This article talks about infostealers which don’t resort to violence or five dollar wrench attacks. Instead they sneak onto systems via various means and surreptitiously exfiltrate all they can. Some even bypass AV by being polymorphic and installing root kits which can’t be so easily removed by AV.
It doesn't have to be violence though. Consider if you logged in to your email with 2FA, then walked away from your computer without locking it, and then someone else walked up and copied all of your messages. Is that bypassing 2FA?
You can mitigate this by using a VPN router. I have a little GL.Inet router I use that ensures all traffic is passed through the VPN. The only caveat is you can’t travel with it even though they’re advertised as ‘travel routers’. You could use it in a hotel if you don’t trust random Wi-Fi hotspots. All I need is a .OVPN config file which I upload in the router’s admin dashboard, copy and paste my username and password and I’m set. A nice feature is if the VPN connection drops, the router doesn’t leak your IP.
Apple App Store mandates that their Apple network infrastructure shall not be impacted by an app (VPN, TailScale, WireGuard, et. al.)
In addition to unimpeded Apple network pathway, DNS resolver is being resolved by Apple DNS recursive DNS server during your tunneling setup, arguably resolving even just the IP address(es) as well as DNS names of VPN server.
More on this sad saga of Apple iOS and VPN, et. al.:
Edit: of course, an external router would only leverage the WiFi part of iOS. We could use just the WiFi part of iOS and totally ignore the mysterious cellular traffic.
I’m not talking about an app. I’m talking about a router that VPN-ifies all your traffic to mitigate any form of leak. That article talks about iOS leaking traffic when using VPN apps. A VPN router is the only solution to stop this from happening.
Or you can just use a different device. There's plenty of hardware/software that respects your VPN routing rules, Apple is the outlier here. You don't need a complicated racked-and-stacked Ubiquiti when kernel-level WireGuard will do the trick.
See my comment elsewhere in the thread about using your normal network setup, but inserting a "slug" that only allows your VPN port and/or endpoint(s).
Since the slug is invisible, and has no IP address, and runs no daemons, etc., the only misconfiguration possible would be the initial one.
Once the slug is in place, there is no more "accidentally didn't use the VPN..."
Well I have a Gl.inet mango router which I think supports 3g USB modems, so you could hook up that and power the router with a power bank. You can use it traveling, but not when driving as you would need some sort of Wi-Fi hotspot in the car. You could setup one on your phone though this is where everything gets complicated and not for the average user.
PKD didn’t consider encryption and the many tools we can use to thwart spying and surveillance. I’m tired of these articles that suggest we’re helpless fools sleepwalking into a dystopia. Encryption is all we have now to fight Orwellian dystopias and it’s worth having good opsec (depending on your threat model). I feel very safe and cozy on the web and with technology in general because it’s all locked down. MFA. Password managers, AD blockers, secure operating systems, compartmentalized identities etc
Where reading PKD and absorbing his worldview ends and a career in infosec begins is incresingly vague. I've been in it since the 90's and tbh, sometimes I think cybersecurity is just a way of collecting undiagnosed paranoid schizophrenics and setting them against one another for sport. If it weren't, how would we know?
There is a great talk by him from about '77 where he outlines the basic idea that we are living in a simulation that became the basis for the plot of The Matrix movies, and the logic is pretty classic psychological disassociation and paranoia you get from using drugs over time. Not to diminish his huge contributions, but there's stuff that's right on the edge. One of the beautiful elements of the "Mr. Robot" series is that this underlying question is also a major plot point. You can see him in the video here (sorry, the better versions seem to haven scrubbed) https://youtu.be/_U6lgSbPj8Q?t=47 , and he's got the kind of blunted affect that is typically associated with decline. His book "Exegesis," which were the letters he was writing to people at the time are consistent with indications something was going wrong as well. When I was just learning synths and a new sampler over the pandemic, I produced a track from a live session with samples from the speech, albeit they were in reference to the "Computer Controlled" logo on the 303 bass synth I used in it: https://soundcloud.com/n-gram-music/exegesis , but I sampled just the best parts.
This is to say, neither PKD nor hackers concerned about surveillance dystopia today may have a reliable picture, as paranoia can be really enveloping. That said, of course that's what They would say - you can see how this becomes an inescapable spiral. Paranoia is the iterated logic of an idea and unless you uproot the foudational one, by virtue of perfectly reasonable and consistent logic, it's going to creep back.
And in addition, to say we can use encryption to fight the surveillance state is a tacit admission that the system actually works as described, or at least that is the intent. And again Dick was not trying to predict actual technology. He was mainly thinking about how it could be used, and he was frequently on the mark.
To illustrate how far this discussion is from PKD's frame of reference, PKD didn't need encryption when VALIS used a pink laser beam from space to trigger anamnesis so he remembered that he was a secret Christian in ancient Rome, and also predicted that his son would suffer from an inguinal hernia.
In case that wasn't clear enough, PKD wasn't talking about what you're talking about.
You're assuming that we're talking about a government surveillance setup where information is intended to be private. But the article's discussion still applies when the subject matter is canceling people on social networks.
In fact it seems even more apropos of the dual identity of both subject and narc that the article discusses. Traditional government surveillance makes most of us solely subjects with little role in the enforcement process. But in a world where mob justice applies social sanctions, we're all simultaneously judges and candidates to become defendants, able to be condemned by our own words. Encryption is irrelevant when those words are intended for public consumption.
Black Mirror did an episode on what it would look like if your social reputation were reified into concrete societal privileges. That kind of ad absurdum exploration makes the surveillance state of social networks much easier to recognize.
PKD didn’t consider encryption and the many tools we can use to thwart spying and surveillance.
I have lost count of the times people used encryption and either it was broken or subverted in some way, an example being the FBI creating its own encryption app as a major honeypot. Encryption apps, chat programs , protocols, etc. have a recurring tendency to be broken or have leaks.
This either satire or laughably naive. You think big brother doesnt have disproportionate access to crack or backdoor the tech that makes you feel so safe?
Coding is bending a computer to your will. If the will is there, I will try everything and anything to get results. If that includes learning a whole new programming language then so be it.
Good teachers equip you with tools used to dispute their own conclusions. Worldviews should be malleable and subject to change. The ability to see things from different perspectives goes a long way in being able to question rigid thoughts.
