Refresh: I Recommend CentOS

On the one hand, I despise most of what passes for Linux advocacy. Most Linux advocates are computer geeks. The computer geek culture is not at all mainstream, and cannot ever be mainstream. Geeks are geeks because they don’t even understand the mainstream. They turn to computers because it’s less confusing for them; computers and other geeks are their friends, and they are on the fringe of society — harmless and useful, but not full participants. I’m not a part of that, though I do understand it fairly well.

There are degrees of this; it’s not a matter of hard, compartmentalization of humanity. There is a much larger part of society for whom computers do matter, and they know far more than the average, but it’s all about how computers serve other needs. Geeks adore their computers as a need in itself. For the rest of us, we need our computers and we need them under our control.

Here’s the fundamental pitch: If you run Linux on your computer, you will retain ultimate control. At the same time, you will find yourself — at best — often on the fringes of mainstream consumer computer usage. That’s the intended result of predatory marketing by corporate fascists. They want control and will use both government force and popular cultural deception to make sure no one questions the utter necessity of giving them all our money.

There are problems enough with the hardware. While the theories have been bandied about for some decades, in recent years people have actually begun using software and techniques to bypass the operating system entirely and gain direct control over the hardware. They can do this because of something call “firmware” — little chunks of software built into the hardware itself, stored in tiny memory registers. It makes stuff run better when the OS doesn’t have to do all the work itself, but can rely on some of the hardware to intelligently interact with the system. Over the past decade there has been a vast increase in hardware that comes with firmware, and the firmware can be hacked. Most hardware manufacturers are egregiously careless, even hatefully stupid at times, in leaving this insecure to hacking.

That is, the same kind of thinking that goes into building operating systems with back doors has infested the whole industry. The manufacturers leave back doors for their own convenience, and sometimes because some other entity pays them to do it, or threatens them if they don’t. It’s hard to be sure, and sometimes it’s several reasons at once. If you use Windows, you already have a massive collection of back doors. The same folks who have poked around and discovered how to write viruses and other malware that bypass user controls have also figured out things like default passwords built into your home internet router, or other bits of commodity hardware. The difference between an independent criminal hacker and a government hacker is that the latter have more and better access to the secrets and are more likely to hurt you with it.

Running something like CentOS isn’t a total solution, but it does make things much more difficult for all kinds of hackers trying to take control of your system away from you. For one thing, the NSA itself is responsible for some of the security features in CentOS. That’s because CentOS is simply the free version of Red Hat, and NSA uses Red Hat a lot. And because of the way Linux works, the NSA gave back their extra security measures so that the non-government developers could look at those security measures as Open Source software and make it even better. What protects the NSA from hacking is what protects CentOS from hacking.

Furthermore, should our government get around making crazy demands about what you can and cannot run on your private computer, it would be very hard for them say you cannot run CentOS. It’s the free version of Red Hat and fully protected by the company, sponsored as an official extension of their own product. If the NSA wants to keep using Red Hat — they can’t afford not to — they have to allow us ordinary folks to run CentOS. And CentOS is just as secure as the NSA computers, once you take the time to learn a little about it.

One real advantage: CentOS has no hidden back doors, no secret levels of access and control that you don’t know about. The folks who produce CentOS are not secretive at all, and are watched by thousands of others — others all over the world, many of whom despise the US government — to insure it stays safe. In other words, we can take advantage of the geeky computer culture to gain some pretty serious computer security for ourselves. About as much as a human can trust anything at all in this world, we can trust the Linux community in general and CentOS in particular when it comes to security and keeping control in the user’s hands.

Did you know that Windows has two levels of permission above the owner of the computer? One level is for software companies that pay for a Microsoft developers’ license, and then there’s another level above that for Microsoft’s own controls. Not even the best third-party security software can prevent MS from wiping their OS from your system, or making any changes they like while it runs, to include giving the same access to anyone they like. With CentOS, there is no way that can happen. If you have the root password, nobody can interfere with your control of the system. There is no higher authority. There will always be a few ways around that, but those ways are considered security bugs to be fixed when anyone finds out (fixed and updated right away, not just once a month). In other words, hacking into a CentOS system that is running the default configuration out of the box will be very difficult, and most of the uber-hackers in crime and government won’t even try it.

Yes, if you’ve allowed yourself to be pampered by the convenience of Windows with all the entertainment and ease of use, it will be a hard move. There are things you have to do in making that change that aren’t exactly simple, but once you do it, and you get used to how it all works, it makes you a very hard target for anyone who hasn’t got their hands on your computer.

I will even go so far as to tell you the Debian is far better, but also far more complicated for the user. It’s a lot more learning and probably not quite as secure as CentOS. Part of what makes CentOS so secure is that, beyond a certain level of common workstation operations, it is very hard to make changes in how things work. Debian is far more versatile, though again, it’s more complicated from the start. I prefer Debian because I have the time to mess with it and need the extra freedom of choice, but if that isn’t you, and you need heavy-duty security that is pretty simple, then I recommend CentOS.