The state of Libre Hardware

The state of Libre Hardware

[Taiidan]

This is kind of short notice but I believe there should be a mention of 
the current state of libre hardware and the OEM's continual revoking of 
computing freedom.

Up until recently your computer was truly yours, only recently have both 
x86_64 OEM's Intel and AMD added black box supervisor processors and 
hardware level code signing enforcement as a backdoor and to currently 
prevent you from modifying your computers firmware and in the future 
prevent you from installing linux on the average computer entirely; 
Microsofts "Secure" boot V2.0 has conveniently removed the requirement 
that users be allowed to disable it or add their own keys.
I imagine that eventually consumer grade computers will prevent users 
from installing the operating system of their choice and one would have 
to buy an expensive "business" PC to install linux.


As of now there is only one high performance owner controlled CPU arch 
(POWER) and only one modern high performance system that is owner 
controlled with libre firmware (Raptor's TALOS 2).

AMD's Opteron socket G34/C32 is the last owner controlled x86_64 
platform, while you can buy a KGPE-D16/KCMA-D8 and install libre 
firmware for the board and BMC the platform is showing its age and is 
significantly slower than the OpenPOWER9 TALOS 2.


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Re: The state of Libre Hardware

[Patrick Anderson]

We can solve this by learning how to share the land and tools needed
to make all we need.

The GNU GPL speaks of User Freedom, but this is only for bits.

Sharing space and atoms seems impossible, but really it isn't.

Once we find a better way to share the Means of Production in the
physical realm, we will no longer need to beg other owners because we
will then be at the helm of production with nobody to stand in our
way.

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Re: The state of Libre Hardware

[Adonay Felipe Nogueira]

> The GNU GPL speaks of User Freedom, but this is only for bits.

Indeed I agree, however the articles in GNU.org (search for "hardware
design") point out that the GPL is *the best* for licensinghardware
designs. The article also points out that there is no "free hardware"
because one can't really exercise the essential freedoms for things
which are already "printed out", one can only do so with the hardware
design.

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Re: The state of Libre Hardware

[D. Joe]

On Wed, Mar 07, 2018 at 04:55:30PM -0500, Taiidan@gmx.com wrote:

> Up until recently your computer was truly yours, only recently have both
> x86_64 OEM's Intel and AMD added black box supervisor processors and
> hardware level code signing enforcement as a backdoor and to currently
> prevent you from modifying your computers firmware and in the future prevent
> you from installing linux on the average computer entirely

The extent to which this seems new speaks to how extensively one has been
ignoring the rise of computing machines for which this sort of lock-down has
been endemic: ARM-based mobile devices.  It applies to most ARM devices--
whether tablet or "phone", but particularly the latter--for which the
"radio" processor serves the role in which the Intel Management engine and
its AMD counterparts serves on that hardware: Running nonfree binary blobs
with sufficient control to compromise the freedom and security of anything
on the "application" processor.

It's hard for me not to wonder where we might be in fighting this sort of
freedom threat had we not spent the time of their rise holed up in the
little corner of decent hardware freedom we had left on x86.

Retreating even further to POWER architecture might be satisfying from a
purity perspective, and far be it from me to dissuade anyone with the time
and money to pursue that from doing so, but putting too many of our eggs in
that basket (now to thoroughly mix my metaphors) is a further march down the
road towards absolutely software freedom but for an ever more marginal
few.[1]

(See also: The broad adoption of MIPS-based laptops like the Lemote
Yeelong[2])

-- 
D. Joe

[1] Or, maybe, instead of marginal, privileged. 
[2] Not really, this is purely tongue-in-cheek.


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Re: The state of Libre Hardware

[Alexander Stephen Thomas Ross]

Despite all the woe with mainstream hardware, There is hope in new efforts:

Exciting India risc cpu + in a card: http://libre-riscv.org/shakti/m_class/

Fosdem video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zF_qelGUgU

Mailing list thread starts here and goes on for the next months :)
http://lists.phcomp.co.uk/pipermail/arm-netbook/2017-November/thread.html

mentioned this is eoma68 crowdfund update:
https://www.crowdsupply.com/eoma68/micro-desktop/updates/fosdem-2018-shakti-project-tape-out-nearly-done-2-7-5-eoma68-a20-pcbs

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Re: The state of Libre Hardware

[Adonay Felipe Nogueira]

> Fosdem video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zF_qelGUgU

I found out that FOSDEM has an independent video server, which already
has the video ([1]).

Besides, this is good because it avoids mass centralization ([2][3]),
mistreatment of end-user ([4]) and automatic execution of vulnerable
non-free software ([5]).

Additionally, I would recommend people to make torrents of these talks
and seed the torrents, or to contribute seeding already-existing
torrents of these. I don't know if FOSDEM knows the advantages of
torrents for their load-balancing, but I think they should consider
doing torrents of their published videos. As of the writting of this
email message, I have made torrents for [2][3][5].

[1] <https://video.fosdem.org/2018/H.2215/designing_riscv64_soc.webm>.

[2]
<https://media.libreplanet.org/u/libreplanet/m/the-surreptitious-assault-on-privacy-security-and-freedom/>.

[3]
<http://cdn.media.ccc.de/congress/2015/webm-hd/32c3-7403-en-de-A_New_Kid_on_the_Block_webm-hd.webm>.

[4]
<https://downloads.softwarefreedom.org/2017/conference/0-keynote.webm>. Under
CC BY-SA 3.0 US, per
<https://softwarefreedom.org/events/2017/conference/video/>.

[5] <https:°mikegerwitz.com½018/01/Meltdown-Spectre-and-the-Web>.

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Re: The state of Libre Hardware

[Michael Rauch]

On 12.03.2018 17:00, Adonay Felipe Nogueira wrote:
> Additionally, I would recommend people to make torrents of these talks
> and seed the torrents, or to contribute seeding already-existing
> torrents of these. ...

relating to FOSDEM, videos and torrents: there was an interesting talk 
[1] at FOSDEM about the PeerTube [2] software.

PeerTube is a federated video streaming platform, powered by ActivityPub 
and WebTorrent. AGPL licensed.

Based on the README on github, it's still alpha, but maybe somebody 
wants to give it a go already.

1: https://fosdem.org/2018/schedule/event/peertube/

2: https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube

cheers,
Michael

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Re: The state of Libre Hardware

[Alexander Stephen Thomas Ross]

On 12/03/18 16:00, Adonay Felipe Nogueira wrote:
>> Fosdem video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zF_qelGUgU
> 
> I found out that FOSDEM has an independent video server, which already
> has the video ([1]).
> 
> Besides, this is good because it avoids mass centralization ([2][3]),
> mistreatment of end-user ([4]) and automatic execution of vulnerable
> non-free software ([5]).

I know, i spent ages finding the video on there server and it looks like
i didn’t paste it into my post! arrgh. thx for posting a link :)

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Re: The state of Libre Hardware

[Adonay Felipe Nogueira]

> i didn’t paste it into my post! arrgh. thx for posting a link :)

You're welcome! :D

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Re: The state of Libre Hardware

[Adonay Felipe Nogueira]

Note: Continuing my last message.

I run a temporary HTTP server that has the torrent files I share via
torrent (using peer-to-peer DHT and PEX, that is: no trackers).

The files are available at [1] --- or if you don't like to remember the
port number, use [2], although [1] is faster.

I could probably just post the magnet links here, but the torrents might
change in the future. I'm still thinking if I should make a news feed
for people to watch for changes in the torrent files, but thankfully,
since I avoid unauthorized client-side scripting in the guest's web
browser, the content of the page is seem as static HTML for most web
browsers, so it's easy for guests to make use of a tool to check for
changes in the web pages.

[1] <http://adfeno.mooo.com:8080/P%C3%BAblico/Semeando/Torrents>.

[2] <http://adonayfn.mooo.com/P%C3%BAblico/Semeando/Torrents>.

-- 
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- "WhatsApp"? Ele não é livre. Por favor, veja formas de se comunicar
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Re: The state of Libre Hardware

[Adonay Felipe Nogueira]

> torrent client, but none of them have started downloading yet.  Are

Hm... strange, the 51413 DHT port is open both in my computer's firewall
and in my router's.

> torrent client, but none of them have started downloading yet.  Are
> you sure that the tracker is working and/or that they are at least
> registered or being seeded via the DHT?

No trackers, sorry.

> I'd be very happy to help with seeding these, but I'm worried that the
> torrent files might not be working right, which is why I mention this.
> Let me know if there's anything I can do to help diagnose the issue.
> Thanks!

I'm speechless, all I can say for now is that we might need to wait.

I made data integrity verification/check using the torrent client's
function (the client is Transmission), and all is well.

I did notice that transmission-remote reports the status of things as
"Idle" if no peers are downloading that torrent from me, but
Transmission web interface reports these same items as "Seeding"
regardless. The web interface reports no error (in "Error" field for
each torrent).

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