SiSU: - Homeland - Cory Doctorow

Homeland
The key word here is “old.” That's because running a pretend computer inside a real computer
is slow. But computers double in speed every eighteen months or so -- this is called
Moore's Law, for Gordon Moore, who helped start Intel. That means a brand-new computer
will be about sixty-four times faster than a computer you could buy for the same money six
years ago, which means that so long as you're working with old VMs, you probably won't
even notice the lag.
But lately, computer manufacturers have been figuring out how to design chips to run VMs
more efficiently, so the gap between a VM and the real computer it runs on keeps shrinking.
This means that it's easier than ever to try out new operating systems and new programs. If
there's something you're really paranoid about, you can just run a free VM program, install
a free OS on it, and run anything you want in that little sandbox. Nothing that happens in
that VM can affect your real computer -- not unless you give it privileges to see your real
hard drive and real files. The VM is like a head in a jar, and you can tell it anything you
want about what's going on in the world and it'll have to believe you.
You can download hundreds -- thousands! -- of VMs from the Internet and just fire them
up as you need them. Want to turn an old computer into a router or a file server for an
hour or a day or a year? Various sysadmins have bottled up perfectly tuned VMs that run
any specialized function like that out of the box. There are even user-reviews to help you
figure out which ones are the good ones. And since it's all built on open, free code like
Linux, anyone can modify, improve, and redistribute them.
I went hunting for an extra paranoid VM, and I found one. It started with a copy of ParanoidLinux,
my own favorite distro, and nuked any programs and services you didn't need,
to make it all the more bulletproof. ParanoidVM also stored its user files in TrueCrypt plausible
deniability chunks, so there was no way to tell from the forensic examination of the
disk how many users there were and how many files they had.
That was good for starters, but I wanted a dead man's switch: something that would cause
the whole thing to lock itself and shut down if I didn't do something every fifteen minutes.
So I wrote a little script that hit me up for a password every quarter hour. If I didn't enter it,
it would issue a system-wide command to kill any VMs that were running, then erase itself.
So if a snatch squad were to nab me, all the work I'd done on the files would disappear
unless they could torture the password out of me in a quarter of an hour.
They'd still have the key and the torrent file, but they wouldn't know whom I'd shown anything
to or what we'd talked about. All I'd have to do is key in my password every fifteen
minutes, and not go off to the toilet or forget and go to dinner, or I'd lose everything I'd
worked on up to the last save-point.
There's a technical term for this kind of security work: yak-shaving -- wasting time doing
silly chores to avoid something harder and more important. There was an old essay I liked
about working for Google by a hacker called Dhanji Prasanna, which talked about “shaving
SiSU www.sisudoc.org/ 76