ChromiumOS used to put more emphasis on simplicity, but gave it up at some point. I am not sure why, but would assume that many decisions are simply company decisions. After all the eventual goal is economic growth.

That locking down on mobile devices is not just to increase security, but has the beneficial side effect of controlling the platform. This might not even be directly intended by the security focused developers, but it is a side effect.

So "most trustable" in that scenario comes with "most gate-keeping", "least ownership", etc., which we are kind of used to on smartphones, tablets and Chromebooks. So I think comparing it with other kinds of mainstream OSs isn't really leading to much.