I love how everyone knows this has nothing to do with kids safety. However no one can or is willing to put up a fight. In the UK where I live its the same. Government does whatever they want and most of us just shrug our shoulders and say "that's messed up" and go on about our day.
The reason is ridiculously simple: people don't put up a fight because they don't want to be labelled as a peto or as someone not in favor of the protection of Children. This is primarily why this cudgel is brought out so often: it's very difficult to oppose because you risk getting shunned for it.
Don’t worry. It will all burn down soon. This administration is preparing the narrative to "cancel the midterms" if they lose the senate and house. Using the illegal war as cover.
The UK is relatively small and I see surveys suggesting 70-80% of the population think the country is on the wrong track. Perhaps you should have a national strike or something, make the politicians come crawling to you instead of the other way around.
Interesting, I struggle to read. I always have. But I genuinely enjoyed it. Few years back I told a colleague that by the time I reach the end of paragraph I forget how it started. He told me sounds like a learning difficulty. So I did a test, thinking I was dyslexic. It turns out I have ADHD with particularly bad short term memory.
Anyways my question for everyone here, how do you read with ADHD? How do you over come reading the same passage multiple time?
Fix your ADHD.
It certainly comes with constant fatigue.
It becomes clear that ADHD, like autism, is related to a lack of energy for the brain, and disappears when enough energy is available.
If you feel too tired to focus, if you think you might need to sleep more than others, have the need for naps and so on, go consult a sleep clinic, get tested for all kinds of conditions, and find and fix the root cause.
Ritalin won't fix the root cause and depending on how tired you are, will rather deplete your energy levels than improve your status in the long run. Ritalin gives you an illusion, not a remedy.
Causes of fatigue can be a chronic inflammatory state, some immune reactions triggered too often...
Do you have allergies? Rashes when you eat some food? Trembling hands? Some skin problems? Hearing loss or tinnitus? Are you abnormally tired after sports? Do you have abnormal cramps after sports or drinking alcohol, or when not sleeping enough? Regular teeth health issues? Do you have a sensitive vague nerve? Did you faint more than other people in the course of your life? Does your body need more time to heal? Do you feel dizziness when standing up? Have you always had the impression that you actually aren't that stable on your feet, even while actually practising a lot of sports? What about headaches and migraines?
When you work, have you specialised in some tasks that are/feel quite systematic for you? Are social interactions or other tasks that require new analysis exhausting for you? These are signs that you optimise your energy expenditure by focusing on tasks that barely require you to think with much energy.
Lack of energy is a very good reason for the brain to avoid using energy for its executive function, the function that is actually impaired in people with ADHD. It's normal, and trying to fix that feels exhausting, which is why people with ADHD avoid spending that energy.
The executive function is preliminary to focusing with other parts of the brain. If it's impaired, the brain won't even try to focus with other parts for the actual work. Two problems solved at once. Twice the energy spared.
Find the root cause of your ADHD (which often is just a symptom) and fix it.
Personally, for any kind of serious reading, I have to go to a place/room with zero opportunities for distraction. No noise, no surrounding commotion, even slightly dimming lights helps. My retention rate drops significantly if there are any distractions.
For lighter reading or docs, I’ve got to take almost diagrammatic-like notes. whiteboard, paper/pen, or ipad work best for me - typed notes don’t work well. I may not even revisit the notes later, but actually writing them helps retention.
If I’m out of luck and must read in a non conducive environment, just resolving that I’ll have to re-read once or twice is the only way. Not aware of any magic solution unfortunately.
I think constantly checking if you can recall the last paragraph is a bad habit. It not only requires mental effort, it also breaks your flow.
I have ADHD myself, and I advise you to always keep reading. Don't stop and think about what things meant, don't recall the important events at the end of a paragraph or chapter, none of that. Just keep reading.
If you really feel like you didn't 'get it', go back 3 chapters. But reread it without stopping.
I just speed ahead, and I always retained more than I thought I did. If I keep going, eventually I can reach a kind of flow. It doesn't matter if I missed bits here or there.
Or, you could try the opposite, and slow down. It sounds like torture, but eventually, it will become habitual.
I think you can compare it to watching a movie. You won't recall at the end what color jacket the character was wearing, or what the name of the victim was, but you still get the movie. Even though the jacket-color might be significant in someway (like being the same color like the monster the character would become or something). It's normal and expected that a single viewing/reading will not give you all the insights.
Just like a movie, if I really like it, I could decide to read it again, and discover things I didn't get the first time around. But there is no requirement to spot every detail the first time.
So the CEO sends an email tell the work force by the 2027 you might now have a job.
So for a year you have to be in this horrible feeling of losing your job.
I just feel for everyone there, the "leaders" failed to see the troubled waters coming and failed to navigate them properly when it was here they took their bonuses and fat checks whilst workers pay the ultimate price.
I don't think in large companies or names like Meta, the top brass actually care what the moral amongst workers are.
I was at Accenture when they let a lot of people go. I watched very talented people just leave. Nothing changed. Management couldn't care less. They could always hire anyone they want/need to.
That's true to a point, but Amazon is finding out the hard way that eventually the well of people willing to put up with bullshit runs dry and it becomes much harder to get actually good talent or workers.
Meta needs to be careful IMO. The subset of capable people willing to work for a company as demonstrably evil as them is not infinite.
Meta's survival is fascinating to me. They dumped money in VR, their AI is not as good as their competitors and now they are dumping money on this glasses thing. They keep on getting caught doing shady things too.
Along with small Indies as stated, a lot of the ad market is controlled by large agencies like WPP.
State departments are also one of the biggest spenders (some say that's how the 'deep-state' maintain control of the media...). All those 'stop smoking' and other health ads all add up!
i think honestly it’s the opposite. it still confuses me why meta invested so much in their pointless experiments (think any of their AR ventures) when their main source of revenue was, and continues to be, their boring advertising on consumer apps
It's one of Microsoft under Ballmer biggest victory, and one that's proving to be harder than you would think for tech behemoth: when you have one product that's so overwhelmingly dominating and raking unlimited money, diverting into other product lines seems to be almost impossible, either they don't make enough money, or you don't have enough focus, or enough need for survival and such need for it to succeed.
Despite everything Google is still the Google Ads company, Meta is still the FB/Insta company, etc ... I would even add Intel in there, they're where they are in part because every new thing they made they killed off right away because it wasn't "a money printing large margin xeon with no competition".
Apple, Amazon and Microsoft are the big ones that got out of that trap. Though with Apple I would say it's more limited than it looks, it's just that their "product" is the ecosystem they build around, so while they have lots of lines they're all linked together and feed off each other with iPhone at the core.
On the other hand some would say, Ballmer decoupled Microsoft survival from Widnows survival so much that it leads to what's happening to windows those past 5-8 years, and that's not a plus for its users.
I saw orgmode once and I really loved it. Used Doomed and spacemacs. But dear Lord, does everything break on updates and need fixing. I had to give up as I just don't think it's feasible for me to fix my emacs when I want to get some work done.
I’ve come to believe that this is less an emacs problem and more an “emacs plugins that try to do way too much stuff / take too much control” problem. I’m on vanilla emacs (I don’t even use use-package) and my config never breaks any more, even when upgrading major emacs versions. I think it’s about doing things in harmony with the emacs way instead of trying to take over the UI/UX. Emacs Live was always broken when I was using that.
use-package is now in standard Emacs, so I would count that towards the Emacs way.
But I agree that it is very stable and for me also doesn't break, even though I use use-package a lot and install many key packages. Maybe it is important to note, that I don't need everything there is out there and that I remove not well working packages quickly after trying them. From time to time I also look at my init file and get rid of no longer used stuff.
Right, I can't understand what this breaking refers to?
I've been using emacs every day all day every time I'm front of a computer, since 1991. I need only one finger to count the pieces of software I've been using that long that have never crashed or broken on me in any way.
I think it depends on which parts of the ecosystem you use. The org publication/export logic has changed a few times in the past 10 years. If you relied on quirks in that in your configuration you would have had to fix your code to repair it after some upgrades.[1]
I have also run into compatibility issues when using older versions of Emacs with newer packages, and newer Emacs versions with older packages.
[1]: I totally did not build my blog on top of a bunch of these quirks. Every time one of them is fixed I'm reminded of the workflow xkcd. https://m.xkcd.com/1172/
I'm a Spacemacs user, and I just tried to update all my packages and my emacs is now somehow broken. Luckily I only did that one one of my two work machines so I will just do without the mac until I have the time to unfuck it.
He means time passing, aka bitrot. Emacs is designed for quick hacks which often rely on filesystem and shell behaviors outside itself to remain constant.
> does everything break on updates and need fixing
Emacs is a kitchen and emacs-packages are recipes - they come with the exact instructions (source code). If you try to cook fifty different meals all at once, your kitchen inevitably would be a mess. You need to know what you're trying to cook and how to work the recipes, and that comes with experience. No starter kit gives you a structure to un-mess your kitchen magically. Every sufficiently complex Emacs config is a system - a composite interweaving network of thousands of expressions, millions of code lines - it is the Space Shuttle equivalent; Neovim is like a simple twin-engine and VSCode is like a Cessna in comparison. Updates break your Emacs, I update things multiple times a week and rarely anything breaks (I consume over 350 packages); when things stop working - it doesn't usually take even a minute to figure out what's up. Yes, it does happen, but not as often as you painted it. On the other hand - when I need to get something done, there's no other tool in existence that can help me better.
TBF to the parent, I also started in spacemacs, then doom, before rolling my own config some years ago, and my early experiences also felt like upgrades were really hard to deal with and often breaking.
I think most of that was because I didn’t understand emacs itself very well, and doom or whatever is an entire extra layer of code and idioms on top of that. Start adding in any custom packages you’ve installed and things get well outside of the realm where a beginner can comprehend them.
Like you, I also now have a pretty large number of packages, and rarely run into issues on update, with any issues that do occur being easy enough to fix. However, I think a lot of that comes from at this point having built my own emacs from the ground up, so I understand what all the components are doing, mostly…
I use vanilla emacs and compile from source straight from master at whatever commit it happens to be in when I decide to do it.
Only once was there a noticeable breakage when a command like `git log` in the terminal would spit out all its output instead of displaying one screenful at a time. I'd expect someone following stable releases wouldn't experience any breakages.
I tried Doom or Spacemacs for a while, not sure which one right now. The one that does evil-mode by default. After it crashed a few times inexplicably, I gave up on them and returned to my heavily configured vanilla Emacs, which never crashes. Not sure how the other Emacsen managed to break things and maybe those failures are long fixed by now, but it was quite unfortunate. I imagine other people experiencing such a thing thinking Emacs is unstable.
Given the way Google is going I'm not sure if my next phone will be Android. I am fully aware that I am probably in the minority here. For me the trust is entirely gone.
Possibly... but the extension of this to Android and Apple is going to be the entire internet shuts you out. And everything else will be a giant Dead Internet crawling with bots.
The sites that require you to log in are precisely the same ones that are crawling with bots. The personal internet or "small web" is, and still will be, full of real content. There are also lots of bot websites that are trying to be small web, but since it's an actual social network and not a giant pool everyone pours stuff into, they don't get traction. If you do find a website that seems to be human but links to a thousand AIslop sites, you'll stop following that guy's links.
What they mean is those are the sites that will require attestation. It's pretty quaint to think that people who don't like bots would rather play wackamole with bots when they can just flip a switch and they're gone.
I have to see. As much as I don't like Murena and /e/OS, they seem to have some clout with the EU/EC. Given that they are using microG and also hit by this, they might be able to nudge the EC to act on this.
Also, personally I care less and less. As long as my banks and government apps work, I'll just not use somebody's service if they put up barriers like this.
> Also, personally I care less and less. As long as my banks and government apps work
If most people care less and less, the result would be that banks and government apps will also work less and less.
Look, companies have to prioritise. And the obvious way to prioritise is to say "users are requesting X A LOT and nobody requests Y, so we will do X". Companies never, EVER say "it would be more ethical to do Y, let's do Y".
As people, we can do two things:
* Push our governments to regulate that shit. That means, complain a lot to the government.
* Be vocal to companies and complain when they don't support your system. If enough people do that, it will be prioritised.
The hardware attestation (which is used by strict Play Integrity) checks the signature on your OS. It is totally possible to allow signatures other than Google, but Play Integrity doesn't do that.
Companies could totally decide to use hardware attestation and accept systems signed not only by Google, but also other systems (like GrapheneOS). But they don't care because not enough users complain to them.
Users of alternative Androids typically silently move to another service or stop using it entirely. Which is understandable but doesn't help the cause.
Both are terrible for privacy so it comes down to which one has a nicer screen now. :(
I'd rather have Google check an Apple phone attestation than have Google check a Google phone attestation, and vice versa, though, because you can assume each company is trying to keep as much information private to themselves instead of giving it to the other. Google is probably just getting "yes it's an Apple phone" and some kind of temporary token, instead of my IMEI, IMSI, phone number, all signed in accounts, biometrics and so on.
Also, Apple sells themselves as a privacy company, but often pick (possibly intentionally) insecure defaults. E.g. you might use end-to-end encrypted chats, but by default iCloud backups are not end-to-end encrypted, so law enforcement can just request your backups/chats from Apple. If you are vigilant and enable Advanced Data Protection for E2E iCloud backups, it probably still doesn't matter because the people that you communicate with probably do not have ADP enabled.
Besides that, they are enshittifying in the same way as Google. Ads in Maps, Ads in applications that you get with the OS (Apple Creator Studio ads in Keynote, etc.), Ads in your system settings for Apple Fitness+ (really).
At least Pixel phones and soon some Motorola models have the option of installing GrapheneOS.
Motorola + GrapheneOS next year could be an alternative. So far they've been relatively insulated from the changes that have been coming down from Google.
Motorola won't change a thing about hardware attestation. GrapheneOS is locked out from reCAPTCHA because GrapheneOS is signed by GrapheneOS and not by Google.
The way it's going, by the time the Motorola + GrapheneOS phone is out, it will be a lot more painful to use GrapheneOS than today. Not because of GrapheneOS of course, but because everybody accepts that bullshit Google is doing.
If you're waiting for Motorola + GrapheneOS, you could start complaining to banks and other apps that don't support GrapheneOS :-). If enough people did that, maybe those companies would consider it.
In the meantime, I'm currently using a low end Motorola moto g 5G 2023 which lets me turn off Play Services. Chrome and the Google Calendar don't run (really do need to find a replacement calendar), and I couldn't be happier. Motorola's interest in GrapheneOS makes me wonder if they did this on purpose.
Or if you need it now, Pixel + GrapheneOS. Pixel A-series are really affordable. E.g. the 9A is 350 Euro here, have great device security (Google Titan M2 hardware security processor, CPU that supports MTE, etc.), pretty good cameras/camera processing, etc.
I'm inclined towards keeping an ancient android for those apps that require it, and maybe something open for actual use. Or perhaps a crappy old android for android and a small non-android tablet/laptop for daily-driver stuff, which always works better as a computer anyway!
I'm also becoming open to using software that lies to google about what it is :) Google will treat us like sh*t, why shouldn't we reciprocate.
Dont get me wrong: I'd love the linux phone "rebel" community to be as large as the android one. But... i doubt it will be anytime soon? The problem is getting the hw investment done first.
Android ecosystem is equivalent to windows one: its open enough to sustain a large number of vendors and tinkerers.
I doubt this scare-campaign (OP link) will drive people constructively towards (effectively) innexistent linux alternatives. It's more likely to do nothing or push people towards iOS
I've been a happy user of several of those "effectively inexistent" devices for nearly two decades now and I'm typing this on one of them. Whether they "exist" for you or not is your choice.
I'm doubtful, I for a bit bought a lot of the Pine64 devices thinking about this eg. not just Android/iOS... but the lack of feature parity eg. missing drivers, lack of apps, old hardware.
That's the depressing part. I keep looking for something I could potential run the likes of kde mobile and maybe waydroid on, but there's really just nobody doing this. You are basically locked into a vendor kernel if it's even available.
People forget how much the mobile hardware industry relies on non-free infrastructure. Infrastructure developed by companies that make the standards. You really can't make a good open-source phone because you, pretty much, have to play by the rules of the companies in these consortiums.
It does. They obscure the usage of non-free hardware/firmware by not shipping it as part of the OS, but as a bundle on separate flash storage that is loaded into the OS by initrd. That blob is updatable as "firmware". The 100% free open-source is just marketing. It's just for the OS. A lot of the hardware and firmware is proprietary.
It's basically taking the blobs that would be normally shipped with the OS in a sensible manner, shuffle it around, then calling it "free" while the same blobs would still be there, just on different flash storage chips.
Because it's true, and I know what he said, I am not confused at all. Did you not read anything at all?
On the Librem laptop, the tampering is done by PureBoot and inject into /run/firmware. The other user was linking the stuff with the laptop.
*On a Librem 5, it is stored on a separate chip, then they read it with the initramfs, then mount it on top of the regular filesystem at /lib/firmware*.
For the record, the "jail" only exists so PureOS (or any other distro) does not have to distribute any blobs within its repositories or include them in their images - though distros still can if they choose to, like postmarketOS does for example. There's very little difference between a firmware blob that's stored in a peripheral's internal flash, NOR flash or OS rootfs when it comes to user freedom, in the end it gets executed the same way on the same hardware. Having a separate place for these blobs only simplifies their management and allows to put a clear distinction of what's free and what's not. The important thing is that, regardless of whether the "jail" is used or not, there's not a single blob that runs on the user's CPU within the user's system on the Librem 5, which isn't a unique property for a phone but rare nevertheless; the peripherals are a different thing and Purism has never claimed that there are no blobs there (in fact, the existence of e.g. the DDRC blob was being highlighted already in very early development).
(also, the NOR flash itself already had to be there because that's what TPS65982 boots from, so the "jail" is just using the 4MB storage that would otherwise remain mostly empty)
I'm tired of arguing with you. I see no effort from your side to come to some understanding or to clarify anything. Here's why.
> On the Librem laptop, the tampering is done by PureBoot
What do you mean by "tampering" here? Is uploading firmware to peripherals a "tampering"? Why is this a problem, compared with other devices? Does anybof those blobs run on the CPU? I don't understand what you are trying to say.
> If you don't know that the firmware for components/peripherals can either be
I do know. How is this relevant? I never denied that the device does have some proprietary blobs.
> I see no effort from your side to come to some understanding or to clarify anything.
Accusing me of your own sins.
> What do you mean by "tampering" here? Is uploading firmware to peripherals a "tampering"? Why is this a problem, compared with other devices? Does anybof those blobs run on the CPU? I don't understand what you are trying to say.
On the laptop, messing with the system memory (/run) and dumping firmware packages in there instead of just shipping it with the OS using a sensible approach like the linux-firmware package is a hack-job and nasty practice. And since it's messing with system memory, that's your "tampering" right there.
On the phone, once again, instead of using a normal, sensible approach like the linux-firmware package on desktop Linux or the vendor partition on Android, they just store the firmware in some chip, then have the OS (or more accurately, the initramfs) mount the content of the chip using overlayfs in /lib/firmware anyways. It's another implementation of the same hackjob. That, and they combine it with using peripherals whose firmware are stored inside of internal flash chips so the OS doesn't have to be shipped with firmware packages that it then needs to load into the peripherals.
What does this entire exercise do for freedom or openness? *Asbolutely nothing*. It's called shuffling the firmware storage around so you can market the OS as "blob free" when it's literally meaningless. If anything, it makes it harder to audit and figure out which firmware version is being run than if the firmware were to be shipped along with the OS.
---
To dumb it down a notch if you really do not understand what I am trying to say:
This makes about as much sense as if I were to take the SSD out of my laptop, destroy the M.2 socket, then advertise it as a "storage free and OS free laptop". To use the laptop, you must plug in external storage through the USB port and load up an OS. But hey, since there is no SSD or OS on the "main" part of the laptop, I am now qualified for some made up certification and can advertise my stuff as "freeing" the user from the shackles of the evil storage system and nastiness of having an OS. Definitely more "open" than other laptops.
> This makes about as much sense as if I were to take the SSD out of my laptop, destroy the M.2 socket, then advertise it as a "storage free and OS free laptop".
I like your comparison and I agree that it doesn't make much sense technically. However it also doesn't make the Librem 5 less secure or usable, too. Also, it brings people's attention to the problem of non-free software, which it seems you completely neglect. In short, this is more good than bad. See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25504641
> If anything, it makes it harder to audit and figure out which firmware version is being run than if the firmware were to be shipped along with the OS.
For fsflover, what Purism is doing is moving the non-auditable part of the OS onto a separate storage device so that they can claim that the OS is "Fully Auditable" and FSF certified even though the non-auditable and non-free part is mounted into the OS filesystem during boot. It's deceptive marketing and you're spreading that marketing.
Other open mobile OSes aren't trying to hide the fact that there needs to be proprietary components for hardware.
The only thing I concede is that the drivers are FOSS, which is why some performance and functionality is degraded compared to phones using non-free drivers. You could develop an AOSP phone using the same FOSS drivers as well, you'll just have the same issues.
> what Purism is doing is moving the non-auditable part of the OS onto a separate storage device so that they can claim that the OS is "Fully Auditable" and FSF certified even though the non-auditable and non-free part is mounted into the OS filesystem during boot.
Yup, that's part of it.
But remember, even if they didn't do it, there's still a matter of them by using components with internal flash storage for the firmware instead of shipping firmware with the OS and letting the OS upload them. Like that's not a hackjob like the /lib/firmware or /run/firmware stuff or anything, but it's not like it's any more "open" than any other system, if not being a bit more opague. Of course the marketing would still be deceptive then.
Depends where you draw the line. There is not a single non-free blob in the OS that runs there once the bootloader is up (unless you put some there by yourself, which you're of course free to do).
I think you misunderstand what the Purism Firmware Jail is. I don't blame you though. They seem to make it purposefully misleading. It doesn't isolate what runs in the OS. It just isolates the OS updates from the non-free blob updates. The OS still runs the non-free blobs. It just loads it from separate flash.
It is you who is confused here. The first link is completely irrelevant to the Librem 5, and the second one points to a thread where the actual information present has been written by me.
The only non-free piece of code executed by the ARM Cortex-A53 cluster on the Librem 5 is the SoC's mask ROM bootloader. Once the control is passed to u-boot/ATF there is not a single non-free blob that runs there. Some peripherals may need blobs to be uploaded onto them to work, such as DP, DDRC and one of the used Wi-Fi cards (handled by ROM/u-boot/Linux respectively), while others boot from their own internal memories. Not all of those firmwares are non-free, but most are.
In the end, as I said earlier, the assessment depends on where you draw the line. I happen to draw it at the main CPU and the blobs that need to run within the user-controlled OS, which are unacceptable for me and which aren't present on the Librem 5.
Ah. I see. So the blobs are loaded into the separate microprocessors. Either way, it's the same as pretty much any modern phone, where the modem (and other secondary processors) are running some proprietary firmware and is communicating with the OS processor.
I don't see how it's different from running a free open-source ASOP OS. On the mainstream Android devices, the wireless hardware is also isolated and communication is done via IOMMU.
There's some debate as to whether using the USB stack for communication to the modem in the Librem 5 is less secure than IOMMU as well.
Pretty much any modern phone is also full of blobs that run on the main CPU to ensure basic functionality, with only a handful of exceptions. Just consider how many features stop working or get severely degraded on various phones when you use a clean AOSP build on them (provided that you can do it at all in the first place). Android's driver infrastructure effectively encourages non-free blobs in "vendor" partitions, and many things are purposely moved from the GPLv2 kernel to the userspace so they don't have to be copylefted. If you want to run a non-Android OS on these devices you either have to fill the gaps yourself or use these blobs through compatibility layers.
> at that point you still are trusting external communication to those devices with their proprietary blobs
Just as you do with any kind of peripheral, whether it implements what it's doing purely in hardware or with an embedded microcontroller.
> There's some debate as to whether the USB stack for communication to the modem is less secure than IOMMU as well.
You can have "some debate" on absolutely anything, but that doesn't yet mean it makes any sense. You have communication protocols on top of IOMMUs as well which are subject to exactly the same security considerations as potential exploits in the USB stack, so whatever debate you're referring to is unlikely to be held in good faith. I wonder why you mention it unprompted, as it's fairly off-topic here.
> Just consider how many features stop working or get severely degraded on various phones when you use a clean AOSP build on them.
That's mainly because of device trees. The firmware also isn't distributed via separate flash storage on the device, but I don't consider that making a difference. It's still proprietary firmware running on proprietary hardware. On Qualcomm-based Pixel devices, cellular, WiFi, Bluetooth, and GNSS are all isolated and sandboxed.
> It's also interesting that you mention it unprompted, as it's fairly off-topic here
A primary reason people complain about proprietary blobs is security. People claim that the Librem 5 is more open and secure, but it still uses the same proprietary modules as a Pixel running GrapheneOS. Does Librem 5 have signature checks for the firmware and a tamper-proof bootloader to load the firmware and OS, or can someone sell you a compromised Librem 5?
Is it more free, open, and secure than a Pixel running Android? Because, the only difference I'm seeing is how the firmware is stored and Google Play Services. And with GrapheneOS, only how the firmware is stored. Everything else points to a more insecure system with Librem 5.
Huh? The device tree is the one thing trivially recoverable from the blob. I'm talking about drivers, the same kind as when you install, let's say, the non-free Nvidia driver on a PC. They run as part of the OS and handle various stuff, most commonly comms like VoLTE/VoWiFi, but often also camera ISPs, GPUs, fingerprint readers etc.
> are all isolated and sandboxed
So isolated that you can break them by repartitioning your eMMC/UFS.
> A primary reason people complain about proprietary blobs is security.
The primary reason I care about blobs is freedom and practical aspects that come out of it. Dealing with blobs is always a PITA and severely limits what you can do with the hardware. The peripherals would be nice to have freed, but it's the main CPU and storage that is supposed to be my (the user's) domain and only mine. My Librem 5 came with a GNU/Linux distro on it, but if I wanted to port, say, FreeBSD to it there's all I need to be able to it. I can't do that with an AOSP device fed with blobs from the "vendor" image, at least not without spending years on reverse engineering.
The Librem 5 is one of the handful phones out there that make it this easy. It is also the only one I'm aware about that's still being sold where you have the hardware ECAD and MCAD designs available - and not just to look at, but published on a free license. I think it has earned its bragging rights when it comes to freedom and openness.
> can someone sell you a compromised Librem 5?
Of course, just like any other PC. You want to reflash it before use, obviously.
The SoC supports High Assurance Boot, you can burn your key into its efuses and have it only ever accept software that's cryptographically signed by you.
I see. So it is better in the sense that the drivers are open-source. Though the drivers in Android/GrapheneOS are not open-source, I believe the drivers are also isolated from full kernel-level access.
But it still brings the point that you can't make a phone without proprietary chips and firmware from the mobile industry giants.
> You want to reflash it before use, obviously.
I think that is non-obvious to the majority of users buying a phone.
> The SoC supports High Assurance Boot, you can burn your key into its efuses and have it only ever accept software that's cryptographically signed by you.
An important consideration for consumers is that their data is secure if they lose their phone. Without a secure boot process by default, that's a hard sell for the common masses.
The real question is whether it affects me as a user. The RF spectrum used by cellular networks is highly regulated, so I wouldn't be able to use it freely either way. The PC keyboard I type on right now most likely has some kind of microcontroller running some code in it, but it's of little consequence to me whether it's free or not. I do care about what runs on *my* system though, as that has tangible implications, and I care about it the same way whether it's my laptop or my phone.
> that is non-obvious to the majority of users
Yes, and the consequences of that can be seen in TFA - locking things down due to ill-defined security concerns. Why not go a bit further - the most secure device is the one you can't use to do anything at all.
On a side note, app attestation is already unironically getting us there - you have to either accept that you have no control over "your" device or not be able to use it to interface with the world. For me, any platform that allows applications to attest the environment they run in is insecure by design, as it can be exploited against me.
> An important consideration for consumers is that their data is secure if they lose their phone
Well, it's a good thing that PureOS is LUKS-encrypted by default then. It even has a smartcard reader, so key storage can be decoupled from the phone's hardware.
> Why not go a bit further - the most secure device is the one you can't use to do anything at all.
That's not far off a reasonable criticism of Purism's security model, that a device so wholly compromised it requires one to activate all physical kill switches to disable the hardware in order to so much as safely enter one's device PIN (per Purism's own site content), that it's no longer useful.
Everyone has to make their own trade-offs, but for me that's a model so questionable that its utility value rapidly approaches zero.
Citing an article [0], a post[1] on the site states, "Security researchers over the years have discovered ways to detect what you are typing on the screen simply by looking at variations in the accelerometer." (Infomercial-esque strikethrough not retained here.)
Purism's solution, apparently, is hardware switches. As I understand it, the accelerometer isn't disabled via hardware switches unless all hardware switches are disabled, as there is no discrete accelerometer switch: "To trigger Lockdown Mode, just switch all three kill switches off. When in Lockdown Mode, in addition to powering off the cameras, microphone, WiFi, Bluetooth and cellular baseband we also cut power to GNSS, IMU, and ambient light and proximity sensors."[1]
I don't care much about hardware kill switches myself - but many people clearly do. I've seen it when I was involved in the Neo900 project, I've seen it in discussions about the Librem 5 and PinePhone, I've seen it in reactions when Purism has released a tablet that lacked them. I guess it's because, unlike software, they're easy to understand and easy to trust. Most people don't understand or particularly trust software, for various reasons. Even with Android's security model, I don't think a regular user trusts that Google Play Services that run on their phone always do what they told them to, so they often long for something tangible that would give them a peace of mind. Hardware switches do that.
There's a matter of the modem being a whole separate device that's not really under the user control too. The only way to be sure that it's actually off is to not give it access to power. You can trust your OS, but the modem could still do its own thing regardless of what you asked it to, so I can get that too.
> The Purism model increasingly looks fatally flawed for anyone who doesn't have a very particular and narrowly defined threat model: one who trusts all software they run from the kernel to their applications completely, trusts their hardware completely, yet for [reasons] somehow fully mistrusts the sum total of the device at very specific, limited, and irregular intervals.
The Librem 5 is a general purpose computer that you can run whatever you want to on. I have no reason to distrust the GNU/Linux distribution that runs on it, but I could very well run Android, perhaps even with Play Services, on it if I had to for some reason, just like I used to boot into Windows on my PC many years ago. If I wanted to make sure that it won't access the radios or sensors while I do so, the switches would indeed not just be helpful, but effectively effortless.
The "lockdown mode" in particular is an answer to a UX issue. People want to have switches for various things, but if you just gave them all they ask for you'd end up with nothing but tons of switches around the screen. I believe the main motivation for the lockdown mode was squeezing the control over GNSS in when it was decided to use at most three switches, and the sensors then followed as adding them there could be done almost for free. You could do the thing PinePhone did, with plenty of tiny inaccessible switches behind its back cover; Purism opted for a limited amount of easily accessible switches, and I'm actually glad they did (it happened long before I got involved), because...
> Per Purism, it's perfectly usable in the same way any Linux slab with no radios or sensors of any kind is perfectly usable, yes, but that's stretching things in practical terms for a phone, and it's all very divorced from the reality of what most people expect from their phones.
I said that I personally don't care about the switches, but I also have to say that I surprised myself and ended up using them quite a lot. Not the mic/cam one, this one stays basically unused, but I'm using the cellular and Wi-Fi ones regularly - they're just super convenient. Whenever I want to save power or not be bothered by anything, I toggle the switches. If I had to unlock the phone and swipe through some menus, I probably wouldn't bother most of the time, but I don't have to, so I do. I used to be completely indifferent to these switches, but they ended up being really nice to have when I actually started using the phone. Let's not pretend that having an airplane mode option on a phone makes it a "slab with no radios", there are contexts where you do want to disable some things and continue to use the others.
> Still, it's entertaining. The marketing, the switches, the sweeping technical proclamations and bold self-assessments of high corporate ethics.
I don't see anything wrong in Purism providing what people have often requested. This is not exactly a kind of device that will just market itself, the more niches it can serve and differentiators it can tuck in without diminishing other aspects of the device the easier it will be to sell. I don't think the Librem 5 project would be economically viable if it only ever targeted people interested in Linux. Kill switches, modularity, smart card reader, replaceable battery, separate GNSS module, audio jack etc. are all attempts to extend its appeal and serve a yet another niche, as a device like this would never be able to compete on thinness or specs with what's offered mainstream. It makes perfect sense to me. Some of these things I enjoy, some I don't care about, but none bothers me.
> Beyond all that, installing packages from Debian stable on a mobile phone is a very enjoyable thing. I'm a former N900 and PinePhone user who's not opposed to making reasonable compromises for significant upsides, and would love a truly viable and fully open Linux phone that can run a variety of distros, but I remain unconvinced that the Librem 5 is that device.
I'm a former Neo Freerunner and N900 user, and a current Librem 5 user (with a PinePhone around too, but I already had a Librem 5 when I got it so I barely ever used it). Installing Debian packages is the only way I know how to use a smartphone. Well, okay, I used opkg in the past too :) I got involved in the project because it was clear to me that this was the device worthy of being the successor of my N900 and I'm happy with it and proud of what we, both Purism and the wider community, managed to achieve with it. In fact, I'm starting to get worried about it aging with no viable successor in sight. It's still fine today, but the arrow of time only points one way.
>> An important consideration for consumers is that their data is secure if they lose their phone
> Well, it's a good thing that PureOS is LUKS-encrypted by default then.
My bad, I meant leave their phone unattended. Wherein someone can compromise the device from boot, so that when unlocked, the device is fully compromised.
You don't have to lock things down to solve that either - see the measured boot process with Librem Key for an example.
(that said, this is a completely different threat vector that I doubt the common masses actually care about; and if I really had to choose between openness and evil-maid resistance, I'd choose the former)
I think the common masses just expect it in the first place. If you told someone that leaving their phone unattended could lead them to getting their data stolen, they would probably be surprised. I know this isn't a surprise to the HN crowd, but it is for regular people.
I would also guess that the common masses would choose the opposite as shown by them choosing convenience over openness. It's convenient to not have a separate key to prevent evil-maid attacks.
To be frank, I'm tired of this security theater. Yes, let's lock things down to prevent evil-maid attacks and bring in the technological dystopia in the process, who cares that the same evil maid could put your finger onto the fingerprint sensor and unlock the phone while you sleep without ever fiddling with the bootloader.
"The masses" used to use completely unencrypted devices for decades. That doesn't mean they don't deserve security, but it's up to us, the technologically savvy ones, to determine how to implement it and which trade-offs are worth making to provide it. The term "security" only ever has any meaning when paired with a threat model, and some threats are more plausible than others. Some people will absolutely require proper evil-maid resistance, some wouldn't care the slightest. The common masses would be equally surprised if you told them that they can't change the boot animation on their phone without preventing access to their bank app, so go figure.
I'm pretty sure that most of the actual evil-maids out there are phone owner's partners that they tend to share their bed with at night.
And yes, I don't think those are the only two available choices either. I already mentioned not just one, but two other ones above. They have some tradeoffs, but so does anything. Personally I'd choose a slightly less convenient option over a tech dystopia without second thoughts, but not everyone is tech savvy enough to even recognize the tradeoffs being made, and ultimately in the vast majority of cases it's not the users who make that choice, but Google and Apple.
> You can have "some debate" on absolutely anything, but that doesn't yet mean it makes any sense.
Sure, but from the fact that anything can be debated it does not follow that any given debate is nonsensical, which is kind of what you did there.
> ...whatever debate you're referring to is unlikely to be held in good faith.
I don't know which is odder, that assertion, or the notion that two completely different security models can't be debated in good faith because they're effectively identical, because of hand-wavy reasons like, "You have communication protocols on top of IOMMUs as well which are subject to exactly the same security considerations as potential exploits in the USB stack..."
Certainly there's some kind of argument to be made that the Librem 5 is relevant to this post as its adherents see it as a viable alternative to iOS and/or Android-based devices. I disagree, but everyone's willing to make different compromises and that's fair.
I only mention that because a contingent of voices as high in volume as they are few in number endlessly shoehorning the Librem 5 into numerous threads no matter how much of a non-sequitur it takes, has me suddenly paying more attention these days to what's coming from the Purism camp. The more I do the more disingenuous the rhetoric seems.
It may just be a coincidence, but for a project with such a fraught history and tarnished reputation, it doesn't do anything to increase my trust in it.
I explained in the other comment why I thing that GNU/Linux phones are relevant, where I posted. You can discuss my arguments, but you can't just dismiss them all with a single general wording like this.
> a project with such a fraught history and tarnished reputation
Another unsubstantiated attack on a free software project from the GrapheneOS crowd, with no links or argumentation.
> I only mention that because a contingent of voices as high in volume as they are few in number endlessly shoehorning the Librem 5 into numerous threads no matter how much of a non-sequitur it takes, has me suddenly paying more attention these days to what's coming from the Purism camp. The more I do the more disingenuous the rhetoric seems.
It seems to be mainly fsflover. You can search “Librem 5” messages in HN and it’s flooded with messages by them.
At least I don't reply to every comment about GrapheneOS with "it's not as free as Librem 5 and you have to pay Google, and you have to rely on blobs running on the main CPU" etc. This is exactly what the GrapheneOS crowd is doing with my comments.
I have to admit that I had a kind of knee-jerk reaction there, as this "debate" is very often brought up in FUD pieces without much substance behind it.
