[tor-talk] Open source firewall.

[Gerardus Hendricks]

On 1/20/14 3:47 AM, TheMindwareGroup wrote:
> Windows firewall is useless.

Who is your attacker?

There are two kinds of anonymity in this world: anonymity that will stop 
your kid sister from reading your tweets, and anonymity that will stop 
major governments from finding your body. Microsoft is about the former.

More seriously: the (rule based or heuristic) firewalls you are 
describing are a last defense measure. Firewalls are born out of the 
assumption that running applications might be malicious or broken. You 
should Have A Little Faith, and trust Tails.

Realize that firewalls make sense under certain attacker models. The 
'family' Windows PC has to endure some strain, and (ie. unknown 
application blocking) firewalls could add some safety.

You could argue that the iOS and the Android API permissions are the new 
'firewall': the sandbox. It controls rough aspects of the application's 
behavior, and can present these aspects to the (casual) user in an 
understandable UI. The user unfortunately faces an 'all or nothing' 
dilemma (on grounds which are uncertain for the casual user).

> PGP: 0xf4b6586f

What is the binary logarithm of sixteen to the power of eight?
How long does it take to generate a fresh RSA keypair?
Are the last eight bytes of keyids evenly distributed?

Thank you.