And FSF has a history of creating important OS level software.
106 karma · joined June 18, 2021
That was stated as a goal at the FSF 40 event, videos of which should be online in the next few days.
They remind me of things like: if you don't vote to ban driving, you must want children to die. After all, driving a leading cause of death among children.
"all respects" is wrong. It also makes it so the proprietary developer can't say "here is a new version, but you must agree to some very nasty license terms, or accept some malicious feature along with it." NOT having a capability does have advantages, a physical book is impossible to be remotely deleted out of existence by DRM, but sure, you can't tinker with the software.
edit: yes, I understand in that the case of sticking the exact same software in a rom vs a read-write memory hurts the ability of a user reverse engineering it, which could ironically decrease user freedom over time. Calling this out for FSF to address is a good thing.
There is some read-only memory that contains the base version. It is executed on boot. You can tell the cpu to run a different version by pointing it to a different version during the boot process (or later). You can't change the version in the read-only memory.
The OS isn't a person. The OS has online discussion forums and the people who develop the OS CAN talk about it in the appropriate forum. Identifying and separating nonfree issues is a useful tool in their goals.
The FSF last year started a new campaign that is specifically meant to not be hardline and to respect the needs and desires of users: https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/support-the-freedom-ladd....
No, that is a version you can't physically modify. The other version is one you can't modify because of it's license and signature verification. You are simply ignoring important differences, like saying an elevator is no different than a flight of stairs, they both get you up, and anyone who avoids elevators must be an idiot.
> In other words, you can’t microcode update a CPU to add or substantially change capabilities.
There is CCC security presentation floating around where someone reversed engineered microcode before it was signed, and designed a backdoor into it, a remote code execution triggered by going to a specific webpage. That is a substantial capability that exists in todays microcode.
Your argument is like "Banning guns will incentivize people to use knives, people who want to only ban guns for violence sake are hypocrites." There is a kernel of truth, but it's really just ignoring the bigger reality.
You're saying that a backdoor can't be secret if it is in an unencrypted binary. That sounds wrong to me. Are you going to decompile and audit the entire OS to find a backdoor, I don't think so.
> I have a perfectly working installer that pulls the firmware updates from Apple's CDN and builds an OS container without installing macOS. You do need macOS for self-hosted system-level firmware updates, but only because we haven't built a process for Linux to invoke that updater yet.
Well, that is nice.
> You could just not apply the updates, and you'd be no worse off than with the non-updatable chip. The updatability gives you choice. It doesn't take anything away, certainly not any more of your freedom.
You "could". In practice, software vendors relies on the updates to abuse their users. For example intel microcode updates have a license that says: you agree not to reverse engineer it. Security updates for printers come with functionality to stop working with third party ink. Oh, you are a sophisticated user and handle it all. Fine. And of course, FSF certainly encourages reverse engineering: if you want to buy something for the purpose of reverse engineering, FSF does endorse that. For everyone else, think it's a perfectly fine position to simply say, we don't endorse opening yourself up to an abusive relationship.
Ya, monitors and hard drives all have very complicated firmware too. It is very simple, it is not denying you a freedom which is unethical to deny. FSF is not saying: it's totally great and fine, I'm sure the FSF will be happy to promote any of those devices if they have free firmware in them, celebrating them as more free. It's the same reason they focus on software and not on hardware designs.
No, no no. This is wrong. You don't need a nested hypervisor to make an undetectable backdoor. If you you audit all network traffic from a separate device, most backdoors are detectable, because a backdoor wants to have some effect that goes outside your system and that is the obvious route. But there are a hundred ways to create a backdoor which is very hard to detect and of course the proprietary bootloader Mac bootloader is a perfectly good vector for them.
So the M1 firmware is meant to be updated, right? Proprietary updates are the means by which a company exercises unacceptable control. The next update to the network card firmware could check the signature of the OS and stop working.
> some of the IOMMU configs grant full access to a few hardware streams; we don't know whether those streams are actually controllable by a coprocessor in such a way that it would make it backdoorable
Wait, so its all good because its protected by IOMMU configs, except where it isn't..., and you just hope its a bug that the IOMMU config was too open? Seems more likely that this whole theory of yours has a whole in it, that some firmware does have access to change important data.
Think of a keyboard. Now, imagine one that just has a simple chip that is not updatable. Well, it could have a backdoor in it. But it isn't a concern for your software freedom. Now, someone devises a keyboard where you load a proprietary firmware in it every time it gets plugged in, and you are dependent on the vendor for updates, but somehow it has better security properties. Well, you may argue that that is more important than software freedom. Ok, but, then that vendor can then make whatever terms and conditions it wants on those updates, and that includes breaking your security. So, one day, the vendor says: run our proprietary updating software, is every user going to reject it because they realize the security implications? No. And the vendor says: our firmware updates are only distributable through MacOS, so every time you update, you are going to have to install MacOS, then reinstall GNU/Linux. Sounds like a good way to kill GNU/Linux for 99% of users who don't got time for that. Wait, isn't that the situation for M1 laptop users? Riiight.
The whole article didn't mention even one concrete thing the FSF has said wrong, it just slanders them several times. No wonder it says to the FSF "don't bother to contact me."
Huh? Torvalds never intended to create an operating system, just a kernel, and that is true to this day.
That is not true. The link shows that a volunteer on the free software directory labeled it as nonfree at one point and later it was changed. However, the FSF did find that matrix in practice leads users to run nonfree software: https://www.fsf.org/news/fsf-and-gnu-move-official-irc-chann... "Doing so would create the unacceptable situation of encouraging a large number of users to run nonfree software in the form of nonfree JavaScript, which is used by the flagship Matrix.org server to authenticate users."