CPU as a service has come!

[Giovanni Biscuolo]

Hi Paul,

* Paul Boddie [2017-11-28 23:06:24 +0100]:

>On Monday 27. November 2017 13.52.55 Giovanni Biscuolo wrote:
>>
>> please also consider that many respectable free software supporters are
>> proposing solutions that are **useless tech workarounds**; e.g. looking at
>> https://privacylab.yale.edu/ , in the "What we do" box, I read: "Hosting
>> Tor", "providing TAILS OS", "hardened GNU/Linux", privacy-respecting tools
>> such as PGP/GPG e-mail and E2EE messaging...
>
>I know that you're trying to communicate that control of the hardware is
>essential,

yes, and since I know that **useless* sounds harsh, I must comment about
this

I seriously *love* and use each of the above mentioned projects _and_ have a
profound sense of gratitude for the people behind them; I also know that
using that software is *much* better than not to use them (I'd be not here
;-) )

that said, please consider I used the term **useless** as an analogy in
this context:
«The summer of 2013 will remain the moment we finally realized how broken
the Internet was [1], and how much this had been abused.»
(http://youbroketheinternet.org/)

[1] http://secushare.org/broken-internet
this page presents a serious analysis of the inherent problems of Internet
design and currently proposed solutions, unfortunately just tech workarounds
(useless in the context of __documented__ abuses, we still do not know
nothing about the _undocumented_ ones)

so, as long as the statement "Internet is broken by design" should _not_ be
discarded just because it's harsh **and** it does not mean people should not
use privacy and anonymity enhancing measures provided by the workarounds
when using Internet, please consider not to trash away my **useless tech
workarounds** "label" :-)

in other words (sorry if I'm stressing on this), some computing devices have
become **virtual machines** running in a stealth host with a complete OS
running on it; you have not root access to the host, just to the virtual
machine (NIBM - aka not invented by me)

everyone relying on virtual machines must know what it means from a privacy
and anonymity POV

I'm fine using virtual machines, I'm using a lot of them for my business and
for my customers... so to paraphrase the #youbroketheinternet statement
above:
«The autumn of 2018 will remain the moment Giovanni Biscuolo finally
realized how broken *his* computing devices was, and how much this could be
abused; anyway he absolutely trusts his vendors, providers, local government
and all other governments around the world and he is confident his broken
devices will **never** be abused by the unknown root user» 

>but those other things still complement efforts to maintain overall
>control of our computing environments, uphold privacy, and so on. As such,
>they are not useless.

sorry but I disagree with you :-)

they are very useful for a broad spectrum of attack vectors, but useless on
virtual machines for *narrow* but potentially destructive attack vectors

[...]

>then openly wonder why anyone would bother encrypting things or running
>secure operating systems.

never said that: I bother encryption and all other security, privacy and
anonymity tech... but they are limited and I use it for a plenty of _other_
reasons (e.g. I use LUKS on all my hosts in case of theft)

>So we need to consider all of these things, or at least many of them. These
>days, I constantly find myself reminding people to beware of the zero-sum
>game, as they promote their favourite things at the expense of other, equally
>worthwhile things. This is no different.

I'm not promoting anything, I'm just questioning the proposed solutions in
the light of this new "discovery" 

...not true, I'm _promoting_ a serious question: can the market alone fix
the "CPU as a service" issue?

I've no solution

Ciao
Giovanni

-- 
Giovanni Biscuolo
Xelera - IT infrastructures
http://xelera.eu/contact-us/

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