On Security
It was brought up recently that one thing was more secure than another. So, here I am going to attempt to talk about what it means to be secure. I’m sure that I need to go and define what I mean by privacy after this because the two subjects are related. But here I will attempt to talk about what security is.
Security is an illusion. Something to strive for, to attempt, actively, and with diligence. Security is how data are made to be yours. Though that bleeds into privacy. Security is a mindset where you pay attention to the smallest possible way that someone with nefarious intent might make off with something that is important to you. Some “thing” is not secure, someONE is secure. To say “X is secure because of Y” is not seeing the whole picture. Systems connected to the internet are going to get breached if there is a motivated actor that wants to breach that system. It does not matter if you run Windows™ or Mac OSX™ or a custom roll of the Linux Kernel with custom software on hardware that you built yourself, if it connects to the internet, if it has a way to interact with it meaningfully, it can, and will, be compromised by a motivated actor. There is no exception to that.
The most secure system is one that is is turned off, unplugged, and never been online. Not very useful, right? That is the thing, you will trade useability for security every time. The more useful a system is, the less secure it is. The more connected a system is, the less secure it is. Security is how you trade these things off. You can sit in a cave, with no power or computers, and be fine with never being exploited. Or you can pay close attention, know where your vectors are, know what you look like to those that might want to exploit you. This means you need to know your exposure, how you react to a potential exploit is more important than anything you do.
TLDR:
Security is understanding your risk, mitigating that risk, and reacting to the risk that you find. It is also defining that risk, and how that definition fits into your desire to interact with other humans online.
