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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 21st, 2023

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  • FSF did not create Libreboot

    Indeed (as I said) they did not create it, they made a shittier version of it, called GNU boot. Or I guess maybe not “the FSF” but devs under their umbrella. I think Linux Libre would be a better example. Or all the crappy “FSF approved” distros listed on their website.

    it’s hard to create a chain of trust without trusting the hardware

    That’s true but that’s not really their stance. They trust the hardware and the software running on said device, as long as they don’t have access to the software. Microcode updates are an example of this. They don’t like microcode “blobs” in the kernel but trust the outdated vulnerable microcode running on their CPU.

    I would rather use a deblobbed device than wait for obscure security features that provide no real-world benefit to my use case.

    I would not. I would prefer not to get hacked by spectre type attack. I also don’t like broken virtualization on my CPU and don’t want my CPU to destroy itself by high voltage.

    But yes, I agree that to trust the software, we need to trust the hardware first. This also means that there is basically no “Respects Your Freedom” hardware. Every such hardware runs proprietary software which the user cannot see. And even if it ran no such software, it’s still just proprietary hardware, which we cannot study, create derivatives, etc. If I ran the FSF, I would acknowledge that there is nothing but grey area, instead of drawing an arbitrary line through the grey area.

    Going back to phones, I am just worried that the Librephone project will focus too much on moving the proprietary parts from software to the hardware instead of actually helping users to get more freedom.


  • TMP_NKcYUEoM7kXg4qYe@lemmy.worldtoLinux@lemmy.mlAntiviruses?
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    5 days ago

    Brodie Robertson made a video about malware which pretends to be a pdf but is actually just an executable with a .pdf file extension. So if you double click it, you get pwnd. I think some desktop environments ask you for confirmation before running such thing but I would not count on it.

    So we even have an example of Linux specific malware.



  • The issue is that for the FSF, what they call “software freedom” is their number one goal. So what’s likely to happen is that they create some kind of “deblobbed” firmware that breaks many features and security of the device, which Graphene OS will refuse to use.

    I hope this project will be useful but am worried that they’ll just make a shittier version of someone else’s work like they did with e.g. Libreboot.



  • I guess you can’t really convince the ones on the other side of the political spectrum. You only have a real chance to convince the “in the middle” people. But when doing so, it’s better not to give free munition to the opposing party to be more convincing than you.

    Also I am kinda hoping that it (not using hyperbolic labels and overall being “nice”) helps create a place where people can be nice to each other even when they don’t agree on politics.


  • Some politicians or activists unfortunately use hyperbole too frequently and sometimes even maliciously. It gets them attention but at the cost of deepening the trenches in the political discourse. Drew thought he’s doing the right thing by calling a fascist out, but realistically this will be remembered as “The woke activists are calling us fascists for saying that nobody should be killed for their opinion.” in the right wing circles. Where the term “woke” is basically the right wing equivalent term to the left’s “fascist”.




  • I am not knowledgeable enough to answer your question. But if it were an open standard, it would be more like Xorg than Wayland. There is only one X server implementation, just like there is only one systemd implementation.

    Here Gnome is kinda like the websites which only work with Chromium based browsers. “Everybody is using Chrome anyways, right?” In a sense it’s also not really systemd’s or Chromium’s fault, that some devs decided to only support their platform.