That's super interesting. It would not be the first time Rockstar have put measures in place on GTA Online for them to be completely ineffective.
yaMatt
joined 3 days ago
I've done a lot of thinking about this over the years.
Ultimately the answer is you cannot, at least with certainty. If you don't own the host, you cannot trust anything that runs on the machine.
A few people have said similar, and that for me is the right answer here. I'll expand on how I used to run my servers, but eventually decided it wasn't worth the effort.
Having said that, there are some things you can do to protect yourself, although it depends on how much you care about your data Vs how much effort you want to put in.
For example, you can disguise your data on disk, by creating an encrypted file on Linux that you mount as a filesystem. Everything you care about runs from there. The ideal solution is you have an encryption key that you store somewhere trusted, that you use to decrypt the volume.
But then of course you have to insert that key each time your machine reboots, such as a kernel update.
You also have to manage and protect that key yourself, otherwise 💥 your data is gone.
Another thing to consider is, is your key in memory or on disk at any time. You need to decrypt the disk without the key ending up on the machine. I passed it over SSH and I assume the LUKS folks know what they're doing about disguising the key in memory, but I don't know for certain. I never looked.
My expectation was that I was doing something outside the norms of how these tools were designed to function, so expect unexpected results.
This isn't to say you cannot trust any provider, it really depends how much you want to trust them.
I think this kind of a good thing.
Those of us with long enough memories will remember a long tail of Mozilla building stuff and abandoning them, quite like Google.
The two that genuinely hurt me were:
But the reason I think this it is a good thing, is that they're focusing on their core product. For me Firefox is superior in many ways to Chrome, Ad blocking is an immediate example of that. They need to keep Firefox being successful.
Another reason I think this is a good thing is that there must be new people coming to Mozilla and Firefox who don't know the history. And it's great that there are new people like that.