Qubes OS: The Operating System That Can Protect You Even If You Get Hacked
Why Hacker News recommends it
Recommended as a great overview of Qubes OS and how its compartmentalization works in practice.
What it is
Micah Lee's Circle of HOPE 2018 talk on Qubes OS, which isolates activities in separate virtual machines so one compromise, such as a bad PDF or USB stick, does not expose everything. He gives an overview timed around the Qubes 4.0 release.
Recommended by 2 HN commenters across 2 different months, 2019 to 2022.
What Hacker News said
Recommends waldfee · 2020-08 · on “Usbkill – anti-forensic tool to halt computer when new USB device is connected”
If you are paranoid about something like this happening, just use [LINK] . all usb devices are jailed in a non-networked vm by default. In general, if what you do warrants that level of paranoia, qubes will help you massively. Micah Lee held a great overview talk at HOPE 2018: [this video]
Recommends isolatte · 2022-07 · on “Ask HN: How do you develop locally with privacy/security in mind?”
In order of decreasing isolation: For hardware and system's security QubesOS(i) is superb for isolation at the (virtual)machine layer. This talk(ii) from Micah Lee when 4.0 launched is a great overview/preview. It's my daily driver, and I find it indispensable. For software security any standard linux distro you can utilize encrypted chroots(iii). This is how things like crouton(iv) work on ChromiumOS. For library isolation you could utilise virtual environments like virtualenv for python. ( or nodenv(v) for 'Node libraries') (i) [LINK] (ii) [this video] (iii) [LINK] (iv) [LINK] (v) [LINK]
Cites lokedhs · 2019-11 · on “How Is NordVPN Unblocking Disney+?”
Micah Lee did a talk about how he does it. In essence he uses Tor to connect to the VPN. He also explains how to pay for the VPN anonymously. I think it was part of his Qubes OS talk: [this video]