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Posted by The Ghost In The Machine on August 21, 2007, 1:02 am
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In comp.os.linux.advocacy, plenty560@yahoo.com
wrote
on Mon, 20 Aug 2007 18:49:55 -0700
> Hi all,
>
> I'm trying to rid my Linux installation of all potential corporate
> spyware, seeing as how (A) the companies may be up to no good
> for their own purposes and (B) they companies' software may be
> conduits for the US government, to allow the Feds to spy
> on Linux users. Now that spying is apparently the Feds' #1 priority
> (and that of the Democratic whores in Congress) I have to
> take this a little more seriously.
That it is, and the NSA has SElinux to facilitate its spying.
At least, we think it facilitates its spying. I can't tell
for sure from here, and in any event its patches are now
part of every Linux kernel and hopefully someone's reviewed
them by now.
Of course Vista is perfectly secure, right? :-)
>
> My present goal is to avoid the use of Adobe flash plug-in.
> I think I saw that there is a free flash compiler out there,
> but anybody know if there is a free player?
Gnash is out there. I'm not sure how well it works; the
games I've tested it on universally fail. Might work on
very simple stuff.
>
> If not, perhaps one safe thing I can think of to do is to only
> run Firefox (Windows version) in Wine, which I assume can't peruse
> my system without someone writing a virus specifically to
> attack Wine.
Wine emulates (or does not emulate -- well, anyway,
it's a long story on what precisely it does) Windows well
enough to allow viruses to affect the environment within
which Wine runs, which can be controlled to some extent
by fiddling with the symlinks in the .wine subdirectory.
One can (and probably should) also run winecfg.
> If I run the Linux version of Firefox with the
> plug-in, presumably that gives them a back door into
> my entire system.
Not clear at this time. I would be of the opinion that
the only thing an infected Firefox can destroy is one's
home directory; however, that depends on how deeply NSA
bugs are buried into the Linux kernel.
>
> Or, perhaps I can just create a new user & group for
> flash-enabled web browsing that can't access anything
> else on my system and put the plug-ins in ~/.mozilla.
> Hmm, I think I just solved my problem.
>
For now.
--
#191, ewill3@earthlink.net
GNU and improved.
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