71–80 of 82 posts
I want hard buttons for power, audio, radio, and keys I type with. Not "smart" hard buttons either: simple, stupid, old approach to buttons or switches that just worked.
This is the first I've heard of Puri.sm. It seems like a very ambitious company. I'm not sure features like this are important enough to me to persuade my buying decision. However I love the idea of having another choice besides apple when it comes to hardware. I've just been really unhappy with everything else. I'm excited for another choice when looking for a high-end laptop!
I, too, welcome the existence of a company trying to compete based on preserving privacy and users' freedoms rather than invading it and spying on everything. Personally, I would consider having hardware switches to disable external sensors and wireless communications channels in a laptop to be a significant factor in a purchasing decision. Other things being equal, I would opt for such features, and I would be willi…
The problem of malware being remotely added to devices like routers and hard drive firmware can be stopped utterly by having a hard switch (or jumper) that disables the "write to flash" signal.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Devices that function when the power has been disconnected would be wonderful energy-saving devices.
These are signal pins, not power pins. The device is still receiving power when the switch is "off", all the switch does is provide a signal to the pins that tell it to disable itself.
This company states that privacy is very important to them. It's also to me. But now I'm wondering, what's the purpose of the killswitch besides having no wifi-connection for a certain period of time? I mean, when you switch back to enable wifi again, everything you did on your computer during 'airgap-time' is still there, waiting to be compromised by corps/govs? Isn't it? Please correct me if I'm wrong. I'm really c…
You could be booting off a USB running something like Privatix during the time you have wifi killed - so that system would be air gapped whenever it is running. But if you trust Privatix you don't really need a HW switch.
Many security conscious companies routinely collect cellphones and other devices during meetings etc. NSA aside things get compromised by regular malware all the time.
I've had a small thought in the past to setup a 'luxury' service to retrofit something similar on smartphones. You would still be screwed during an actual call, since the mic would have to be on.. but a kill switch would still provide a fair amount of damage control in the event of a compromise.
If you go the extra mile and implement a 'read-only' connection to software you could remove most of the hassle for users.
Imagine moving the switch to the on position also answering an incoming call if the phone is ringing. Then when you hang up the software can send a signal to move the physical switch to the off position (but make it physically impossible to move it to the on-position from software).
Complete with a tiny LED to alert the user the switch is on.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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. They are going to use coreboot, which is free but includes some binary blobs from Intel. I don't think you can boot any modern x86 without…
AFAIK the microcode updates aren't mandatory, you can use your computer without them and use the stock microcode (though that's also proprietary).
It would be cool if there was a fail safe switch that nuked the hard drive with microwaves or something crazy like that when it was pressed. That would be one laptop I'd buy.
Ok, 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…
To me it sounds like a practical decision. Go buy a USB wifi adaptor and plug and unplug it 100 times. Then tell me if the adaptor works correctly after that; the kernel driver is probably in some undefined state now. The reality is that the chip/firmware/driver combination is tested by turning the power on once and then making it pass a few benchmarks that reviewers like. Doing something new and exciting may or may…
IIRC I think one of the LinuxJournal guys reviewed a pre-production version of the Librem 13" and 15" models: http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/purism-librem-13-review http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/purism-librem-15-review
[..]The Librem 13 has a 13.3" 1920x1080 Matte IPS screen that I thought looked great. It is nice and bright and to my eyes looks better than the 1920x1080 IPS screen on my X240. [..]
[..] I'm used to the relatively weak speakers that tend to come with Thinkpads so I was pleasantly surprised at the volume from the Librem 13 speakers. Speaking of sound, I've gotten some questions about how quiet the laptop is. The laptop does have a fan and features vent holes along the bottom. It's kicked on while I've typed with it on my lap and while you can hear it a bit in a quiet room, to my ears it's pretty quiet. Let's put it this way, you can't hear it over my typing and certainly not if you were using the speakers at all. [..]
[..] It's a bit tricky to compare keyboards between the X200 and the two island keyboards but I definitely preferred the Librem 13 to the X240. When it came to the X200 and the Librem 13 I think it's more of a tie. I like the extra key travel of the X200 but the Librem 13 keyboard actually felt a bit crisper, especially when typing heavily with more force. [..]
[..] Honestly the biggest issue for me personally is the touchpad mouse. I'm just a trackpoint person, I can't help it. That said, at my day job I have a buckling spring keyboard with a trackpoint in the middle of it, but since my home setup uses a classic Model M I've sort of been trained to not reach for it and reach for the physical mouse instead (and for the most part I just stick to the keyboard and keyboard bindings anyway). If Purism can fix the issue with palm presses generating mouse events while typing (which the multi-touch driver is supposed to solve), I think the mouse will be fine. [..]
[..] The final hardware feature I want to cover is the hardware kill switches. This was a much-requested feature by the backers of the original Librem 15 and the Librem 13 has them as well. Unlike software-based kill switches or keyboard combos, these switches literally cut the power to the wireless and bluetooth in one case, and the webcam and microphone in the other. I honestly don't know of anyone else who offers a webcam/microphone kill switch like this. I tested the webcam kill switch myself and not only did the video output from Cheese go black, dmesg reported that the USB device was completely gone:
[ 626.880277] usb 2-5: USB disconnect, device number 3
and when I flipped the switch back on, the device reappeared: [..]
I would immediately order a Librem-15 if it had (as an option) a keyboard with a trackpoint with physical buttons and without the separate number block on the right, i.e. a centred keyboard.