Whonix/Qubes integration is excellent, and it's certainly a nice perk of Qubes.
To clarify the benefits of the "two VM" approach:
Most of the unmasking exploits against Tor users (as distinguished from unmasking Tor hidden services) involve getting a browser to ignore the proxy settings, somehow. I believe WebRTC, Flash, and various other things have been used to cause the browser to beacon out to some endpoint - you exploit the kitty picture site, and put in code to exploit the browser, which then makes a direct request to http://someip/unique_identifier - and, boom, you've got the user's IP, probable cause, the works.
This happens because a "typical" Tor install is the daemon running locally, but nothing prevents other binaries from making a direct connection out. You set the browser to use socks5://localhost:9050 or something as the proxy, but if you can either get some part of it to misbehave, or just spawn off a different process, it doesn't obey the proxy settings and goes straight out.
Whonix solves this problem by splitting the system into the workstation VM (what you interact with) and the gateway VM (that connects to Tor and "torifies" traffic). The only network port on the workstation VM is connected to the input port on the gateway VM - and everything coming in that port is routed through Tor, via the other (internet connected) port.
So, if you manage to exploit the workstation VM, the attacker still doesn't gain an IP - because they launch a shell that runs 'wget http://someip/unique_id', but that goes out through the gateway VM, and gets encapsulated into Tor before going out, so it still pops out some Tor exit node, not your home IP address.
It raises the bar rather substantially for using Tor, and avoids a lot of the various ways to get Tor to leak. Also, they ship a copy of the Tor Browser in Whonix, which disables a lot of high risk functionality and allows you to very easily disable automatic media parsing and Javascript and such.
Qubes is awesome, and the integrated Whonix stuff is just a beautiful integration.
The more time passes, the more comfortable I feel about mostly interacting with the internet from a Qubes box, in a disposable Whonix/Tor VM, with Javascript disabled...
This is just gross. I mean, not surprising. But appalling in so many ways that it's even possible.
If you're not familiar with fingerprint.com, they do "deep user profiling" - think "maintaining a constant user ID across computers, browsers, OSes, etc." They have a demo on the main page that's a little bit creepy in how good it is.
I find it hard to believe that one would be in more legal hot water for having checked as a matter of policy and having missed a high quality fake ID or something, than for not having checked at all.
I know an awful lot of gun owners, and I can't think of one who would sell a gun to someone they suspected wasn't permitted to own one.
> You should take a few steps to make sure the buyer is legit. Ask to see a concealed carry permit or FOID card.
I've known people who buy and sell quite a few guns, and even though there was no legal requirement for them to do so, this was their policy. Show them a matching permit to acquire or carry permit and driver's license, or they wouldn't sell a gun. Nothing was written down, but if you weren't willing to show matching paperwork and an ID, they wouldn't sell it to you. And I think in a few cases, if the buyer was being unusually squirrely and evasive, they didn't even get that far.
Very, very few gun owners have any desire to sell guns to prohibited persons.
> There's plenty of times in Apples history where looking cool has won out over practical concerns.
I'm not even sure "looking cool" was a factor in some of the worst ones. "Winning industrial design awards for being thinner than possible" stands out to me. In pursuit of that, they had four years worth of laptop keyboards that didn't work long term, and got rid of the most amazing feature ever for laptop charging (MagSafe), to thin things out further with USB-C. Not a bad connector, but definitely a bad charging connector compared to MagSafe for people with kids, pets, etc.
I'm glad they've gone back to a laptop that seems to work, but... I've lost interest.
I've mostly installed them on motorcycles over the years. The combination of a modulator/flasher (several pulses and then solid) and a bright LED tail light makes a HUGE difference in how cars behind you follow - I converted several motorcycles at different points in time and observed the rather significantly increased following distance on each one as I converted them.
I don't know the legality of them, but nobody ever complained on the motorcycles.
Uh. Really? On the ceiling? Or have I screwed up my perspective entirely there?
If it's actually on the ceiling, I either know it's there, or I'll be into pulsing my brakes manually before I bother to find it should I actually need it.
That's actually one complaint I have about the 1st gen Chevy Volt - the hazards switch is a physical button... on the right side of the center console, over by the passenger. It's not a location that is either rapid to find if you don't know where it is, or particularly rapid to hit when you need them - it's a substantial span reach, unsupported, on a smaller button than I think reasonable. Though, admittedly, I miss the ones on the top of the steering column. That was standard enough for a long time that I still look for the toggle there.
I use them at least a few times a year, though far less than I used to when I was on the interstate a lot more. Any time traffic rapidly drops more than about 20mph, I light up my hazards to let following traffic know, "Yes, you see brake lights, no, they're not just people scrubbing a few miles an hour off - get on your brakes now!" Probably a habit I picked up from truckers, a lot of them do this for the very understandable reason that a big rig doesn't stop on a dime, and even if they will, you're likely to unstack your cargo in the process.
Super infrequently used compared to other buttons, but also not something I really have the time go sorting through menus for when I need it. And neither do I trust the car's automatic systems to turn them on for me.
Though, if I could dream, we'd use LED brake lights to encode braking intensity somehow. The car knows if I'm barely touching the pedal to cancel cruise control and light up the brakes, or if I've just mashed them to the ABS actuation point, but the brake lights don't encode any of this useful info. You couldn't rely on it for car behavior (trivial to spoof, and get rid of tailgaters), but it would be an additional useful input for driving - "Woah, hey, that car in front of you just nearly locked up their wheels, radar data agrees, slow down!"
> Sometimes it feels like every innovation of the last 15 years has been a step backwards.
A step backwards, for which party in the exchange?
The past 15 years have seen vastly huge improvements in the ability of user interfaces and such to collect widespread behavioral data that can be mined for prediction products! That you're upset with thus and such change, as noted by your interaction with the device and accelerometer data, is really important for better predicting what will sell to you!
But, yes, the past 15 years have seen a turn of consumer tech against the consumer. Now, the question isn't (shouldn't be?) "What can this thing do for me?" - it's, "What am I giving up by using this thing?"
I don't know if any of them specifically require a certain number of presses or such - I've never had an "old style" knob climate system that would automatically turn the blower to max in the defrost position, though that certainly helps the process. But neither have I ever run into a vehicle where the functionality is actively hidden. Scan for the defrost logo, front and rear, interact with the proper controls. To remove this obvious behavior from a car randomly speaks to an insane level of disconnect between the designers (who mostly operate on the concept of change for the sake of change, because any change makes it look new) and users (who, generally, would rather things stay where they were).
I don't care if my car UI wins international design awards for Excellence in Minimalism (ExMn) or something. I care that I can use it to make the various systems do what I want, or put them in a sane "Automatic" mode that then does reasonable things with them. And, further, I very much do care that they don't randomly change on me between trips in the vehicle.