A couple of random questions about login

[Tim]

On Mon, 2013-09-02 at 15:42 +0000, Bill Oliver wrote:
> My wife turned to me and said, "If I were the bad guy, I'd just have
> the computer delete everything if someone entered the boat name, or at
> least send me a text.

In the normal run of things, I think a someone breaking into your place
is just going to steal your computer to sell it.  So, whatever you did
would need to mangle your data when the next person simply tries to use
it.  So, a few wrong password entries would be a reasonable trigger,
making sure that you have enough attempts to retype your own password
when you type it wrong.  If you want to outsmart the morons, stickytape
a false password to the box, use it as your destruct code, because it's
a fair bet that they'll try it.  A friend of mine does a similar thing
with his ATM card, it's got three false PINs written on it, a dumb thief
will probably try them all, and the bank will automatically block the
card.

Someone who's determined to crack your computer, is probably just going
to unplug your hard drive and read it on their own computer, where none
of your programs will be run.  Drive encryption is the only thing that's
going to protect your privacy, here.

Now, if I knew you were a sensible and organised computer user, I'd
probably just steal or copy your backup discs.  Much easier than prising
your hard drive out of the box.  Again, encryption would be your only
protection of your privacy.  But, also, your backup restoration software
needs to handle the encryption, or your backups are useless to you.

-- 
[tim at localhost ~]$ uname -r
2.6.27.25-78.2.56.fc9.i686

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