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> doing what they believe is best for software freedom It is quite self-evident that not being open about the existence of proprietary code is not the best for

• medo-bear 5y ago
  arguing that FSF is some crazy sect or a religion is certainly not constructive to improving what they do i think that how you framed your concern in this last point is valid from a security point of view. as someone who values knowing security implications i support the argument that they should improve their work on security matters. in saying that, to me FSF is certainly no worse (i would think alot better) than closed source vendors, including ms, apple, intel, nvidia etc as far as making their users aware of security problems is concerned. i actually think that every device should come with a cigarete packet style label that says "might include backdoor inside", not just FSF products. in fact, maybe if only FSF did this, it might create an impression that only their products have this issue
  • marcan_42 5y ago
    See, the funny thing is that Apple's M1 devices are less backdoorable than the FSF's "Respects your Freedom" laptops. That's because unlike those obsolete laptops, Apple's designs actually firewall off all the blobs and coprocessors using IOMMUs, and those IOMMU configurations are introspectable by system software so it can confirm they are correct and not granting too much access. That means if you boot Linux on an M1, and you check the IOMMU configs (most of which are not locked, but those which are are readable), you can say "yup, this isn't backdoored". There is also no nested virtualization support on those machines, and the design of ARM virtualization makes it impossible to "hide" a secret backdoor hypervisor. There is also no ME or any other hyper-privileged software. On top of that, the fact that Apple uses code signing for their entire boot stack means that only they can theoretically (though as I said, in practice detectably) backdoor your laptop - that's much better than the RYF laptops, which have no security and therefore anyone in the supply chain can backdoor them. Oh yeah, and all the post-boot blobs on M1s are stored in the filesystem or readable Flash memories, so you can actually audit them, unlike all those microcontrollers with LPC access to all system RAM on the RYF machines. That's just nasty, the perfect design for an invisible backdoor. So yes, the FSF is actually worse than closed source vendors because they are promoting ancient laptops with poor isolation and no security mitigations, while Apple has spent the past 15 years building a secure platform. You may not like some of their reasons (e.g. locking down iPhones)... but in the end it results in significantly better end-user security than a "Respects your Freedom" device. And you can put Linux on those Macs and run a fully open source kernel and userspace - not very different from those laptops in the end. Think about that. Of course, I am very happy to talk at length about the design of these machines with everyone, and I want all the users of my software to be aware of these things (yes, there are a ton of blobs here - the amount of damage they can do is less than the blobs in the RYF laptops, but they still exist), as well as the things we don't know (e.g. 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, but we'd like to find out and if it is, that would be a firmware bug to report to Apple). I believe that in order to make an informed decision, users need to have all the information.
    • medo-bear 5y ago
      >FSF is actually worse than closed source vendors because they are promoting ancient laptops with poor isolation and no security mitigations but they are promoting such devices on ethical concerns, not on security concerns. they are not deceiving anyone >Apple has spent the past 15 years building a secure platform. You may not like some of their reasons (e.g. locking down iPhones)... but in the end it results in significantly better end-user security than a "Respects your Freedom" device you mentioned FSF fanboys before. there are way more Apple fanboys who are convinced that their Apple products respect their privacy and that their devices are impenetrable. what is worse, Apple markets itself based on this grotesque misperception! if security and privacy is a vital concern for people, Apple devices are NOT products that should handle their security concerns! you promoting Apple as secure makes you guilty of the very thing you accuse FSF of actually i would absolutely love it if there is a public non-profit organisation like FSF that is security/privacy focused - eg Secure Software Foundation - that would employ security experts to analyse and audit security and privacy of all software, free and non-free, and of course always open their findings immediately. moreover, i would definitely hope that such an organisation would be as autistic and unwavering toward open security and privacy as FSF is toward software freedom :) the fact of the matter is, while you can support both free and secure software seperately, they are seperate matters. it is possible to come to a conflict of interest type scenario. secure-software and free-software, although often sharing the same concerns, are simply not the same thing