On Sun, 31 May 2015 01:48:10 -0600 Mirimir <mirimir@riseup.net> wrote:
On 05/31/2015 12:15 AM, Cathal (Phone) wrote:
Wipe the machine, install fresh and clean Linux, and then password lock the BIOS.
That's excellent advice ... to someone who owns the machine. I'd say also to use LUKS. But maybe here that would dramatically escalate the confrontation. And there's also the lack of physical security.
Zenaan's advice is more appropriate in a child-parent context. If that's impossible, the best option is probably doing private stuff elsewhere.
I think trying to go against the parents themselves would be a bad idea unless you know they can be reasoned with, but having a look seems only fair, their children should know to what degree they should trust their computer. I would personally use software such as process explorer and tcpview to get an idea of what is running (assuming they use windows here), but if you think the parents may be using something stronger than your usual parental control tool maybe booting the system from a live cd and having a look at what may be hidden from regular process managers (might be a bit extreme, I'm not sure any parent would go that far, but it will be pretty effective, and maybe less of a chore. If they really are monitoring all activity on the computer they might deduce that they are "busted", it might even "incriminate" you once they realize that their kids shouldn't know that much about computers.) In any case, the most likely is that they use some basic software and just "manually" check what was the machine used for, so a small introduction (if needed) about using computers (and the right tools) safely and cleanly might just be enough to stop Orwellian parents. I never contributed to a mailing list before, hope I didn't fucked it up Cheers
On 31 May 2015 03:24:45 GMT+01:00, Gadit Bielman <thetransintransgenic@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi.
I'm trying to help (probably badly, but..) a friend deal with parents that they expect are spying on them. I know that in general, it's impossible to secure a computer that you can't trust and don't necessarily have administrator privileges to.
But their parents are not exactly the NSA -- any spying that's happening is almost definitely some sort of product, plus basic things like maybe looking through their history. (I don't know much about they're situation -- maybe they know more, so well-if-you-know-they-do-this-then-you-could-do-this type advice would still be helpful.)
Would antivirus be able to detect spy-on-your-kids products? Would they be able to scan their computer with like Immunet or something, even if they didn't have administrator privileges?
Tor would probably help -- unless the monitoring was looking at the RAM or something for website names, which would be way overkill on a commercial product, no? Or (more likely) if it was taking screenshots at regular intervals, which would also break running a VM or something. (Is there any way to detect taking screenshots?)
I know probably the best thing would be running TAILS as a LiveCD -- the problem with that is that it's REALLY obvious over-the-shoulder.
Um, thoughts about any of those? Any other things about parents as a threat model in general?
I know this is pretty far from what is usually discussed on here, but I'm really interested in what you think/it would potentially help a lot of people.
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