Is there a limit or datum for ´good´? These are dangerous times and a good firewall might cause snoops, spies and ´legal´ monitors a degree of reason to be suspicious.
Ipfire is configured with tweaks discussed in the Forum: why, hacks and thief’s might think, should a location have a fire-fire wall as strong as a commercial business?
The Thread is about opening discourse on ipfire inquiring into the notion does ipfire itself present an obstacle attaining safety and peace of mind.
What you wrote makes no sense to me. Maybe this is due to language barrier, but I could not understand your intent here. If you are asking if IPFire as a software is legal, please get the service of a lawyer, expert of your jurisdiction civil and criminal law.
As far I can tell, if IPFire is not legal then any equipment running Linux is not legal, including all the servers you used to send your question in this forum.
Hi.
From what I can understand, the question is “what is valuable to me that I protect it with a perimeter protection solution, just like a company?”.
100% security no one can offer it to you. If they do, they are cheating you.
What should be tried is to make yourself less attractive so that the criminal considers whether it is worth the effort to compromise your security, especially when there are others that are easier to compromise.
There are many reasons why a criminal wants to compromise the security of a network. And they all stopped being altruistic a long time ago. Among them I can list (there will be many more reasons):
In short, you have to try to be as unattractive as possible, reducing the attack surface as much as possible so that the criminal does not waste time and effort trying to access a system that does not know if it will be possible to have an easy and fast monetary return, knowing that there are other easier ones.
For the others questions:
One might also vector in the durability and relevance of a firewall application over time.
We don’t know how the threat parameters might evolve in the future, but to me the biggest threat is, and always will be, social engineering and clueless users, not only in companies.
OP mentions the word “ legal” two times.
First in the title of this thread: “Legality”. I think that this is meant in the sense of: is it worthwhile or wise using IPFire. No justice involved. Let me know If I understand that right.
The second time the word ‘legal’ seems to mean ‘justice’ or ‘police’.
Should you ask in the title if IPFire is legal, in the justice sense, I would say: Yes, of-course.
Should you ask in the title if using IPFire is worthwhile or wise, I would say: Yes, of-course.
In the rest of your message you seem to imply that IPFire is so secure that you might attract attention of the police. You think highly of IPFire (and you should) and as a member of this community (as a user) I say thank you.
I do think that everyone should protect himself from the dangers of the internet, including surveillance (I use Tor every day and take other measures as well). If you educate yourself in this matter you know that we all should imo. So if I can protect myself, my family, school, company I will do so.
You also seem to imply that if you protect yourself well, you probably have something to hide. In the same spirit goes: if you pursue privacy, you probably have something to hide. Forgive me my strong words here, but that is plain stupid.
(On second thought, maybe it isn’t you that think so, but you thinking that others might.)
So I am grateful that I can use a (often better than) professional grade open source firewall.
And to answer your question: I do not think that I am now a target for ‘legal’ of something like that. I think they are busy catching thieves, not me.
Of course. If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear. Passwords are clearly overrated.
It is not like power distills sociopaths, psychopaths and narcissists that will inevitably abuse their position. This has never happened in our history, so why worry about that?
And even if it were to happen, people will resist because people are naturally courageous and critical thinkers and never follow, amplify and enforce blindly the majority consensus, do they?
OMG, the privacy thing is a can of worms. Not wanting to derail this topic, but it deserves a bit of attention.
Yes, I most definitely have something to hide. And protect.
I work with healthcare systems. That is sensitive information right there. Sure, I have work equipment that has VPN and Malware protection, but I created my blue pinholes to lock that out from my internal network, and thus also somewhat protecting it from my internal machines. I may not be sure how good that protection is, but in any case it is a first step. Maybe more can be done.
But raising a red flag vs the police (or NSA or Bundesnachrichtendienst) because I have a firewall ? I do not think that should be a concern. Then again, who knows?
Thanks for these response s. That is exactly what I was looking for! You have understood perfectly.
Indeed!
Right, can’t think of one case of abuse indeed.
Exactly!
From a different perspective: I started years ago using coyote Linux to protect our LAN from hacking. I got tired of taking a week to recover the NT 4.0 server and then recover all the data back from backup tapes.
I bought a “Hardware” firewall from a well known company and within a year it had been cracked and was useless. So I went back to a server running firewall/gateway software to stop this.
Let me ask you this question: If you bought a car that had the locks all stripped would you pay to have the locks replaced so that you could lock up the car while you get groceries? Makes sense that you would want to protect your car so that you don’t have to walk home carrying all that you bought.
So more and more people are becoming security conscious and since most of them are unable to deal with firewall/gateway servers, they go with VPNs.
This doens’t attract No Such Agency any more than me running CLEAROS, or IP Fire. And as time goes on, I will get better with it and do more so it provides more protection for my VOIP hardware so someone can’t hack/crack it and make lots of long distance phone calls for free (for them) at a price for me.
I hope see the analogy to your laptop/desktop being zombied, stolen, whatever, and the car. So, it does make sense to have this kind of protection.
Hope this helps.
TImes are we should take a big step back. Privacy securing etc. yes ofcourse who wants to get in a bank and be spied? Legality concerns only to industries and their money making business. How can we adress responsabilities to a firmware/hardware/software/metalware they are just producing something humans want to have? Yes, blame eddison and marconni for their legality of making use of electricity.
Electricity. Maxwell. Faraday. 1855. The new world. That’s the train to where I am now. The issue of legality comes from wondering about the sirens I hear when-ever the ipFire team supplies a new version. The way IPFire is updated its a wonder how the other softwares can compare.
I don’t want to be controversial when I decided to respond to this topic, and I explained in a private message what I wanted to clarify after being blocked. I explained that licenses are more concerned with intellectual property rights than with defending consumer interests and protecting the industries that generate billions of dollars in sales and distribution of equipment and applications. The computer market emerged from the demand for strategic needs in defense, as well as finding an exponential market in players and gamers. It developed without knowing the consequences that could arise. It was impossible to conjecture the prevalence of Information Technologies in peoples and cultures, but it is certain that access to a whole range of programming languages allows not only large companies but also others to develop computer systems. I disagree that the lack of licensing is synonymous with less capable software. In fact, it can be either less capable or more capable and better. I mentioned electricity because I detect, and this is my personal opinion, that the problem of intellectual property rights or the vulnerability of computer systems stems from the discovery and invention of binary systems for conducting electricity. A CPU clock or a capacitor is that, and a computer is nothing more than a giant calculator processing electricity. Best regards (translated with open AI)
Polly Wolly DoodleGPT
In my opinion there’s necessarily no need for using information technology in order to risk someones privacy.