TBF, nobody's going to make that Privacy-Respecting laptop if people reject the "most privacy respecting laptop so far" for not being good enough. Because, we can keep moving the goalposts, here.

Librem isn't perfect, and its BIOS isn't fully free. But it's free-er than almost any other laptop being sold that's worth owning, and it even comes with a hardware switch for some key sensors.

I could ask for more, but bitching and rejecting the Librem because it's not-good-enough, and buying a laptop with NO respect for me on the basis that "I can just roll my own", continues to send the market the message that:

1) Free software doesn't sell
2) Privacy doesn't sell

On 14/09/15 13:37, Travis Biehn wrote:

Oshwm: Seems reasonable. It would be cool if consumers started valuing
privacy-oriented products, now the whole plot is lost once a company
uses a 3rd party load balancer? Nice.

"Every hardware chip individually selected for being freedom-respecting"
Is that in the datasheet for each chip "no backdoors & 100% certified
vulnerability free"? Does an Intel chipset laptop manufactured in
Shenzen really count as 'thoughtful and freedom respecting'?

“Getting rid of the signature checking is an important step. While it
doesn’t give us free code for the firmware, it means that users will
really have control of the firmware once we get free code for it.” - Dr.
Richard M. Stallman

And without signature checks how will we prevent un-solicited BIOS
modification?

Securing their Trisquel derived distro?

RMS doesn't have 'robust against nation state attackers' on his platform
for GNU. They're still just trying to get people to comply with the
license & refer to it as 'gnu / linux'.

Don't mistake a 'FOSS' laptop for a 'Privacy Laptop' just because they
installed a switch for the webcam. The privacy stuff is just the work of
marketing.

-Travis

On Mon, Sep 14, 2015 at 1:36 AM, Oshwm <oshwm@openmailbox.org
<mailto:oshwm@openmailbox.org>> wrote:

    Links go via cloudflare so privacy already abused before even
    purchasing.


    On 14 September 2015 03:11:12 BST, Alfie John <alfiej@fastmail.fm
    <mailto:alfiej@fastmail.fm>> wrote:

        Just saw these this morning:

           https://www.crowdsupply.com/purism
           https://puri.sm/

        Although a physical switch to kill the webcam and mic seems obvious,
        this is the first laptop I've seen with them built in.

        Overall thoughts?

        Alfie




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