[Cryptography] Understanding state can be important.

[grarpamp]

On Tue, Dec 29, 2015 at 1:34 PM, Ray Dillinger <bear at sonic.net> wrote:
>
> On 12/28/2015 02:02 PM, Henry Baker wrote:
>> At 11:45 AM 12/28/2015, Ray Dillinger wrote:
>>> Maybe I've always been a suspicious bastard where software is concerned
>>
>> Apparently, not suspicious enough.
>>
>> It's nine o'clock; do you know what all of your processes (i.e., ps ax or equivalent) are doing?
>
> Oh hell no, there's hundreds of running processes now.  I'm still a
> suspicious bastard, but these days I feel utterly helpless to do
> anything about it.  There is no practical alternative to complicated
> OSes that start processes without permission and refuse to explain
> what they are and why they're running.  I look at my process table,
> I see $NAME I don't recognize, I ask "man $NAME" and there is no
> such documentation.  One more mysterious thing that will crash my
> system if I kill it but I have to look elsewhere to explain what it
> is and why it's running.
>
>> If you're running Win10, a goodly amount of disk & net traffic has to do with surveilling you
>
> This is one of the reasons I don't.  The other is that there is even
> less explanation of what the hell is running, and you can't even get
> the code to check what the hell it does.

The minimal unix userland process count up to a basic window
manager is about ten, with all remote network bindings for same closed.
Learning unix is essential for those who want to do that.
BSD's usually have fewer layers of crap installed by default and
are generally more discrete, thus easier to minimize than Linux's.
As in this thread, minimization is only part of security.