The difficulty of black box over white box is the reason obscurity has benefits…

only using my own code

You’re going to write your kernel and bootloader as well? Drivers for the hardware? And a compiler for those? And an assembler to build that bootstrap compiler? Build the CPU? The second any of these are “out of your control” you lose “absolute security”. The reason people say there is no “absolute security” is that it is not a useful concept to even consider. Since you have to approach it theoretically, you can easily end up stuck at the fact that every computation changes the state of the world and thus every computation can in some way be measured. It’s a useless endeavor even if it were theoretically possible because it leads you to absurd solutions against absurdly powerful attackers. You want security in a well defined threat model not some “absolute”.

Air gapping isn’t sufficient to prevent communication either. For example there are functional TCP stacks working over audio. Silence on the Wire is quite old at this point, but also explores esoteric exfiltration methods.

People like to think in black and white, but you’re definitely right. Having your SSH server on port 36271 will likely stop a ton of drive by attacks because they simply won’t check it. Having it only listen on IP6 would stop almost all of them because you can’t trawl the IP6 space efficiently. These are “obscurity”, but they have real benefits. The idea that “obscurity” doesn’t help is just a meme that people love to quote because it’s a great single sentence with some nice rhyming “security by obscurity”. I assume the reason it became a meme is because tons of products fully relied on obscurity; I still see it all the time. As you said, it’s all layers.

Yes I’m not going to take some “survival of the fittest” nonsense approach to security: consumers need securely built devices and software. This is the first line of defense always: we need to make things secure and then have secure defaults according to whatever we decide “secure” means in the context of our widget or software. Then we need to provide “advanced” (or even just “ignorant but risk tolerant”) users with the ability to change the device or software to match their definition of “secure”.

The easiest example is secure boot. Your laptop likely has a key provided by your OEM and likely Microsoft’s key preinstalled. This is a valid “secure boot” path for the average user, provided your OEM and Microsoft don’t get compromised, which is APT territory. However you are provided with the ability to use a different key if you know how to do that. You have thus opted in to protecting your own private key but now you have more control over your device. This design is notably absent in phones, which is absolutely bananas and actually less secure in some threat models

You could extend examples like this if you wanted. One could easily imagine a device that does soft brick itself after the EOL date to simply protect people that are ignorant of the potential risks, but also provides an advanced user with the ability to revive it in a “less secure” state. The less advanced user will then have to either learn something new or buy a new device.

Security is constantly used as a guise for removing consumer rights and as someone who has been in the security industry for about 9 years I’m so sick of it.

First and foremost, everyone please understand: the user should be allowed to opt into your concept of insecurity: you do not know their threat model and you do not know their risk tolerance.

Using exploits in low level drivers in the wild is approaching APT level, and even if there were a simple one to use it’d likely be useless without some sort or local access to the device (bar some horror show bug in a Bluetooth or WiFi firmware). The risk is incredibly low for the average person. I’d put it pretty close to 0.

Wire transfers aren’t instant and for large sums (your inheritance) the banks will likely require more than just a request from your app. If the bank cares about that then they can also use the attestation APIs which would be more than sufficient, as much as I hate them.

This boogey man of the APT going after my technologically illiterate <family member> with nation state level exploits needs to die. Long ago we entered a new era of security where it just isn’t worth it to waste exploits. Especially when you can just text people and ask for their money and that works plenty well.

Security is not a valid reason to soft brick consumer devices at some arbitrary end of life date.

Ok so aluminum casting is still OK.

This is the sad state of the US I guess.

Could you also just make these same parts out steel or aluminum? Seems like a weird arbitrary line to essentially say what material you can make them out of and what equipment you can use. Or are benchtop CNCs gonna be banned next?

I wager that, for example, most people didn’t vote in california not because they see their candidate as a lost cause, but because they know “their” candidate has carried the state for sure.

That’s a natural interpretation as well. I wonder if it’d be possible to at least guess at whether it was that or “my person won’t win so what’s the point”. There are probably so many other factors. For example the “did not vote map” looks surprisingly similar to the SOVI map: https://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/place-health/php/svi/svi-interactive-map.html. I’m not entirely sure what to make of that, my knee jerk thought is that you could see more “what’s the point they’re both the same” or “neither side actually cares about my needs” among disenfranchised people in general combined with maybe more voter suppression efforts in disenfranchised areas? Would voting being a federal holiday or easier to vote by mail make those areas specifically better?

I’d be interested in an interactive version of this where you could assign a percentage of those votes to the person who lost the state as a naive proxy for “what would have happened if the people who thought their vote didn’t matter because [D|R] would win anyway”. I know it wouldn’t be an actual measure but it’d be fun to mess with anyway.

In particular I find it kinda interesting that CA and TX are both didn’t vote and both historically considered “easy wins”.

This image is just generally interesting because it also turns the idea of swing states around a bit. If neither candidate motivated enough people in all of those states could we consider them swing states?

I remember being a kid and the teachers just made it seem like the difference between desert and dessert was just so deeply important.

The coordinated strike had an immediate impact. Millions of people in Dubai and Abu Dhabi woke up on Monday unable to pay for a taxi, order a food delivery or check their bank balance on their mobile apps.

I honestly can’t tell if this paragraph is supposed to be satirical.