Your Hardware and Your Data

What Is Encryption? Every now and then, the news spikes with headlines like "Identity/Data Theft/Breach". If you've ever been hacked, you know these are real threats for ordinary citizens. Educating oneself in Digital Literacy is essential. Bank accounts, social profiles, phishing phone calls - the attack surfaces are endless.

Password is not the Same as Encryption

• Around 2012, your account was protected by a password (Windows/Linux/Mac/iOS, some even had a "BIOS" aka Boot, etc.) on your own computers/phones where you work/shop/surf and do "everything" possible.
• Essentially, this was like saying, "Here's my house key - enter, and you can use the house (house represents your 'data')." So, anyone entering through a window or just bashing your door could access and use it too.

Note: This is especially true for enterprises and their workers (who have intellectual property on their laptops). An IT Administrator could simply reset your password, making data readable by everyone. Imagine having a copy of your travel passport there - it would then become a "community good of the company."

Encryption and Encryption Password

• A good analogy for encryption would be Da Vinci's Cipher/Mirror writing - unless you know HOW the data should be interpreted, you won't be able to use any of it. The encryption password is this "HOW" part.
• In the modern online world, having your data encrypted is a must - your IDs and intellectual property should be encrypted.
• Setting up a private NextCloud instance is NOT enough: you must have data redundancy and... encryption. Google Drive/Microsoft do not encrypt your data; rather, they scan it and track what goodies you have.
• Flexibility of access (rather than ease of access) is very important for productivity, allowing you to access any of your data securely online (preferably self-hosted) from anywhere as soon as possible, and to keep it in sync between your machines.
• iOS, macOS, and Android have switched to encrypted filesystems (the CPUs became performant enough for these operations). Windows? (You guess -> the answer is "Haha" or "Kindof" with some advanced BIOS techniques.)

Recommendations

• In recent years, there have been attempts to bring Linux-based systems to SBCs (single-board computers). However, there isn't a single encrypted "image" to easily put on there. If you're interested in experimenting with these, start with encryption. Try installing Debian on an encrypted partition (there are manuals for this).

TIP

• Moreover, synchronization technologies like SYNCTHING (a highly stable and recommended system) help to keep your data up to date and secure on multiple devices, without any Big Tech snooping.

Afterword

By learning to code, you actually start to understand how systems operate. Already programming? Try the small challenges of John Skeet's C# Puzzles.

Stay strong, stay free.

Updated: 04.12.2023