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from the all-your-computer-are-belong-to-us dept.
At the All Systems Go conference in Berlin 20-22 September, Lennart Poettering proposed a new extension to systemd, systemd-homed.service. A video of his session can be downloaded from media.ccc.de with accompanying slides [PDF].
In his presentation, Poettering outlines a number of problems he sees with the current system, like /etc needs to be writeable, UIDs need to be consistent across systems, and lack of encryption and resource management.
His goals with the proposed solution are migrateable and self-contained, UID-independent home directories with extensible user records that unify the user's password and encryption key; LUKS locking on system suspend; and Yubikey support.
He identifies a number of problems this new idea could cause with SSH logins, disk space assignments, UID assignments, and LUKS locking.
He plans to introduce JSON user records that can be queried via a Varlink interface and to a certain extent are convertible to and from existing formats. The home directories will be stored as LUKS-encrypted files that will be managed by the proposed new service, systemd-homed.service. The system integration will be supported by pam_systemd and systemd-logind.service.
It will be interesting to see how the world responds to this new take on systemd's ever-increasing encroachment of Linux.
... and lastly, this story is brought to you from a systemd-free laptop.
(Score: 3, Informative) by The Mighty Buzzard on Sunday September 22 2019, @02:59PM (9 children)
Nobody's stopping me. I use them on my Gentoo-based distro every day.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by jmichaelhudsondotnet on Monday September 23 2019, @07:32AM (8 children)
For now.
If you are instituting a vast system of social control, you deal with people intelligent enough to use gentoo and wise enough to know that LP has a hidden agenda, seperately.
They have enough time and resources to put invisible cameras above the workstations of all of those people while they are out of the house.
Tyranny of the masses is a thing. Once 95% of the people are using cloud computers that are backdoored through spageti code, they can focus down the remaining personal computers with grunt work the old fashioned way.
They are manipulating a bell curve of a population who can't understand any of this entire thread without house of acronym and concept study. I don't completely understand a lot of this discussion because at this point they are expert level discussions and I am not a programming specialist, I'm someone who doesn't have to look up the acronyms and concepts though.
So I am looking for which side of the argument is being more manipulative and in whose bed everyone is sleeping.
An intelligent person can be overloaded with too many specific questions, which is what is happening here, it's a real whackamole scenario with systemd that is exhausting the community exactly as predicted.
A wise, experienced, mature person can just look at who is lying, manipulative and/or naive, and the answer to this question in this case is as clear as day, clearer even.
At some point though 'well my specific solution works for me i don't care if everyone else builds a panopticon and gives away all their freedom' is going to stop working, sane people cannot survive for long in a completely insane society once it hits a point.
I am on the front lines of this, I had to leave the united states out of fear in January 2018. Ignore my story at your peril .
(Score: 3, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday September 23 2019, @10:56AM (7 children)
There's no conspiracy here, just one terrible software engineer with a vision that looks good to morons in a hurry. And if you think good software can't survive a bunch of morons wanting to use shitty software, I offer you the opportunity to explain the continued existence of the Linux kernel and *BSD. Or SoylentNews when many more people use Slashdot.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Bot on Monday September 23 2019, @01:17PM (4 children)
The adoption of systemd cannot possibly be anything but a conspiracy. It is documented by the 180° change in Debian, the formerly init AND kernel independent Universal OS.
To correctly frame it as a car analogy imagine if the automakers all started to build larger heavier cars full of insa uffnely connected electrics and electronics which hamper repairability and slow them down. Would you conclude that:A. The advantage in doing that is so compelling that they can afford being less competitive. B. They do that so that they can sell more and do more assistance, no need for a conspiracy. C. A conspiracy to build shitty cars is underway. The answer is somewhere between B and C, but the official answer is always gonna be A.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 2) by jmichaelhudsondotnet on Monday September 23 2019, @03:33PM (3 children)
To help with your analogy, these improvements would be for 'enterprise cars' that are rentals or for transport, but the entire engine for these types of cars is put in everybody's car, even if they don't want it.
AND there was an open source car that just anyone could build and contribute to the design, and rather than make their own proprietary one, dozens of people converge from nowhere wanting to change the open source car version for everyone, just because. They don't want to fork, they want to take over the whole thing. And then the things they add are overcomplex and totally out of line with the original philosophy of the project(s).
They are actually doing this with cars too now by the way, your car will be tracked like it's in a fleet and there will be no way to buy one that is not.
Always be suspicous when people want to do free work and come from a for profit entity that does business with spy agencies.
At this point if business representatives contribute to a software project, it already starts to stink. There is a huge world for business software, but if there is no distinction made for personal computers and individual needs, we might as well just beam up to the borg ship already.
It may be too late, which is why I type so much here.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday September 24 2019, @02:46AM (2 children)
Says you. All I need are parts, tools, and time and I can put one together that does exactly what I tell it and nothing else. I don't just want my computer just so, I want my everything just so and will acquire any skills necessary to ensure that it is.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by jmichaelhudsondotnet on Tuesday September 24 2019, @08:06AM (1 child)
Like I said before, those of us capable of using and building alternatives will receive special treatment because there are so few of us, and gradually living with a bunch of people who have no regard for their privacy or control of their devices, will be annoying.
If you go with the flow and let all manner of tyranny pass on right in front of your face like a heartless monster, the system will treat you well though.
https://jmichaelhudson.net/4-important-drawings/ [jmichaelhudson.net]
Totalitarianism is like a restaurant where if you order anything off the menu or interfere with the slaughter in the backroom, you get slaughtered in the backroom. And they don't tell you actually everything that is on the menu and it constantly changes, getting smaller, and eventually it forces everyone it doesn't like into a grievous error.
You can only bury your head in the sand for so long with your own perfect world of ethical personal tech before they come for you, and your ass will be in the air, and at that point no one else will see you because they all have their heads in the sand too.
One of the main points of my writing in 2019 is because I have seen how this works first hand, so I am trying to yank your head out of the sand, but you just like it in there so much apparently.
We cannot protect ourselves from tyranny one at a time, and tyranny anywhere threatens every free person. These are not problems you can run from.
And you still haven't answered my question: Are there any non-crazy people in the united states being infiltrated and harassed by undercovers just because of things they say and think?
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday September 24 2019, @12:17PM
Oh, sure but you don't number among them as far as I can tell. You see a situation with an obvious, mundane explanation (like Mr. Douchenozzle and systemd) and come up with a conspiracy to explain it instead. That don't reflect well on your mental state. I mean, if there's some evidence of a conspiracy that's all fine and dandy but if it's entirely speculation on your part, you're supposed to be able to recognize that.
Like I'm relatively sure quite a lot of people who've pissed the Clintons off and subsequently died of self-inflicted gunshot wounds to the back of the head number among them. You don't get double digits worth of enemies dying in extremely timely circumstances and retain the benefit of the doubt. My relative certainty still holds a very important bit of doubt that your absolute certainty does not though. Science vs. Religion. Proof vs. Faith. Cynicism vs. Mental Illness.
Now as far as the on-topic stuff goes? Please... Nobody anywhere gives two shits if you build or modify your car in such a way as to not have invasive bits you don't want on it. Well, maybe your insurance company but they have good reason and they'll just charge you more if you do. The people who have the skills and the inclination to do so are such a small fraction of the population that we're utterly irrelevant to anyone.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by jmichaelhudsondotnet on Monday September 23 2019, @03:38PM (1 child)
I'm curious, do you see any conspiracies anywhere?
In your eyes, how did epstein get away with it for so long?
Because if someone sees no conspiracies, then that is the last person I can trust on the matter.
btw you did not answer my question, have you read about any private citizens being harassed and followed by mucky mucks?
I can name 5 offhand. Snowden is one side of the issue, but if anything he says is true, the cointelpro stuff has to be going at full speed, so you think *no one* is encountering undercovers?
That *everyone* who reports strange things has a mental illness?
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday September 24 2019, @02:49AM
Oh all the Epstein stuff was full of conspiracy. Systemd is just one egomaniacal douchebag who talks fast enough to convince corporate officers he's not a shitty software engineer though. I mean, is he or is he not an egomaniacal douchebag? Is he or is he not convincing if you don't have half a clue what he's talking about? When you have an obvious cause staring you in the face, it's kind of silly to go looking for a hidden one.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.