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Comment by walrus01 | Hacker News Reader

I don't see any specs on the wifi card there. Assuming it's an Intel 802.11ac dual band minipci-express interface, (likely 2x2, not 3x3), which has decent linux kernel driver support. But if it's not specified it could be a lot worse. There's a shocking number of "new" laptops that still ship with 2.4 GHz only, 1x1 (SISO) wifi cards, because they're cheap as hell.

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They say on their website "Atheros 802.11n w/ Two Antenna"

Wi-fi cards are actually a huge issue if you are concerned about privacy. You have no idea what the firmware is doing, and it has access to your entire memory through the pcie interface, and the internet at the same time.

802.11n

in the year 2018

ewwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww.................

I don't see how using a Qualcomm (Atheros) 802.11n chipset is any better than an Intel chipset card, developers do NOT get access to the code that's running its firmware. Same as Intel.

If you look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_open-source_wire... you can see that a few of the atheros chipsets have both OSS firmware and OSS drivers, the intel ones only seem to have OSS drivers. Perhaps they are using one of those that have the OSS firmware/drivers combination?

It really doesn't matter, the actual RF baseband inside the chip is still closed source. Atheros never released it for any model. The firmware interface to the OS driver, yes, but not what's going on under the hood.

It's still better than a proprietery firmware though, right? The baseband does not have as deep access to the system (like DMA), so having the firmware be OSS should at least be better than the alternative.

I do not see the logic in having a M.2 NVME SSD attached to the pci-express bus, which certainly has a totally closed source binary in its onboard controller... That's in the laptop, and it's OK? It has access to every disk read/write operation and manages a small RAM cache for the SSD flash, organizes the write wear leveling algorithm, etc.

But they have to go with some weird, ancient 802.11n card instead of a modern 802.11ac 3x3 MIMO, dual band Intel chipset card, because they don't like the binary blob in the ROM of the Intel minipci-express card?

At some point in time you have to trust the devices you're attaching to the pci-express bus in an x86-64 system or you won't have any useful functionality left.

I agree in principle, but there is also something to be said for not having a closed system being able to talk both to a wireless network and have DMA.

Anyway, the more open components the system the better, and if this shows there is an interest for an more open system, the next one might be more open than this.

The problem is that many wifi adapters require loading a binary blob at initialization time. "Burnt-in" firmware is practically the same as hardware, which you already trust since you bought it.

Not so much for the firmware blobs the vendor maintains in the "linux-firmware" kernel.org repository and that are absolutely required for the device to function.

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