[ExI] scratch monkey

[Eugen Leitl]

On Sun, Jul 21, 2013 at 10:58:03AM -0400, Mike Dougherty wrote:
> On Sun, Jul 21, 2013 at 10:39 AM, Keith Henson <hkeithhenson at gmail.com> wrote:
> > The scratch part of the expression comes from the era of spinning
> > tapes.  A scratch tape that was used for intermediate data storage,
> > the contents of which you did not care about,  This was before
> > computer memory reached a MB, much less a GB so intermediate sort
> > results and the like were spooled to tape.  Writing to a scratch tape
> > did no harm.  "Mount" was the physical act of loading a tape and
> > enabling the computer to read it, and that is an expression still used
> > for disks to this day in Linux.
> 
> I assumed this use of scratch and mount.  Now that you've clarified, I
> imagine what other mental picture one might have from "mount a scratch
> monkey" - haha.

In my original mail a scratch system is one you're not afraid to lose,
as opposed to production system. E.g. anything you're using for browsing
or any Internet-connected system really can be compromised, and should
be considered as tainted.

A good practice is to run a dedicated VM guest just for browsing, and
always reset to last known good snapshot state. In the simple case,
that could be just a Tails VM booting from a Tails .iso image.