Re: [lp-ca-on] Respects Your Freedom hardware, has anyone bought some?

[Blaise Alleyne]

On 07/01/16 03:40 PM, Sergio Durigan Junior wrote:
> [...]As for computers, ThinkPenguin is not 100% free (proprietary BIOS) but
> it comes real close.  I've been thinking about buying one of them for a
> while now (and perhaps play with libreboot). 
> [...] There's BIOS, there's Intel AMT, and other nasty stuff under the hood.
> 

>From what I've been reading while looking into a new machine myself over the
past week, I'm not very optimistic that it's just a matter of developer
attention needed to get coreboot running on ThinkPenguin machines...

http://libreboot.org/faq/#intel

"It is extremely unlikely that any post-2008 Intel hardware will ever be
supported in libreboot, due to severe security and freedom issues; so severe,
that the libreboot project recommends avoiding all modern Intel hardware. If you
have an Intel based system affected by the problems described below, then you
should get rid of it as soon as possible."


This has been a huge source of debate around Purism, because the Purism project
seems to think they can throw a few devs at it and get coreboot running on their
Librem laptops in the next revision, but coreboot developers are really
skeptical of those claims because it's using modern Intel hardware.

http://libreboot.org/faq/#librem


The ThinkPenguin and Purism machines both come really close. Purism seems to
think they'll get all the way there, but others with experience think it's
unrealistic. Minifree (and Libiquity) are the only ones who've done 100% free.


The more I've read about this, the more I've gravitated away from ThinkPenguin
and Purism and am leaning towards the Libreboot X200 (or T400), e.g. this line
in particular sticks in my head from a coreboot dev:

"""
I’m a coreboot developer; I know how this business rolls. I can make your
firmware email me a daily digest of your passwords and Facebook activity, and
you wouldn’t even know about it. [...]

[The Purism project had] a graphic representation of the software stack. A green
square meant libre, while a white square meant closed. There was so much green
on the reverse pyramid of the graph, that it was too easy to miss the two or
three white squares at the base. They were the platform firmware. That’s the
part that emails me your passwords without any of the green dots above it being
aware.
"""
https://blogs.coreboot.org/blog/2015/02/23/the-truth-about-purism-why-librem-is-not-the-same-as-libre/