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EvilMutant.com: Paranoid II – The Revenge of TinFoil Hat

“TinFoil Hat Linux is a small Linux distribution that
can be easily booted from a floppy disk. As from my perspective its
two best sides are that you have your ring pair backuped on one
place and that you can securely encrypt and decrypt files wherever
you are located. TinFoil Hat Linux is created to be a little
paranoid place, so its other features surely go door-to-door with
paranoia:

Anti KeyLogger feature: KeyLoggers are little software or
hardware pests that are installed by people with malicious intent
(for instance if your computer has been compromised so a KeyLogger
is installed to snoop all your keystrokes and send them to
attacker’s e-mail address) or by people within the company
infrastructure (that usually install hardware KeyLoggers to spy on
what their employees spend their business time on). If you are on a
non secure computer and you really need to use encryption, TinFoil
Hat Linux has a nifty feature that gives you the abbility of
entering your password in a secure manner, so the hardware
KeyLogger (TinFoil Hat Linux boots from a floppy and as it is a
seperate Operating System software keyloggers from other OS on this
computer, of course, cannot work) and the people that check its
logs cannot get to your passphrase. TinFoil Hat Linux used a
wrapper for GPG, called gpggrid, that lets you use a video game
style character entry system instead of typing in your passphrase.
Don’t think that it is something heavily graphical, as it is just a
simple grid where column and row characters are randomly being
changed. This finishes up with the possible KeyLogger getting aZ zT
jP cJ aM hY instead of your passphrase “sensei” (just an
example).

Anti Tempest feature: As seen from the readme.txt file
attributed to this small Linux distribution – ” TinFoil Hat Linux
uses ctheme to manipulates the VGA console palette. It’s an amusing
hack, and does make it harder to photograph the screen with a
digital camera, but it won’t complicate tempest observation. It’s
the best I could figure out without having greyscale fonts.” This
feature is very interesting if you are into illuminati and big
brother theories. What the heck – if your encrypted file is worth 2
million dollars, you should be afraid of people looking your screen
over your shoulder, agents using their machines to grab your
monitor signals, corporate spies using tele-kynesis powers and…
and… well, you watched Enemy of the State, didn’t you? BTW what
to say about a software package that is being described by its
author with the following line – “An exercise in paranoia or a day
to day tool”. Also, the thing degrates in a positive anti-paranoia
sense – in order to complicate listening to radiation from the
keyboard, TinFoil Hat Linux blinks encrypted messages in morse code
on the keyboard LEDs.”

Complete
Story

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