How to encrypt your home folder.

Computer Security, Computer Software, Encryption

Here‘s a brief tutorial on how to encrypt all the files in your home directory so that they will need to be decrypted with a password at startup.

It works by using public and private key cryptography. Basically the computer generates a few small files that are used to encrypt and decrypt all your files as you access them. This encryption key is initially encrypted with your password since passwords are mainly just good for encrypting small files.

The advantage to this is that if you lose your computer no one will be able to get your personal files since they are encrypted. The cost to this is that it will slow your computer down by a small amount and if you delete this encryption key then you won’t be able to decrypt your files.

You should also probably create encrypted backups of all your files in case that key is deleted. For backing up your data I would recommend “backintime-gnome” and here is a tutorial on creating an encrypted partition for backing up your files to.

Google cardboard

Uncategorized

A few days ago I was able to create my own Google cardboard which is a virtual reality headset made out of cardboard, a smart phone and various other things. So far I’ve managed to improve upon its design by stapling rubber bands on to the side. Like such:

staple

You can also combine rubber bands without having to break them using the following method:

Unfortunately I wasn’t able to turn around in the VR. It seems that most Android phones lack a part called a “gyroscope” that would allow it to better detect where I’m looking.

Some things you didn’t know about computer viruses.

Computer Security

It has come to my attention that a lot of people don’t actually understand computer viruses. Many people seem to think that computer viruses can affect any computer, and can somehow be avoided by not visiting “shady” sites.

Let me clear something up for you: Computer viruses (and I mean actual VIRUS viruses)affect Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X. Linux, and the countless other operating systems are completely unaffected. The fact is that in order for an operating system, like windows, to get a virus it needs to have practically no security at all.

Furthermore you can’t avoid viruses by avoiding “shady” sites. Think about that for a second. What counts as “shady”? How does the computer know if it’s on a shady site? The fact is that it doesn’t know. Any web page could have a virus on it. Even the Google search page could have a virus on it. The only reason it doesn’t is because Google would never do such a thing. Also by the time that the page loads enough for you to see that it’s “shady” it’s already too late. The virus is in place because, and I can’t believe I have to actually tell this to technologically literate people, computers are really fast.

If you’re wondering “then how is it that I don’t have a virus?” the answer is that you most likely do and just don’t know it. Think about this for a second: If you were writing a virus, why would you want the user to know that they’ve caught your virus? Wouldn’t it be smarter to have it hide in the background until just the right time?