Bought a Prison Laptop on eBay | Hacker News Reader

Bought a Prison Laptop on eBay

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186 pointsdgudkov44 comments

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1761548861896606014.html

Thank God. Twitter logged out is a piece of shit, and they are purposefully gimping the API to make nitter awful too. Fuck Twitter.

Hate the user more than the tool. I know the audience is there and you want impressions but Twitter was never meant for long form content like this. It’s a blog post tweeted in chunks. Probably it would reach far less people if it was posted on a niche personal blog so I can understand people doing it but I think it’s not a Twitter problem per se.

Twitter's long ass posts suck egg. Twitter threads should be readable. They were and they were fine and good. It was great having content broken up. It was great seeing reactions to individual sections.

It should not made impossible to see some's Twitter theads. Get in the sea.

> was great having content broken up.

Having each paragraph preemptively separated from its context was certainly great for entertainment, but maybe not so much for reasoned discussion.

On the contrary, Twitter's threads to me are one of the greatest enhancements to discussion we've ever had.

It's quite clear what specifically someone responds to with length-limited tweets. The discussion naturally expands into a tree of refining arguments. Where-as in most text mediums, there's no direct pointers telling us specifically what someone is referring to; it's implicit context we the reader have to infer. If the person even is making a targeted real reply in the first place, isn't just soapboxing.

The ability to direct arguments & contestations clearly is far advanced over regular text by the hypermedia form for Twitter. Its wild to me that we haven't rebuilt more discussion systems to generate structure.

It's not a blog post tweeted in chunks, it's post-as-you-progress, a conversation that others can follow... or not. I do it all the time, and so did Wenting here. Others will often give suggestions with things to try. Wenting has a blog in which describes completed projects: https://www.wentingzhang.com.

It's also weird how unappealing and bare it is. It's like they don't want new users. As someone who rarely clicks Twitter links and never logged in, I thought the first post was all there is to this, which certainly wouldn't entice me to sign up...

You can’t even view the tweet if you have iCloud private relay turned on

Nah it seems Elon only wants more crypto peddlers, agitprops and other sockpuppets that will gladly pay for "verified" status

It's better than showing the top replies like when you're logged in, which are usually a bunch of lobotomized blue checks saying the dumbest things imaginable

Justice Tech Solutions offers a version of this laptop that has the "Endless Justice" OS preinstalled. This is a derivative of the Endless Linux distro. What I found amusing about this (apart from the involuntarily dystopian name) is that it apparently has dozens of games preinstalled, so there are probably a few convicts playing solitaire in class, just like normal people do.

https://www.worldpossiblejustice.org/layer-1-securebooks/end...

I feel that 99% of the population that learned to use a PC in the 90s and 00s learned how to master the mouse via Solitaire!

That was why it was developed for

Thanks for that, I learned something today!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Solitaire

"According to Microsoft telemetry, Solitaire was among the three most-used Windows programs and FreeCell was seventh, ahead of Word and Microsoft Excel."

Damn! Throwback

At university I made some money on the side giving courses in HTML, Excel etc. One person that was mandated by an employer to follow such a course had extreme trouble using the mouse. I opened Solitaire and showed quickly how to click and drag. The person in question had to confess he also did not know how to play Solitaire.

From the Incarcerated Software Foundation.

With ReiserFS pre-installed!

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Comparison_of_fil...

In case anyone else was wondering why this would even exist, it's for education in rehabilitation programs: https://www.cdcr.ca.gov/insidecdcr/2022/08/18/secure-laptops...

"The laptops contain standard Microsoft Office applications, a link to the Division of Rehabilitative Programs (DRP) Learning Network, and pre-loaded approved bookmarks. This gives students access to Internet sites approved by academic instructors as appropriate for research."

In that case it would probably be good to issue to politicians - it might cut down on allegedly accidental leaks and would be of little immediate use to a thief who might "find" it on a train.

If this were issued to politicians and I saw it on a train, I'd think "wow, state secrets" and it'd immediately scream "high value" to me.

Then run them with only some variant of ChromeOS or similar on it.

Root FS is immutable, all content goes over a wireguard secured network connection. No network? No files.

"What do you mean you can't get in? It says here you're trying to access content just fine... You said you're where? Moscow? I'm sorry sir but we can't risk that."

And at least for the BIOS version I have (and the BIOS V06 available on the website), there is a default password.

Unfortunately no mention of lkwpeter, AMI_SW, or aLLy -- those would be my instinctive guesses. However, I'm puzzled that he didn't just try to clear the default password from the BIOS image before flashing it, or try a BIOS image from a different model with similar hardware; Apollo Lake SoC with an IT8987 is not exactly a rare combination --- Clevo W515PU uses that, for example.

Anyone else have guesses on what the OEM/ODM for this was? The APL09_MB_V10 identifier makes me lean towards LCFC/Compal, but the complete lack of component designators is odd, and Compal mobos are usually blue. Quanta and Wistron tend to go for green mobos, from what I've seen. Can't rule out Pegatron either.

Prison laptops are clear so the insides can be checked for threats, contraband, etc.

I wonder if they do the same with the source code.

The thread contains multiple tweets about how hard it was to remove the password prompt, so I'm guessing "yes."

That the bootloader is hard to bypass says nothing about whether the bureau of prisons has checked the source code. It seems to me unlikely they have.

Super unlikely they audited it. But also what's the risk?

Generally they only care about prisoners getting things in or out of the prison without the blessing of prison staff. Prisons also tend to be able to afford to be reactive, rather than proactive. If a new method of smuggling is created, the prison staff will learn about it eventually and deal with it at that point, by ensuring that only they control what comes in/out using that method.

Oh certainly. I was only commenting on the flawed logic of the comment I responded to.

For what exactly? You reckon MS would package dark web messaging so that prison kids could communicate?

> The specs are: Celeron N3450 + 4GB SKhynix LPDDR3 + Intel Wireless 7625

Aren't they being punished enough by being in prison?

Jokes aside, with such hardware and a lot of time on your hands you could really dig into practicing your low-level development skills, given there is some compiler.

Looking at CPU benchmarks shows that one being roughly the same performance as this other common CPU that's 8 years older, but uses around 1/20th the power:

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Celeron+N3450...

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core2+Quad+Q6...

Those who had systems with the latter would certainly not have considered them slow. Netbooks at the time often had this:

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Atom+N270+%40...

For a long time, my daily driver was this:

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Pentium+4+2.4...

I can say that the above was more than sufficient to do native development, audio+video conferencing, watching videos, listening to music, as well as the usual office tasks of email, documents, image editing, IM, and the like. Software inefficiency has simply expanded to fill all available CPU performance.

> So I quickly connected a USB Hub onto it. I decided to use the USB signal on the touchpad connector, because I am a bit too lazy to figure out the pinout of the dock connector.

I love this so much. I'm totally a hardware noob but even I thought "there has to be USB somewhere right". This whole inspection is amazing and shows that it's very much possible to take back control over your hardware. Sure, this is specifically locked down for prisons, but you could also think of it like a consumer device from a dystopian future. Let's fight against that together with libre open source hardware & software projects.

but you could also think of it like a consumer device from a dystopian future

A closer approximation to that, which also exists today, would be a smartphone.

You can buy these things new.[1]

They only connect to a custom "docking station". No standard ports. WiFi is available.

[1] https://justicetechsolutions.com/

Techmoan did a video about prison TVs and radios: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O3PfsndsihY

Youtube video about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P8vziYLMpl4

I expected the escape key to have been removed.

Why does the service formerly known as Twitter take 4 seconds to load that link for me?

justice1

Twitter

We should start a “TT;DR” thing.

(Twitter Thread, didn’t read)

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