I doubt that most critical systems are air gapped. Even if there are, most part of Russians economy is not, but is still using IT based on COTS systems. Why wouldn't the Ukraine DoS or compromise the whole non air-gapped IT infrastructure of Russia to hit the economy if they could have easy access to RCE just because they are a government?

I mean, they do all the time. The value is generally in keeping access, however, and operational security and access control is helpful. You can knock a system out but then you just get kicked out and have to start over.

Do you have evidence for that?

No, he didn't. Learn to discuss properly. OP stated that any government could get RCE for any OS. And that is highly unlikely, since budget above market rates does not imply that you can easily get RCEs. The market rates are high because there is scarcity of such vulnerabilites.

Governments using COTS operating systems does not imply that these systems are unackable. If the statement of OP would be true, we would just see constant exploitation of RCE zero days, or at the least the impact of that. But that is not the case.

We do see constant exploitation of government and critical infrastructure systems. The US telecom network is literally actively compromised right now and has been for multiple years [1]. Like wishful thinking, ignorance is also not a valid argument.

It is frankly baffling that I even need to argue that COTS operating systems are easily hacked by governments and commercial hackers. It literally happens every day and not a single one of those companies or organizations even attempts to claim that they can protect against such threats. Government actors are literally what these companies peddling substandard security use to argue "nothing we could do". It has been literal decades of people trying to make systems secure against government actors and failing time and time again with no evidence of success.

I mean, seriously, go to Defcon and say that nobody there with a team of 5 people with 3 years (~10 M$, a single tank) could breach your commercially useful and functional Linux or Windows deployment and you are putting up a 10 M$ bounty to prove it. I guarantee they will laugh at you and then you will get your shit kicked in.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salt_Typhoon

Everything thinks of Defcon et al a a gathering of elite hackers. But it's more of a fucking drinking game.

The depressing fact is that you don't need an RCE to accomplish most goals.

I am aware. I was making a concrete example pointing at a well known conference where average industry professionals would find the very concept of these systems being secure to be laughable.

Somehow we have ended up in this bizarro land where everybody in software knows software, especially COTS operating systems, is horribly insecure due to the endless embarrassing failures yet somehow they also doublethink these systems must be secure.

I was agreeing with you! It's a drinking game because the infosec field is laughable. Who needs a zero day RCE when the president is using an EOL Samsung?

Just because the market would buy something for X$, doesn't mean that you could buy that if you have more than X$.

Militaries have billion dollar budgets.

That doesn't mean anything.

The provided binaries may still contain malicious code but it guarantees that no malicious code has been inserted in between the build process of the published code. So if your binaries contain malicious code, you can be sure that all other users of the software version are affected, too.

does anyone practice dual build pipeline? eg: 1 by your devops team and another one by your security team and compare binaries hash later. To verify everything is reproducible.

is it a common practice?

It is not common outside of security inclined communities like cryptocurrencies. It should be and we are slowly moving there.

Indeed, thanks for the precision!

It can be hard to write macros with state in typst.

It is hard to write macros in LaTeX.

In Ada you can pay for integer overflow checks (runtime) if you want to. With Ada SPARK you can prove that your code does not contain integer overflows so that you don't need runtime checks.

And you can disable these checks with a flag when it comes to Ada, and yeah, with SPARK, none of it happens at runtime.

Check the table at https://docs.adacore.com/spark2014-docs/html/ug/en/usage_sce..., look for "SPARK builds on the strengths of Ada to provide even more guarantees statically rather than dynamically.".

More reading:

https://docs.adacore.com/spark2014-docs/html/ug/en/tutorial....

https://learn.adacore.com (many books for learning Ada and SPARK) available in PDF, EPUB, and HTML format.

Yeah, but there is a dark number of cases that don't make it to the media, e.g. I just read by a guy who had a 15k$ cruise ship trip booked from the US and was rejected at the border because they found his flight stop "unusual" he came from Australia and had a stopover in Asia because that was the cheapest flight. He wasn't imprisoned without any legal process, but the number of people rejected without cause ought to be much higher than the number of people who will be detained.

I grew up in a tourism country and the number one rule of tourism is that if you want people to come hospitality goes a long way. A mad-king-leader calling them freeloaders and quoting Napoleon with "He who saves his country, violates no law" and a cult like followership doesn't exactly instill confidence that your rights will be respected when you go there.

The current administration seems to be downright hostile to everybody who isn't a US citizen even if we'd just come to spend our money in the US. Pair that with a lack of basic oversight over your cops/TSA-agents/whatever and suddenly the US just isn't as attractive any more.

Don't get me wrong, I find the US fascinating, but given I am in the middle of Europe, I have many destinations with a friendlier atmosphere and a more reliable political leadership to chose from.

So, he wasn't tried at all, he was convicted on a guilty plea, and the case was in the United States District Court for the District of Maryland, not the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (which, as previously stated, doesn't handle criminal cases.)

After Qubes OS I ended up using Fedora with Wayland, Flatpaks and running applications as different users but this introduced other problems.

The security profiles of many "flatpacked" applications are quite permissive (see https://flatkill.org/) so that they could be circumvented. Besides that I'm experience some convenience issues when accessing files on my drive. It's especially annoying when using "flatpacked" office such as onlyoffice.

> scrolling web pages with large images is laggy

Now that I've read this, I can also remember that I was also annoyed by jerks when scrolling web pages.

I also found the backup management too complicated. I didn't want to back up entire VMs, just the data within the VMs. In principle, I would have had to start up all VMs for backups and run a backup script for each individual VM.

I only noticed the jerky scrolling on pages with a lot of images, particularly hires + CSS effects (blur etc.). Everything else feels OK to me (I'm sure it could be smoother, but it's not too bad so I haven't noticed).

For backups, I don't them the qubes way, I do "regular" backups within VM using rsync/duplicity/... When moving to a new machine I prefer to setup everything from scratch (and then restore the data). And it gives me all the features like incremental backups etc.