What I did on my vacation from reality

I just found a new reason to hate Myspace: A big “ARE YOU GAY? Take our quiz to find out!” ad at the bottom. Newsflash: I don’t need an intarweeb quiz to tell me if I’m gay or not. Hell, here you go:

Are you gay?

Yes
No
I’m bisexual, you insensitive clod!
Only for Cowboy Neal

There you go. If you don’t know which one you are, you probably still think girls (or guys?) are ucky.

I know Myspace probably isn’t the only place running the ad, but were it not for Myspace, I never would have seen it.

Anyway.

I bought a 1G USB stick at Fry’s (USD $12.99, when did these things get so F’n cheap?), and I’ve been experimenting with different things to put on it, mostly live distributions. Damn Small Linux and DSL-N are the least painful so far. Eventually, I’d like to reimplement my old system of having the encrypted filesystem on it with all my private keys (SSH, GPG, etcetera)…

The system worked something like this. The entire key was an encrypted filesystem. In order to log into X, you would need

1. The physical key
2. The passphrase to decrypt the filesystem on the key
3. The SSH private key passphrase, which lived in the encrypted filesystem on the key

On top of that, the key was automounted, which meant you could unplug it at will: I rigged it so that unplugging the USB key would forget the SSH passphrase and lock the X display, so you’d need to plug it back in to unlock the display.

The major weak point in the system was console logins. You could always Ctrl-Alt-Fn and escape to a tty. It was a work in progress.

Improvements I have planned:

• Make the USB stick bootable (! — done)
• Require authentication for more every-day system stuff (su, reboots, etcetera)
• ???
• Profit?

The bootable part is going to throw me a bit. Having an encrypted filesystem living within another filesystem probably isn’t the most efficient method: maybe repartition it? sda1 = boot, sda2 = encrypted filesystem?

I’m also probably going to customize DSL-N a bit.

While I was out wasting money, I also managed to accomplish what I’d actually gone to Fry’s for: picking up a laptop drive USB enclosure. I got a compressed IDE one, instead of the SATA one I needed, but I’m going to hang on to it anyway, since I may actually end up using it (and you can never have too many toys).