241–250 of 257 posts
The remarkable is more open than usual and that's great. That being said, if your priorities are openness, you should look at Onyx or Likebook devices, they run android and you can root them. That alone is leagues above anything in the Remarkable. They are cheaper with better screens and more powerful processors, too.
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Well the reMarkable isn't an eBook reader. That is something it can do, but it's more aimed at note taking. You also have root access out of box, which is not something that eBook readers give you.
A lot of eReaders nowadays have Wacom touchscreens, run android, and have an unlocked bootloader. Unless you limit yourself to mainstream Western eReaders, it's not really the case anymore.
Also, are these devices properly GPL compliant?
Having used the reMarkable 1 tablet for over a year now, the hackability is so refreshing to have in a consumer device. The tablet runs Linux and you can SSH into with root access. The hacking community is quite active, one frequently asked question is how to get and run custom software on the device. There's the Entware[0] package repository for running ARMv7 software on the tablet. Recently a community maintained p…
What? That's amazing. I agree with you, so refreshing.
A pity that three friends tried the latest one and all decided to return it. Very dissatisfied with the product overall.
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A lot of eReaders nowadays have Wacom touchscreens, run android, and have an unlocked bootloader. Unless you limit yourself to mainstream Western eReaders, it's not really the case anymore.
Wacom touchscreen or pen input? I don't know of any eReaders that have pen input. Also, are these devices properly GPL compliant?
I haven't inquired about GPL compliance.
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A lot of eReaders nowadays have Wacom touchscreens, run android, and have an unlocked bootloader. Unless you limit yourself to mainstream Western eReaders, it's not really the case anymore.
What are some models you recommend?
The remarkable is more open than usual and that's great. That being said, if your priorities are openness, you should look at Onyx or Likebook devices, they run android and you can root them. That alone is leagues above anything in the Remarkable. They are cheaper with better screens and more powerful processors, too.
You already have root access to the reMarkable devices. Plus they are GPL compliant, so you have access to source for most of the software.
As for GPL compliance, that really only means anything for the kernel. For the rest of the software, they can easily be closed sourced and not provided. Not that they necessarily wouldn't be, but I'd still rather have an Android device with an unlocked bootloader and no kernel sources.
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What do you mean by this? Are you asking what bootloader it uses?
Specifically, whether it's locked in any way, preventing alternative operating systems.
[1] https://github.com/ddvk/remarkable-uuuflash [2] https://github.com/ddvk/remarkable2-recovery
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Thank you for that tip. Yes, I was blocking all connections to 443 on my firewall but I didn't realize that clients like those had such long timeout periods. Those connections should now be explicitly refused.
Out of curiosity, why do you blocks HTTPS when you otherwise seem very privacy conscious?
There's also a problem with how certificate authorities are run which I strongly disagree with. People trust them because corporations trust them, which is already bad, because those same corporations are in-bed with NSA and probably other "security" agencies (which are hard to tell apart from criminal syndicates). If we moved to an HTTPS-only world (Universe, please forbid) there would be an absolute CA racket, and any website could be censored by having the CA revoking its certificate. I fear very much for that possibility, and I completely disagree with the direction that corporate browsers are taking by moving towards HTTPS-only, and especially false messaging like when Chrome reports websites as "non-secure". Firefox, which along with Mozilla is almost entirely funded with Google dollars, is going the same direction.
Another problem is if an ISP is tampering with a customer's connection, that is a social problem and not a technical one. Sure, some technical measures may mitigate that from happening, but ultimately the problem is social and users of that network should stop using it, or start tunneling their traffic some other way.
I provide HTTPS as a convenience for people downloading my software who otherwise wouldn't check my PGP sigs. Browsers like Chrome have false messaging claiming sites are "not secure" and techno-illiterate users don't understand what that really means, and they complained, so I listened but still advise everyone to check the signatures anyway.
Another major reason is that I don't care to support HTTPS for the rest of my life on my personal website. If I were to start supporting it, then everyone will start linking to the HTTPS version, then I could never get rid of that because redirecting back to HTTP requires HTTPS. I never collect any kind of data through my website--there are no form submissions, it's read-only and purely serves .html pages (not even server-side rendering). There's not really a purpose to a secure connection for that.
This only scratches the surface of these problems. I won't even get into how certificate authorities assign, then revoke, bogus certificates all the time--but that happens more than they will ever admit to. If you do a search for that, even just on Ars Technica, you'll find a lot of examples.
My biggest complaints may be summarized as, "we need completely distributed human-to-human trust without any corporate authorities."
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Majority of consumer facing products collect usage analytics, otherwise they don’t know how to improve the product.
> otherwise they don’t know how to improve the product. Or, you know, they could just ask customers how the product is working for them. Automated data collection is a huge, huge problem and stampedes over civil liberties. We ought to control our computers, and not be controlled by them, which is why I vigorously oppose all non-free (proprietary, non libre) software.