Riskable

Sounds sooooo second class to me. I only deal with first class languages so I can enjoy my curry with a satisfying closure 🎩 👌

This is a, “it’s turtles all the way down!” problem. An application has to be able to store its encryption keys somewhere. You can encrypt your encryption keys but then where do you store that key? Ultimately any application will need access to the plaintext key in order to function.

On servers the best practice is to store the encryption keys somewhere that isn’t on the server itself. Such as a networked Hardware Security Module (HSM) but literally any location that isn’t physically on/in the server itself is good enough. Some Raspberry Pi attached to the network in the corner of the data center would be nearly as good because the attack you’re protecting against with this kind of encryption is someone walking out of the data center with your server (and then decrypting the data).

With a device like a phone you can’t use a networked HSM since your phone will be carried around with you everywhere. You could store your encryption keys out on the Internet somewhere but that actually increases the attack surface. As such, the encryption keys get stored on the phone itself.

Phone OSes include tools like encrypted storage locations for things like encryption keys but realistically they’re no more secure than storing the keys as plaintext in the application’s app-specific store (which is encrypted on Android by default; not sure about iOS). Only that app and the OS itself have access to that storage location so it’s basically exactly the same as the special “secure” storage features… Except easier to use and less likely to be targeted, exploited, and ultimately compromised because again, it’s a smaller attack surface.

If an attacker gets physical access to your device you must assume they’ll have access to everything on it unless the data is encrypted and the key for that isn’t on the phone itself (e.g. it uses a hash generated from your thumbprint or your PIN). In that case your effective encryption key is your thumb(s) and/or PIN. Because the Signal app’s encryption keys are already encrypted on the filesystem.

Going full circle: You can always further encrypt something or add an extra step to accessing encrypted data but that just adds inconvenience and doesn’t really buy you any more security (realistically). It’s turtles all the way down.

You’re thinking that every Android device is reasonably new. This is not the case.

There’s devices running Android from >12 years ago that can’t get apps any other way than F-Droid because Google Play Services no longer work.

Docker containers aren’t running in a virtual machine. They’re running what amounts to a fancy chroot jail… It’s just an isolated environment that takes advantage of several kernel security features to make software running inside the environment think everything is normal despite being locked down.

This is a very important distinction because it means that docker containers are very light weight compared to a VM. They use but a fraction of the resources a VM would and can be brought up and down in milliseconds since there’s no hardware to emulate.

I remember when the web didn’t have JavaScript.

Honestly, though it was much worse back then. I prefer the variety and features of modern browsing over (mostly) plain text.

What I wish we could do away with on the web is videos. Let’s go back to just images and text, thanks. Animations are fine though 👍

I tried using the SharePoint Plugin for TC, but it requires the freaking pope to allow my loggin.

“The power of Microsoft compels you!”

“The power of Microsoft compels you!”

“The power of Microsoft compels you!”

“Please just let me in FFS!”

Error 53003: Your sign-in request was blocked due to a conditional access policy configured on the Tenant where you tried to authenticate.

SharePoint

Oh come on! Everyone knows that SharePoint’s only reason for existing is to act as a black hole for Microsoft Office documents. They go in but they never come out. Nothing intelligent can escape!

The “limits of humans” I was referring to were things like:

• How long can you push a deadline before someone starts to get really mad
• How many dark patterns you can cram into an app before the users stop using it
• The extremes of human stupidity

👍

Arguably, a much more important thing for the students to learn is the limits of humans. The limits of the computer will never be a problem for 99% of these students or they’ll just learn on the job the types of problems they’re good at solving and the ones that aren’t.