I make and sell BusKill laptop kill cords. Monero is accepted.
- 14 Posts
- 17 Comments
Personally I wouldn’t run a lemmy instance because of this (and also many other concerns)
I recommend [a] letting the lemmy devs know (eg on GitHub) that this issue is preventing you from running a lemmy instance and [b] donating to alternative projects that actually care about data privacy rights.
The fines usually are a percent of revenue or millions of Euros, whichever is higher.
So if your revenue is 0 EUR then they can fine you the millions of Euros instead. The point of the “percent of revenue” alternative was for larger corporations that can get fined tens or hundreds of millions of Euros (or, as it happened to Meta, in some cases – billions of Euros for a single GDPR violation).
The fines usually are a percent of revenue or millions of Euros, whichever is higher.
So if your revenue is 0 EUR then they can fine you the millions of Euros instead. The point of the “percent of revenue” alternative was for larger corporations that can get fined tens or hundreds of millions of Euros (or, as it happened to Meta, in some cases – billions of Euros for a single GDPR violation).
That would be true if their instance wasn’t federating. If the instance is federating, then it’s downloading content from other users, even if the user isn’t registered on the instance. And that content is publicly available.
So if someone discovers their content on their instance and sends them a GDPR request (eg Erasure), then they are legally required to process it.
It’s definitely not impossible to contact all instances; it’s a finite list. But we should have a tool to make this easier. Something that can take a given username or post, do a search, find out all the instances that it federated-to, get the contact for all of those instances, and then send-out a formal “GDPR Erasure Request” to all of the relevant admins.
You definitely can do that, but if you’re afraid that you might stand-up and forget you’re using it, then you probably shouldn’t.
It’s probably enough to just use the default trigger that locks your screen. Or, once you get comfortable with it, set it to shut down your computer. Most people don’t need to shred their FDE keys, unless they’re facing torture.
In fact, we make it difficult to use “destructive” triggers (like the LUKS Header Shredder that wipes the FDE header) and intentionally do not include the ability to switch to it in the app. To use it, you have to do a lot of extra work. So most users don’t have this issue.
Why? It defaults to just locking your screen. So you stand-up, the magnetic breakaway cable separates, and then you just have to type your password…
If you’re the type of person that would forget to lock your computer before standing up and walking away, then it’s exactly what you’d want.
34·1 year agoYes, it’s clearly disclosed in my profile that I am the founder of the BusKill project.
This is a PSA that our sale has started. I’ve had inquiries from members of our community asking about Black Friday sales.
10% off is barely any discount anyway.
Sorry, we’re a very small open-source shop. I’ve paid myself nothing so-far. The price just barely breaks-even for the business.
All of this is explained in-detail in “The Finances” section here.
Prices would drop dramatically if we could do production runs (and actually sell) >10,000 units at a time. Currently we only sell a few cables per month. If you want to help, please tell all your security-conscious friends about BusKill :)
Hi, this is not spam but a useful PSA that’s full of information, not just about the sale.
BusKill is useful for many groups, including human rights defenders, activists, journalists, whistleblowers, etc. You can read more about the use-cases of our community at our documentation here:
Yes, BusKill works with any USB drive.
In fact, the BusKill cable is just a USB Drive. The only thing “fancy” that it has is a magnetic coupler in the middle of the 1-meter cable so that it will breakaway at any angle. But, if you’d like, you can build your own. The instructions are here:
45·1 year agoIt’s run by the folks at dys2p.
Besides running ProxyStore in Leipzig, they have published some pretty great articles:
- Random Mosaic – Detecting unauthorized physical access with beans, lentils and colored rice
- Revealing Traces in printouts and scans
- On the security of the Linux disk encryption LUKS
You can follow them on Mastodon here https://chaos.social/@dys2p
Yes BusKill works similarly – any USB drive can use the BusKill software
The BusKill cable is just nice because it includes a magnetic breakaway, so it works when the laptop is snatched-away at any angle. There’s actually a ton of anti-forensics software like usbkill and BusKill; we enumerate them all on our documentation’s Similar Projects section
You may want to check ^ it out :)
I made a video of this (demo in Windows, MacOS, Linux, TAILS, and QubesOS) with the old DIY model here (sorry for the terrible audio quality)
We’re currently working on an updated video with someone who is much better at video production than me; it should be finished in early 2024.
11·1 year agoI’ve paid myself nothing so-far. The price just barely breaks-even for the business. There’s one-time costs like a few grand for a CNC’d injection mold and assembly jig, but also certification fees, product boxes, cardstock paper for documentation inserts, printing fees, artist commissions, packaging materials, warehousing, shipping, other logistics fees, etc.
All of this is explained in-detail in “The Finances” section here.
I prefer open-source hardware to be designed using common off-the-shelf items that are easily found everywhere in the world. Unfortunately, the one vendor of a USB-A magnetic breakaway couplers decided to EOL their product shortly after I published a guide on how to build your own BusKill cable. After we published, they all got sold-out, and we had to go to manufacturers for a custom component.
Prices would drop dramatically if we could do production runs (and actually sell) >10,000 units at a time. Currently we only sell a few cables per month. If you want to help, please tell all your security-conscious friends about BusKill :)
It should only be posted once to this community. It’s also been cross-posted to other relevant communities.
Unfortunately, that’s what it costs to make open-source hardware at small-scale.
There’s a cheaper $59 cable available or you could build your own.
Hi, Michael Altfield here. I was the sysadmin for OSE from 2017-2020.
Everything OSE does is transparent, so you can just check the OSE websites to see what everyone is currently working-on. OSE contributors log their hours in a worklog called “OSE Dev”. There you can quickly see who is working on what.
The above graphs show 4 contributors in the past ~10 weeks (one is me; we had some issues with the apache config recently). There’s no direct link, but you can then check the wiki to see people’s work logs (just search for the person’s name and
Log):I also like to look at the MediaWiki “Recent Changes” page to peak at what people are up-to as well:
I told Marcin about Lemmy back in June 2023. Another OSE contributor even created an OSE community on the slrpnk.net instance, but it appears to have been abandoned. I’ll email him about this thread to see if he’ll bite and publish updates in this community since there’s clearly interest :)
Also, shameless plug: I started an org that’s very similar in spirit to OSE called Eco-Libre, with a focus on projects to sustainably enfranchise human rights in smaller communities. We’re currently accepting volunteers ;)