I realized that the way I use my computer is so different that other people wouldn't be able to use it
This past week in the office, I left my computer unlocked for about a minute while I went to get some water. It was just enough time for a coworked of mine to spot the unlocked machine, jump into the seat and set up an office prank, like browsing to the rickrolling website, a fake Windows update page, etc.
His prank would have succeeded and I'd have been lectured by my infosec department hadn't he had one small problem: he didn't actually know how to use my computer!
Now let's make it very clear: I was at work, and the computer was running Windows, so none of the Linux-related quirks that I expect to give a Windows-only user a mild heart attack. But even then, this incident showed me one thing: by using (and borrowing things from) Linux for so long, I've essentially started to use my computer in such a way that most other people wouldn't really understand.
This change stacked up slowly and gradually with many quirks so over the years I didn't quite see it, but this incident made it crystal clear. What sort of quirks, you ask? Well, in no particular order:
- My main browser is Firefox, not Chrome.
- My search engine isn't Google
- Javascript is disabled (so the prank didn't work
;)
) - Ads do not load due to uBlockOrigin
- Browsing history is inexistent (one can't see what I was doing from the client side)
- Sites like YouTube, Twitter or Reddit do not load at all due to the redirector add-on with Privacy Frontends enabled
- An assortment of desktop software besides the browser that almost no one uses in an office (vim, Cygwin, GIMP, etc.) instead of preinstalled (bloated) ones.
So in short my specific configuration of my computer makes it almost unusable for most bystander noobs. And this saved me from an office prank. ¯\_ (ツ)_/¯
Wonder if anyone else has had this situation?