Hard, Not Soft, Kill Switches

Post by chadzawistowski » Mon, Sep 28, 2015, 6:59 PM UTC

beeboop wrote: post #59

toothbrush wrote: post #2

Great! 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 don't really feel like the librem laptops offer much value when built using a processor with IME. It's offering a mostly open source laptop, but still has a massive gaping backdoor for someone to log your every keystroke and get every bit of your data - even if the laptop is off or your harddrive is encrypted (source: http://libreboot.org/faq/#intel ) I am more excited in the continued development of the Novena lap…

Freescale's ARM processors are quite open, and getting better all the time! I'm looking forwards to their i.MX7 line.

Post by leoedin » Tue, Sep 29, 2015, 10:23 AM UTC

robryk wrote: post #54

leoedin wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This article does leave me slightly confused. Both these additions seem to be completely done after the fact. Why would you solder wires to 1 side of the pads for the pulldown resistors (suggesting that when the motherboard was designed it was intended to always have enabled WiFi) rather than designing a proper switch (not very many components!) into the board to start with? It all sort of suggests that they didn't a…

> It probably costs a lot more than $250,000 to develop a laptop from scratch (...) Novena[1] had a total budget of ~750k$. It was done from scratch, with some nonstandard (and somewhat expensive) components (e.g. an fpga; it had a software defined radio included too, though it was a mostly-off-the-shelf-one). [1] https://www.crowdsupply.com/sutajio-kosagi/novena

Novena's a pretty amazing project, but it's not nearly as polished as this purism laptop appears to be. It's (intentionally) a hacker friendly box with lots of space and less integration than a normal laptop. It even uses a RC hobbyist style battery. Novena is a labour of love driven by a particularly skilled person.

To design and mass produce a laptop as slim and well integrated as the Purism laptop is significantly more work. To do so having never produced a laptop before would cost even more so. $250,000 really is a small amount of money when you're trying to mass produce cutting edge consumer electronics.

Of course they may (almost certainly do) have other sources of investment.

Re: Hard, Not Soft, Kill Switches

Re: Hard, Not Soft, Kill Switches