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German government warns Windows 8 is a security risk

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Re: German government warns Windows 8 is a security risk

#101

Post by moocowduckquack »

mpyne wrote: post #91
moocowduckquack wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"First, I fail to see any relevance or technical info about how TPM or trusted boot to the issue at hand." Is that a sentence? It sort of looks like a sentence, but something seems missing.

I'm assuming you're not a computer, have you tried using context clues to figure out what the author might have meant? This isn't Reddit, we don't need grammar Nazis or joke threads here.

wasn't a grammar issue, it was that the middle of the sentence seemed to be missing and that it was confusing enough that I thought it useful to point out, and now it is fixed and makes sense to people, yayy :)

Re: German government warns Windows 8 is a security risk

#102

Post by walshemj »

kintamanimatt wrote: post #84
walshemj wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So don't buy an iPhone ;-) But you do have a point - I suggest you lobby your MEP/Senator/MP to ban totally walled gardens or to use anti trust to split the app side of Google and Apple etc from the parent - this is what caused IBM so much trouble in the 60/70's

TPM isn't limited to iPhones! I don't think TPM or walled gardens are a political problem, but more a technical and marketing problem. Lobbying for legislation that prevents alternative marketplaces from being locked out of a particular ecosystem doesn't actually mean people will use them en masse, or even know they exist. For example, despite Android's open nature, Amazon Appstore is very unlikely to ever beat Googl…

call me when open office and gimp don't suck

Re: German government warns Windows 8 is a security risk

#103

Post by kintamanimatt »

walshemj wrote: post #102
kintamanimatt wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TPM isn't limited to iPhones! I don't think TPM or walled gardens are a political problem, but more a technical and marketing problem. Lobbying for legislation that prevents alternative marketplaces from being locked out of a particular ecosystem doesn't actually mean people will use them en masse, or even know they exist. For example, despite Android's open nature, Amazon Appstore is very unlikely to ever beat Googl…

call me when open office and gimp don't suck

I don't really use OpenOffice apps frequently (LaTeX FTW!), but OO doesn't suck.

Photoshop beats the pants off GIMP, unfortunately.

Re: German government warns Windows 8 is a security risk

#104

Post by Spearchucker »

T-hawk wrote: post #99
Spearchucker wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have no intention of moving away from Windows 8. I do, however, have a laptop that never connects to a network. Ever. It's where I keep things I consider private. Data transfer, minimal as it is, is done using swivel-chair integration. Everything else (i.e. all my remaining devices and apps on those devices) are treated like any PC in an Internet café - untrusted and compromised.

How do you back up the private data on that laptop?

Two external hard drives. One stays at home, the other is at my dad's house.

Re: German government warns Windows 8 is a security risk

#105

Post by kunai »

I never really understood how TC works. Does the TPM actually do anything on-the-fly that is noticeable? Is it used at all on any consumer devices?

Fill me in here, because I'm at a loss.

EDIT: Never mind. It seems like prior TPMs shipped with hardware, but were opt-in instead of opt-out, and now, with the W8.1 hardware spec, TPM 2.0 (which has a greater range of TC technologies) will need to be enabled as default on hardware shipped with W8.1, and there is no possible way to opt-out.

A shame that hardware manufacturers are just Microsoft lackeys.

Re: German government warns Windows 8 is a security risk

#106

Post by reirob »

snarfy wrote: post #88
kintamanimatt wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hadn't heard of them, although buying such a thing internationally would be an expensive pain in the ass to return if there were an in-warranty defect! Also, as an Ubuntu-user, as I really love the idea of these, but they're ugly and look really cheap: http://i.imgur.com/KGPznQz.jpg

There are other places, like http://www.powernotebooks.com/ and http://www.xoticpc.com/ that have excellent warranties and deal with all the international stuff so you don't have to. Granted they don't come with linux, but you can order them with no OS.

I just have looked up on www.xoticpc.com for a Thinkpad X1 Carbon and there is NO possibility to get it without Windows. So at least for them it is not true.

Re: German government warns Windows 8 is a security risk

#107

Post by superuser2 »

bangboppok wrote: post #98
thaumasiotes wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> TC could also be used to delete evidence from computers of journalists who would have no power to keep it. Since Amazon deleted all those copies of 1984 from everyone's Kindles, I don't keep mine connected to the internet. If you have data, you can keep it. Keep it on your own devices.

> Since Amazon deleted all those copies of 1984 from everyone's Kindles What? When? Seriously?

They mistakenly sold books the publishers hadn't licensed, then refunded the customers and removed the books from their Kindles.

Re: German government warns Windows 8 is a security risk

#108

Post by reirob »

Just have found another article that might give some more details. It is again a German article, so I hope that German speaking community will step in again (the last Google translation was really bad) and provide its interpretation.

The article is an interview of Professor Dr. Rüdiger Weis, who is a cryptology expert:

https://netzpolitik.org/2013/interview-trusted-computing-sti...

Re: German government warns Windows 8 is a security risk

#109

Post by 64598u3wieodsk »

progman wrote: post #41
grobmeier wrote: post #12

2013, it's the post-snowden era. We don't have a cold war any more, but the level of spying is unbelievable. I am currently moving out my emails from GMail and installed PGP. At the moment I am using OSX since I do for years. But in the end the only "safe" way to protect your business and privacy is to use Linux/Unix. The FSF said it for years; the german CCC told us for years. I admit, I didn't believe it's so bad.…

It is even worse. The attempt to escape into OSS/Linux is a step in the right direction. But as long as we are dependent on mass consumer hardware then there is always a risk of being spied through hardware backdoors. In this case it doesn't matter which software we use. Even encryption is useless. It is NOT enough to avoid Windows 8 because the real problem is modern hardware that uses Trusted Computing chips. Trust…

Thanks for your insight. I completely agree. Can you recommend any tutorials and secure hardware components?

Re: German government warns Windows 8 is a security risk

#110

Post by catnaroek »

kintamanimatt wrote: post #103
walshemj wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

call me when open office and gimp don't suck

I don't really use OpenOffice apps frequently (LaTeX FTW!), but OO doesn't suck. Photoshop beats the pants off GIMP, unfortunately.

OpenOffice/LibreOffice suck for what I do with Office: Write scripts that exchange data with other applications, in particular, operations research software. It is a pity, because Python is a superior scripting language than VBA, but for the most part, developers of optimization and simulation packages have voted with their feet to make it easier for their programs to exchange data with Excel and Access, not with OO/LO Calc.

Admittedly, my use case is not terribly common.

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