601–610 of 669 posts
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Everyone can develop their own personal leadership too instead of looking to others and judging leadership.
If that were true, the world would be a lot better than it is in general.
It doesn’t depend on external expression or validation.
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There aren't even any arm or x86 desktops that are completely blob free. There is some ridiculously expensive amd power hungry power9 thing that nothing will run on, and some of sifive's newer boards might qualify. Every arm at least has some soc blobs. And every x86 has something like ime. Going straight for a blob free phone seems like getting ahead of ourselves. How about we shoot for a completely free rpi usable…
Rockchip AFAIK doesn't have any. It boots with mainline u-boot, but it doesn't include any wifi or other radios.
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> It was exactly "Open source" that enabled Google to dominate the smartphone landscape. The financial interest may have preferred a licensing model, but either way, it was the financial interest that actually built a ton of this software. Linux isn't unpopular with businesses because of its license model. It is healthy because it found ways to plug into financial interest. The FSF will always push licensing models w…
This is the one big flaw I've seen in Stallman's philosophy on software. He's been thoroughly proven right I think about the dangers of closed-source (unmodifiable) software to user freedom. But I think his insistence that Free Software also needs to be freely redistributable with no payment to the author in order to be Free has greatly limited the resources available to build such software. The FSF will argue "you c…
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Why is eBPF a problem?
A lot of functionality of newer Android releases (Android/AOSP 13 and later) rely on eBPF [1] for both interception of process insights and sandboxing of processes. eBPF in a nutshell is a way to build kernel hooks, so that you can also disallow or intercept syscalls or kernel API calls that the Apps are executing behind the scenes. eBPF was introduced with Kernel 4.14 officially (but partly long before that). Most L…
Just an aside, but this is one of the major downsides of monolithic kernels, and a case where microkernels would have had more consumer friendly upsides.
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Do you think the same for using credit cards in general or is using the phone somehow worse?
Credit cards have become mainly a way for the banks and visa/mc to use the customer to strong arm money out of the business. Get 3% and rebate some to the customer. For the convenience. It’s kind of sad, really.
Ultimately, I don't think the most important challenge is in binary firmware blobs, but the software which people depend upon to run their lives. What does it matter if you can run a completely free software stack on your phone, if your bank software (or your required government ID, as is looking depressingly likely) requires you to run a Big Tech approved phone OS? Perhaps the FSF can't do much about that, but that…
The rest of the time, I will use a free phone.
All the apps that I will not be able to use any more? Doesn't matter. I am now old and grumpy enough to realise that phones are utterly evil and actually useless. Give me a camera, Google Maps (or better a non-Google alternative), Signal and a browser, and I don't need anything else.
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hahahahaha 2k for a phone that cannot last a day. yeah no. i d rather go for a redmi with postmarket os. it does not even have a blob free modem
That's their US made patriot phone, the regular less than half of that. Also, please read up on the concept of economies of scale. If you go with postmarketOS (good!), and don't want to touch anything that touched Purism, better avoid anything GTK (Phosh, GNOME Mobile and related apps). While Purism did not make a competitive phone, their investments into libre software went great and keep paying off.
Finally! It took the FSF long enough to catch up with the overwhelming usage of mobile devices, but it's better late than never. I like that this project is trying to tackle something much more challenging that can't be done with just software: reverse engineering device firmware and binary blobs, the pieces of software that actually make hardware components interface with an OS. Understanding how this stuff function…
I hate to complain, but I can't help but feel this is kind of impossible with the resources available to the people working on it. Reverse engineering a modern phone would take years and years of work from many people, and by the time you have it worked out, the phone is obsolete and very few people still use it. The Apple Silicon macbooks seem a good example. The M1 came out about 5 years ago now and with a whole pr…
Apple Silicon isn't a single SoC. They have support for the M1 and M2 lines across both Macbooks, the Mini, iMac and Studio.
It's the same thing with phones, isn't it? You're not starting over for each individual phone. First you get one device working which uses some popular chip, which is a large undertaking. But then all the other devices that use the same chip are nearly working and it's not a matter of starting over, it's a matter of mapping the couple of changes they made to the base design.
Meanwhile the chip designs themselves are incremental, so the 2026 device is really the 2023 device with a die shrink and a new feature.
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Use the website. I’ve never seen a bank where a mobile app is the only option for remote access. If my bank did that, I’d switch banks.
UBS bank mandates their "Secure Access" app as second factor even when logging in from a desktop. They used to allow the smart card reader for existing customers that had it as a work around for a few years but they disabled that. Also many websites are making it remarkably hard to not use the app if they even remotely sense you're not on an actual PC. FB and LinkedIn aren't banks but prime examples.