-160
Your Linux PC is NOT private out of the box
(lemmy.world)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 07 Feb 2026
-160 points (6.5% liked)
Open Source
44260 readers
46 users here now
All about open source! Feel free to ask questions, and share news, and interesting stuff!
Useful Links
- Open Source Initiative
- Free Software Foundation
- Electronic Frontier Foundation
- Software Freedom Conservancy
- It's FOSS
- Android FOSS Apps Megathread
Rules
- Posts must be relevant to the open source ideology
- No NSFW content
- No hate speech, bigotry, etc
Related Communities
- !libre_culture@lemmy.ml
- !libre_software@lemmy.ml
- !libre_hardware@lemmy.ml
- !linux@lemmy.ml
- !technology@lemmy.ml
Community icon from opensource.org, but we are not affiliated with them.
founded 6 years ago
MODERATORS
You posted this same silly thing about 3 days ago.
anyway why isn't the advice "encrypt your drives" instead of "disable all logging".
I mean your own examples are like the least serious problem.
Who is logged in and when? So we're talking a multi user system that's clearly hosting a lot... that's kind of important for an administrator to be able to track who is logging in when, to know if something goes wrong.
Package manager logs what's installed. well duh, what's the scenerio that this is even a factor? I don't want big government to know I had, qbittorrent or whatever? There's no program that's likely installed via apt that's illegal to have.
So yeah in short, stuff that's vital if you ever need to troubleshoot, useful in general, almost unthinkable to imagine situations where this is a problem (at least in situations in which someone has your user account, or root access to your system for these to be the high priority.
On the whole the idea there is like.
"If someone steals your car... they could also steal the car users manual".
Drive encryption is useless if your laptop is taken while unlocked. Learn from Ross Ulbricht.
and security on pages is useless if you are logged in.
We're already talking the least of security problems (IE the device being physically confiscated).
In ross's case which hurt him more do you think, the fact that his system probably had logs of what he installed... or the fact that it was taken while he was logged in as administrator to the silk road? and it supposedly contained a journal... not system logs, but activities that he specifically wrote out detailing his daily activities.
The point again is someone gaining physical access to the computer itself, while you are literally in the process of doing things that you don't want known about, what you are currently working on is 100x more valuable to the thief, feds or whatever, than any of the low level stuff that the logs are likely to be recording.
Ross was foolish to be running the largest black market in the world from a public library. They make magnetic kill switches for that sort of thing. No amount of security is impervious to bad decisions.