Hmmm, strange. It’s working on my side.

Take a look at this article from Wired (which I would consider a reputable source).

Honestly, I’ll take anything over those outsourced call centers at this point. Half of those representatives barely speak English.

Not the kind of data loss we are concerned with. As long as his data doesn’t reach a third party, we are happy.

Sadly yes

Cast it in concrete for even better security

Yes, I already mentioned that in the title. However, it is always bad practice to rely on a third party for your privacy. Especially a third party that profits off of your data.

EXIF data is sometimes appended when you take pictures and often includes things like the coordinates it was taken at (exact location), the device it was taken on, and some additional identifiers. This is, of course, bad for privacy, especially when posting online, as someone can accurately track you just from the image.

I found this article, which seems to describe how to remove it fairly well and does not appear to be sponsored.

No, it should delete all system files. Those people don’t deserve a computer.

“Cave Johnson, we’re done here.”

You can always trust the police. They would never ever do anything illegal.

You can always forcefully shut it down while it’s rebooting.

This is quite extreme. While it could be beneficial for some threat models, this was written as an example for the average Joe. OPSEC is not about having the best possible security as much as it is about having security that satisfies your threat model.

When it comes to all Linux distributions based on Debian (which is a good chunk of them), the Debian Security Advisory mailing list notifies you of all critical security updates and vulnerabilities. Even if you don’t use Linux, it’s still useful to see what was patched in relation to what CVE.

It is unfortunately impossible to defend against time. What works today might not work tomorrow, but that doesn’t mean you should give up because it might get compromised at some point in time. Establishing a clear threat model helps push that point in time farther away.

The backlash is extremely idiotic. The only two options are to store it in plaintext or to have the user enter the decryption key every time they open it. They opted for the more user-friendly option, and that is perfectly okay.

If you are worried about an outsider extracting it from your computer, then just use full disk encryption. If you are worried about malware, they can just keylog you when you enter the decryption key anyways.