Hard, Not Soft, Kill Switches
1–10 of 82 posts
Re: Hard, Not Soft, Kill Switches
#2Great! Small point though, i would be in favour of a separate Bluetooth and Wifi kill switch.
EDIT: They use i5 and i7 processors, which IIRC use black-box Intel microcode... Also, i wonder if they support Libreboot? My apologies if it turns out i cannot read. Otherwise they look quite nice. I'm excited to see more "alternatives" in the "free as in liberty" laptop space.
EDIT 2: Some more information here: https://www.crowdsupply.com/purism/librem-13
EDIT 3: At least they're up-front about what's Free and what's not: https://puri.sm/posts/purism-software-freedom-deconstructed/
Re: Hard, Not Soft, Kill Switches
#3Great! Small point though, i would be in favour of a separate Bluetooth and Wifi kill switch. EDIT: They use i5 and i7 processors, which IIRC use black-box Intel microcode... Also, i wonder if they support Libreboot? My apologies if it turns out i cannot read. Otherwise they look quite nice. I'm excited to see more "alternatives" in the "free as in liberty" laptop space. EDIT 2: Some more information here: https://ww…
> i would be in favour of a separate Bluetooth and Wifi kill switch.
that's what I thought as well.
About the microcode, this won't be fixed. But see the weekly updates on their blog[1] that states progress they make with the coreboot developers. Hopefully they can free the number one problem with intel chips[2] which is the Management Engine firmware.
[1] https://puri.sm/posts/weekly-update-on-librem-production-201...
Re: Hard, Not Soft, Kill Switches
#4Sometimes I wonder whether there is a webcam video of me in my bed, lit only by the laptop screen, you know... masturbating.
Re: Hard, Not Soft, Kill Switches
#5I used to have a laptop that when you pressed the function button to enable/disable the webcam would actually install/uninstall the webcam drivers. I found it more hilarious than anything.
Re: Hard, Not Soft, Kill Switches
#6I especially like to see this laptop because it's the first that I know of that can effectively turn off the microphone (for the webcam we already have stickers so this is less of an advantage, of course still laudable).
Though I think these hardware kill switches should not be optional. A product that praises itself for privacy and security should have this as a base feature instead of asking $89,- separately for it.
Re: Hard, Not Soft, Kill Switches
#7Great! Small point though, i would be in favour of a separate Bluetooth and Wifi kill switch. EDIT: They use i5 and i7 processors, which IIRC use black-box Intel microcode... Also, i wonder if they support Libreboot? My apologies if it turns out i cannot read. Otherwise they look quite nice. I'm excited to see more "alternatives" in the "free as in liberty" laptop space. EDIT 2: Some more information here: https://ww…
> i would be in favour of a separate Bluetooth and Wifi kill switch. that's what I thought as well. About the microcode, this won't be fixed. But see the weekly updates on their blog[1] that states progress they make with the coreboot developers. Hopefully they can free the number one problem with intel chips[2] which is the Management Engine firmware. [1] https://puri.sm/posts/weekly-update-on-librem-production-201.…
Assuming they're running Intel Wireless chips (which is very likely), this is impossible because they are run on the same antennas by the same chip.
You can disable this in software by passing "bt_coex_active=N" to the iwlwifi kernel module, but of course, who knows if that's actually sufficient.
I'm pretty sure the situation with other vendors is similar or worse. Big vendors like Broadcom have terrible open source track records.
Re: Hard, Not Soft, Kill Switches
#8Ok, maybe I've been doing too much hardware development and more tinkering than the average guy, but this part here, to me, sounds way overblown:
> As you can see, it is not a trivial matter to
> manufacture these HKSes. A lot of research and
> hard work went into the effort.
And while the webcam/microphone switches will prevent the particular devices from working, I'm not so sure about the WiFi card and Bluetooth. The microphone surely is dead by cutting the single signal line and the webcam by cutting its power.
But there's no guarantee that the W_DISABLE# pins are honored with every firmware of every possible wifi module that could be inserted into that slot. What if W_DISABLE#, on the card, is only a gpio that is checked by the WiFi chip's firmware? It would have been safer to also cut the power there, too. Or at least to verify that W_DISABLE# cuts off power to the RF PAs (transmitter power amplifier) of WiFi and Bluetooth in a way that can't be circumvented.
Re: Hard, Not Soft, Kill Switches
#9This is how it should be done. I really hope manufacturers will start going back to physical hardware switches. I hate long-pressing buttons to switch things on or off, not knowing whether devices are really on or off, or being unable to tell the state of a switch/device just by touching it (without looking).
The physical dual-position sliding switch has a lot of advantages, and yet it has almost completely disappeared from the electronics/computing world. I'd like to see it back.
Re: Hard, Not Soft, Kill Switches
#10Ok, maybe I've been doing too much hardware development and more tinkering than the average guy, but this part here, to me, sounds way overblown: > As you can see, it is not a trivial matter to > manufacture these HKSes. A lot of research and > hard work went into the effort. I mean, compared to all the other things one has to get right to design a laptop computer, switching these few signals is indeed very, very tri…
It's even a bit worse when looking at it from a fail-safe point of view. To turn the bluetooth and wifi off, 3.3 Volt has to be put on the pins. Giving no power on the pins turns both devices on.