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Laptop stolen from Pelosi's office during storming of U.S. Capitol, says aide

reuters.com

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Re: Laptop stolen from Pelosi's office during storming of U.S. Capitol, says aide

#711

Post by ingenium »

paganel wrote: post #587
cptskippy wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does anyone use /Documents? That's just a folder where Apps like Acrobat put garbage files.

I'm on Mac OSX and almost all my non-programming files are in /Downloads. Maybe some other HN-ers have a better folder management technique than mine (which basically is absent), I'm curious what that is.

Honestly I make pretty heavy use of /tmp. Almost all downloads go there, along with anything that I won't be using again after the next hour. Self-cleanup whenever I reboot (which is rare).

Anything of importance, I have broad directories under Documents, and then sub folders. Or sometimes I'll put them on my fileserver with similar directory structure. The Documents folder is backed up with Spideroak.

Re: Laptop stolen from Pelosi's office during storming of U.S. Capitol, says aide

#712

Post by baldfat »

Joeri wrote: post #539
baldfat wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People who make up their truths that can't be disproven already have all that they need. a missing laptop.

Honestly, those people didn’t even need that. They need nothing founded in reality to make up their conspiracy theories, which is why no argument from reality can weaken them.

One of the most intelligent programmers who has been in the game since the early 80s posted the he is refusing to ever vote again till he knows his vote isn't stolen.

Re: Laptop stolen from Pelosi's office during storming of U.S. Capitol, says aide

#714

Post by hnick »

omarhaneef wrote: post #177
simonh wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it’s a shared machine for projecting notes, chances are it has nothing stored locally.

If I had to bet: -- someone accidentally stored something -- that thing is no big deal, perhaps technically a secret -- people who get ahold of it and read it will make up conspiracy theories about it

At that point, if you have the laptop and are willing to admit it you can just make a conspiracy document and say you found it on it.

Re: Laptop stolen from Pelosi's office during storming of U.S. Capitol, says aide

#715

Post by eloff »

jfk13 wrote: post #650
obmelvin wrote: post #629

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How was that amateurish? Acquiring and handling such a substance would not be easy.

They left a pretty clear trail, and they didn't actually succeed in killing the target. Sounds amateurish to me.

That sounds intentional. The only reason to use novichok as the weapon is precisely so everyone knows who did it. It's meant to be an example to others so they don't cross the Russian government.

Re: Laptop stolen from Pelosi's office during storming of U.S. Capitol, says aide

#716

Post by therealdrag0 »

ashtonkem wrote: post #103
mumblemumble wrote: post #14

Beyond the information security risk around the loss of this specific device, what really worries me is the physical security implications here. I'm certainly no expert on the subject, but it seems to me like, in a building like the US Capitol, it should not be anywhere near this easy for unauthorized people to waltz into an office or conference room in the first place. Let alone walk away with items from within that…

All that money, all those guns, all that harassing of random citizens, and this happened. One has to ask “what are we actually paying for?”

Fwiw multiple police/security leaders have been fired or forced to resign due to this.

Re: Laptop stolen from Pelosi's office during storming of U.S. Capitol, says aide

#717

Post by [deleted] »

baldfat wrote: post #712
Joeri wrote: post #539

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, those people didn’t even need that. They need nothing founded in reality to make up their conspiracy theories, which is why no argument from reality can weaken them.

One of the most intelligent programmers who has been in the game since the early 80s posted the he is refusing to ever vote again till he knows his vote isn't stolen.

[deleted]

Re: Laptop stolen from Pelosi's office during storming of U.S. Capitol, says aide

#718

Post by jlokier »

jandrese wrote: post #296
jerkstate wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? Every place I have worked with more than about 50 employees has used full drive encryption, so a laptop being stolen is not an infosec risk at all.

FDE only works if the machine is powered off. If a machine is stolen while it is still running there's a risk the user account could be compromised. Depending how sophisticated your adversary is they could potentially completely compromise the machine and extract all of the data. When you have physical access and no time pressure the options are vast.

FDE could be made to protect the data when the machine is out of range of its secure home network too.

Leaving it on, the machine would detect loss of home network fairly quickly and lock itself.

The FDE key would depend on a key server on the home network, so it could not be rebooted and unlocked just with the physical on-board devices.

If some parts of the FDE were handled on the storage itself and required a periodic end-to-end refresh with the home network key server, then even freezing main RAM (literally) to extract keys later would not work.

More generally, the FDE key could be split over a number of components on the machine, all of them requiring end-to-end periodic refresh from the home network key server, making it extremely difficult to freeze all on-board devices effectively enough to extract the whole key and decrypt the storage contents. Add RAM encryption to complete the job.

Re: Laptop stolen from Pelosi's office during storming of U.S. Capitol, says aide

#719

Post by brynjolf »

rufus_foreman wrote: post #684

I guess the bright spot of all this is we haven't heard anyone talking about abolishing the police for a couple days now.

Abolishing? Are you trying to sway opinions with using that word? Want to rephrase it?

Re: Laptop stolen from Pelosi's office during storming of U.S. Capitol, says aide

#720

Post by kube-system »

IkmoIkmo wrote: post #671
kube-system wrote: post #593

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also walked into my congressperson’s office when I was on a field trip as kid. The security was similar to going to the airport. > Might as well argue that you should be able to just walk into the white house and speak to the top public representative. Entirely different situation. The reason that people need to talk with the legislature is because those are the people’s representatives.

> Entirely different situation. The reason that people need to talk with the legislature is because those are the people’s representatives. Totally different, were it not for the fact the president is also the Chief of State: The chief public representative of a country. Besides, even if this wasn't the case, humor me and suppose it was (which it actually is), would you then conclude that the president should simply…

> Totally different, were it not for the fact the president is also the Chief of State: The chief public representative of a country.

It’s kind of a stretch to frame it that way. The president quite literally represents the states, not the people. The US does not require that states assign electors by popular vote, states have chosen to do that. And in the past, they have chosen to do it other ways. Before the civil war, there were states that selected electors without conducting a popular vote.

The way the US government is architected, the legislature is the extent of federal representative government.

6 of the 13 original states held a popular vote for president Washington.

But to respond to the bulk of your statement: it was like airport security back when I was a kid, and I don’t see any reason why that wouldn’t also be appropriate on any other typical (i.e. not a special event) day. Angry mobs should never make it to the building in the first place. Crowd control happens outside of the building.

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