Qubes
The Qube-ic formula
What on earth is Qubes? How can it stop your traitorous activities being noted by hostile governments?
If you’re using Linux at home, you’re already doing pretty well security-wise. Even reading this magazine has been shown to boost security by up to 15% (in certain circumstances). We can all improve our security, though, but if you’ve looked into this, you’ll know that this generally comes with some sort of usability trade-off. For example, if you really don’t want any of your computers and smart devices to be hacked, you could just switch off your router (and any radios in any of those devices). But that’s not useful. Qubes OS has a far more reasonable approach, namely security by compartmentalisation. A default Qubes installation sets up four virtual machines (VMs) running under the Xen hypervisor. Much like the spoon in the first Matrix movie, there isn’t (under normal circumstances) a Qubes OS for you to interact with – only these subordinate VMs (known in Qubes as qubes).