- What it is
- A computer whose ownership, users and installed software you can describe accurately without resorting to probably or I think.
- How you get one
- Usually by choosing which of the machines around you qualifies, occasionally by setting one aside for the purpose.
- Where to keep it
- Somewhere you control physically, because a machine other people can sit down at is a machine you cannot describe.
- How it goes wrong
- Circumstances change around it. A flatmate borrows it, work installs management software, and the description silently expires.
- What fails without it
- Every precaution above it rests on an unknown base, so careful work at later stages buys less than it appears to.
- Time to acquire
- Minutes to assess a machine you already have, considerably longer if the honest answer turns out to be none of them.
Trust here means describable
The word secure is doing no work in this entry, and it has been left out on purpose. Nobody reading a small reference site is going to acquire a secure machine this week, and a page telling them to would be theatre.
Describable is achievable today. It asks only that when you make a statement about the machine, the statement is true. Nobody else logs in. Nothing was installed by an employer. The disk was not passed on to you by a stranger. Any of these might be false for your machine, and knowing which are false is the actual artifact.
Questions you should answer without guessing
| Question | A weak answer | An answer you can act on |
|---|---|---|
| Who else uses it | I think nobody really | Two people, both of whom know the login |
| What else is on it | The usual stuff | A list I could write out, and I know who installed each item |
| Is it yours to change | It is my work laptop | Mine, bought by me, no management software on it |
| Where does it sit | Around the house | On my desk, in a room I lock |
The right column is not better because it is more secure. It is better because you could plan around it. A shared machine you know is shared is workable. A shared machine you believe is private is the dangerous case, and that is the one this table is meant to expose.
Borrowed, shared and issued machines
A borrowed machine belongs to whoever lent it, including whatever they left running on it. A shared machine carries other people's sessions, other people's browser profiles and other people's idea of what a sensible download is. An employer-issued machine is managed by design, and management means somebody else can see and change what runs.
None of those are automatically disqualifying, though the last one comes close. What disqualifies a machine is not being able to say which of the three it is. If you have to think for more than a moment about whether your laptop is managed, treat the answer as yes until you have checked properly.
When a machine stops qualifying
The description expires without any warning, because the events that break it are ordinary. Someone stays over and uses it for an evening. A partner is given the login for one legitimate reason. A repair shop has it for three days. A work profile gets pushed while you are on the wifi at the office.
After any of those, the machine is not the machine you described. Sometimes the honest response is a reinstall, sometimes it is simply updating your own understanding of what the machine is now. What is not honest is carrying on with the old description because rewriting it is inconvenient. The same reasoning covers retiring anything else in the inventory.
What sits on top of it
Nearly everything else does. The browser copy from the previous entry runs here. Whatever you write down may live here. A clean profile is only clean relative to the machine underneath it, and key material kept on a machine other people use is key material other people can copy.
That is the whole argument for putting this entry early. It is not the most interesting thing in the inventory and it takes almost no time to assess. It just happens to be the surface everything else is standing on, and an inventory that skipped it would be counting objects while ignoring the table.
Questions that come up
My only machine is shared with family. Is that hopeless?
It is workable as long as you know it and plan around it rather than pretending otherwise. Shared means anything you leave behind may be seen, so the practical consequence is that you lean harder on things that do not persist and you keep written material off that disk entirely. Paper becomes more attractive in exactly this situation, which is one reason the notebook entry does not assume a file.
Does a phone count as a machine here?
It counts as a machine you can describe, and often you can describe it better than a laptop, because fewer people touch it and less software gets installed by accident. It carries its own set of constraints that this site does not attempt to cover. Judge it on the same question as anything else: can you state who uses it and what is on it, without guessing.
Is a fresh install enough to reset the answer?
A reinstall resets the software description and leaves the rest untouched. Who else has physical access, who knows the password, and whether the machine is managed by an organisation are all unaffected by wiping the disk. Those are the parts that decide most of the outcome, and they are decided by your circumstances rather than by anything you install.