I’m personally motivated in a non-commercial way to supply everyone with as much cybersecurity as possible in the interests of civlization, especially now. I’ve just finished what I wanted to releae as “set” 2 days ago and it’s time to announce them.
I’m the former Web Application Security Team Lead for the National Computer Center, Research Triangle Park, having been contracted to the EPA by the now defunct Computer Sciences Corporation.
If you have some extra hardware not really being used I would suggest perhaps a great use of it would be to create yourself a hardened platform, just in case, to protect your sensitive data on an emminently stable platform going forward.
Maybe you’ve always wanted to try a BSD, well now is a great time to do that. They are super stable, super reliable, community drive, and you are in control of everything.
I would also like to mention that if you’d like to go extra hard consider Hardened BSD. Another alternative is using grsecurity/PaX kernel patched Alpine Linux as a Desktop choosing crypt full disk encryption during setup + AppArmor.
Just as an example you can get your hands on a $250 Thinkpad T495 and installing GhostBSD on it is as simple to setup as Linux Mint and runs as fast as a brand new 2023 Windows laptop. If you choose Dragonfly BSD, the fastest BSD, on a T495 (the lastest year fully BSD compatible laptop), my repo will completely configure it for you, complete with all applications needed for a professional developer.
In addition to that I’ve created a Network Based Firefox hardening solution that wipes the extremely profitable, For-Profit, Mozilla Corporation off your Internet and easily combines with Arkenfox. It removes Mozilla servers from being contacted by any application or service on your machine and does not interfere with web page rendering.
I’ve created my own Git Repository using Gogs (which Gitea is based on) where you can get all the goods here:
Latest Software
Main Website
https://www.quadhelion.engineering
About
https://www.quadhelion.engineering/about.html
Backup GitHub
Backup BitBucket
https://bitbucket.org/quadhelion-engineering/workspace/repositories/
Yes, I’m serious about my mission statement in the beginning and I have some more ideas. First there is a Linux OS that installs all kinds of Educational Software, like Encyclopedia, Maps, Learning Tools that is all available offline in the full 17GB Full Version. It’s called Endless OS (no affilitions) and here is the excerpt.
It would be great if all of us could have some of the civilization important databases on this BSD installation of yours. Please contribute a downloadable database file or file set you know of. I’ll start.
Downloadable Wikipedia Database Encyclopedia Britannica All Volumes
I’ve recently been looking into downloading offline copies of important data, since I don’t expect that today’s freely available information will continue to be freely available and accessible in perpetuity.
One problem I quickly ran into was that e.g. wikipedia downloads are not in an easily browsable format.
I found a project called Kiwix that packages datasets from a variety of free sources, like Wikipedia and Project Gutenberg, along with a reader application that can read these “zim” archives. The different data sources are available via torrents or direct downloads. https://wiki.kiwix.org/wiki/Content
I’m particularly interested in freely downloadable archives of scientific papers. A lot seems to be paywalled, or at least free-account-walled, even though the papers themselves are theoretically open-access. I would love to know of any sources out there to download an entire database locally.
I was thinking the exact same thing, thanks for the awareness! Tangentially, problem with Wiki is it’s excellent for Who, What, Where, but is nearly totally bereft of how to do anything.
Aha! I went down this road recently.
I have the main full Wikipedia plus extras on my file server accessible on the home land through kiwix.
It was really simple and painless to set up. It also includes wikihow which is the How you’re after
These things aren’t the greatest sources for anything of course but they cover pretty much everything you might want to know in a general “archiving human knowledge at home” sense.
Very happy with it all and have bookmarks on all the devices at home now.
10/10
I made a Hacker News post about human knowledge databases and got some interesting data I’d like to share back to this thread.
Related:
Major cyber attack could cost the world $3.5 trillion