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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 9th, 2023

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  • This seems like a very complicated way to achieve your goal! It sounds like sitting yourself down and giving you a stern talking to might be a beter aporoach.

    Having said that, if you have these very important files that you don’t want to lose, please make sure they’re backed up somewhere off of your machine. Storage fails, and it’s a horrible feeling losing something important. Unfortunately doing so would defeat the approach you’re thinking of.

    This might be a case of needing to reframe the question to get to the cause of the issue, and then solve that. So, why do you want to make it hard to reinstall your machine? Is it the amount of time you spend on it, the chance of screwing it up, needing it working, has it become a compulsion or something else? Maybe if we can get to the root of the issue we can find a solution.

    With regard to TPM, it’s basically just a key store, so you can use it fir anything really, althought it’s normally used by generating a TPM key and using it to encrypt the key that’s actually used to encrypt your data, storing the encrypted key with the OS. Just reinstalling won’t wipe the TPM, but unless you made an effort to save the encrypted key it’ll be gone. Given your problem statement above it just adds to the data you’d need to save, which isn’t helpful.


  • Ok, I’m still not clear on exactly what you’re trying to achieve as I can’t quite see the connection between somehow preventing certain files being duplicated when cloning the disk and preventing yourself from reinstalling the system.

    Bear in mind that reinstalling the system would replace all of the OS, so there’s no way to leave counter-measures there, and the disk itself can’t do anything to your data, even if it could detect a clone operation.

    If what you’re trying to protect against is someone who knows everything you do accessing your data, you could look to use TPM to store the encryption key for your FDE. That way you don’t know the password, it’s stored encrypted with a secret key that is, in turn, stored and protected by your CPU. That way a disk clone couldn’t be used on any hardware except your specific machine.


  • Nothing can prevent a disk clone cloning the data, and there’s no way to make something happen when a disk is cloned as you’re not in control of the process.

    If you wish to mask the existence of the files, use either full disk encryption, in which case cloning the disk doesn’t reveal the existence of the files without the decrypt password, or use a file based encrypted partition such as veracrypt in which case the cloner would just see a single encrypted blob rather than your file names.

    Ultimately encrypting the files with gpg means they have already effectively ‘destroyed or corrupted’ themselves when cloned. If you don’t want to reveal the filenames, just call them something else.

    If you could be a bit more specific about your threat model people may have better ideas to help.






  • Remember to look after yourself. When you’re already calm and happy within yourself it’s easier to be ‘successful’ in whatever you’re trying to do without burning out, which makes it easier to be calm and happy, creating a positive spiral.

    That professor who is happy, calm and confident? He’s had a great weekend skiing/hiking/playing with the kids or grandkids/generally looking after themselves by unwinding and enjoying themselves. He’s calm because his mind is clear and he has the energy he needs to work and confident because he knows he’s good at what he does and trusts himself. That might not be your professor exactly, but they’re examples from profs I’ve had in the past.

    Do yourself a favor, take half an hour out today and do something positive to improve your own well-being. Take a walk somewhere green, write a list of all the things you need to do that are bothering you, contact a friend you haven’t spoken to in a while just to say hi, if you’ve got some slack time in your week see if there’s some voluntry work you could enjoy doing, start learning a new skill. Just pick something and do it, even if you’d rather be sitting in a dark corner ignoring the world. Keep doing it. Things can and will get better if you push them in that direction. Good luck!


  • It’s the same problem with a drive like this, or any long term archive, you either store the data unencrypted and rely on physical security, or make sure you store the encryption key and algorithm for the same length of time, in which case you still need the physical security to protect that instead. In both cases you need to make sure you preserve a means to read the data back and details of the format its in so you can actually use it later.

    Paper is actually a pretty good way of storing a moderate amount of data long term. Stored correctly it’s unlikely to physically degrade, the data is unlikely to suffer bitrot and it can be read back by anything that can make an image in the visible spectrum. That means you can read it, or take a photo and use OCR to convert it into whatever format is current when the data is needed.









  • The internet in it’s heyday, when it was a genuinely thrilling place to find information, and quite a lot of weirdness, and before it was swamped by corporate interests.

    I remember starting out with gopher and a paper print out of ‘The big dummies guide to the internet’ which was a directory of almost every gopher and ftp site (pre web) along with a description of what you’d find there. Then the web came along and things got really good for a while. Once big corporations got involved it all went down hill.



  • The big stumbling block I see with this approach is that it’s not just the maintainers who do the work, as others also contribute code fixes, documentation and help in the community.

    I can see the very real need to support the core maintainers on the projects we use, but I can also see that causing friction if the others who contribute to a project being successful and useful are overlooked. I know that some projects’ communities put bounties on bugs they want dealt with, which helps to a degree, but still leaved many contributors effectively donating their time whilst a core group get paid. For instance, I’ve submitted and had accepted several patches across several projects that I use. They’ve usually been tobadd functionality that I wanted and saw others wanted too. I don’t think I’d want paying for them, but I’d probably feel different if I knew the person accepting the pull request was being paid, either commercially or via a scheme like this. Maybe that will work out in practice, but I’d be worried about the change in dynamic.

    I don’t have a good solution to this, but I thought i’d offer it as a different viewpoint.