[ILUG] Question about ssh

[David Golden]

On Friday 03 August 2007, Frank Peelo wrote:

> Would they mind if I rebooted into knoppix, do you think?
>

Depends heavily on the cafe.  Usually best ask first. And that won't in 
itself defeat hardware keyloggers (opie would be attempting to address 
that).

> Have a Psion 5. 

They were nice  little things. Used to have a 5mx myself. I can 
understand sticking with it even today - the hardware (especially the 
keyboard) is excellent.   Technically, if you have a mobile phone that 
does IR (and if the 5 has an IR port, I know the 5mx did), you probably 
could still use the psion with it to dial to or ssh to servers, but it 
would probably be pretty slow, and I doubt any of the relevant epoc32 
software has been updated in a very long time. More of a geek fun thing 
to do than practical or sensible....

Believe it or not, you can stick linux on a 5mx, I'm kind of
regretting selling mine years ago now:
http://linux-7110.sourceforge.net/howtos/series5mx_new/index.shtml
That site suggests you can install on a 5 too, but I didn't see a howto.
... more of a geek fun thing to do than...

> So, this PUTTY thing on a USB key would be equally bad?

Equally? Depends how coarse-grained you're being.

It really comes down to your judgement and acceptability of various 
risks and loss of trust in the server* for you, and how generally 
paranoid you are (I'm typically "paid to be paranoid", it's up to you 
how seriously you take this stuff).  Really, people do a lot riskier 
stuff every day, but it's a totally avoidable thing you'd be choosing 
to risk for some convenience. 

*Once it's done, you can't un-do it, only practical option to regain 
lost levels of trustworthiness is a reinstall. If you never do it,
that attack avenue is impossible. If you do it, you'll never
be quite sure...