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TFA is very specific about the harm done by FSF's policy, unfortunately you either missed the arguments or chose to left them out. E.g. > The FSF “Respects You

by oefrha 5y ago

TFA is very specific about the harm done by FSF's policy, unfortunately you either missed the arguments or chose to left them out. E.g. > The FSF “Respects Your Freedom” certification has a loophole so large you could drive a truck through it called the “secondary processor exception”. > ... > This means that users of the Librem 5 phone are objectively harmed in three ways: first, they are unaware of the existence of the blobs to begin with, second they do not have the ability to study the blobs, and third, they do not have the ability to replace the blobs. By pursing RYF certification, Purism released a device that is objectively worse for the practical freedom of their customers.

MathMonkeyMan 5y ago
I referred to that when I mentioned "loopholes." It's a contradiction for sure, but either you have a "libre" device with non-free components isolated over a serial interface, or you have a less capable device. Disingenuous, maybe.
- throwaway81523 5y ago
  I have sometimes thought of ditching my phone plan and getting a wifi hotspot, just to stop the phone carrier from messing with the software in my phone through OTA updates and whatnot. All communication would be through TCP and that would stop the phone carrier from talking to the mobile baseband processor, which could be completely disabled or removed. It would even allow ditching the whole phone and using a wifi-only tablet instead. Both sides (the wifi box and the phone) are hard to make entirely free, but by isolating them from each other, some higher control can be achieved.
  - aesh2Xa1 5y ago
    Another HN user, tptacek, has made comments going back years now that point out how modern Android (at least Pixels) and iPhones all isolate the baseband behind a serial/USB peripheral interface. I'm not sure you would gain anything at all by going with your surmised setup above.
    - tata71 5y ago
      Many carriers do OTA config stuff when you insert their SIM, cooperated with by your carrier.
seba_dos1 5y ago
> that users of the Librem 5 phone are objectively harmed in three ways That's not true though. First: things that were done in order to move the blobs out of PureOS weren't hidden in any way, to the contrary - they were loudly announced as "steps towards RYF certification", describing exactly how that's supposed to work in public blog posts[0]. I can't see how that counts as "[users] unaware of the existence of the blobs". Second: the blobs are perfectly accessible to anyone who wants to study them - not only you can download them from repositories online, but you can even access the flash where they're stored on your device; you can also read and modify the code that loads them. What's more - you can even bypass that loading mechanism and load them directly by yourself from the main CPU if you don't care about keeping the blobs out of your rootfs (and some alternative OSes do that already). Which gets us to... Third: users do have the ability to replace the blobs. Not only can they run an OS that loads the blobs directly - they can even reflash the storage where the blobs are being stored. And no, no disassembling, special tools or weird hardware tricks are necessary - you can just lift the read-only lock purely in software (it's a one-line change to the device tree), which is there mostly to prevent you from accidentally shooting yourself in the foot than anything else. You may disagree whether the additional effort that went into creating these solutions was worth it - and that's a valid opinion to have, but nothing's artificially locked out from the user, so nobody is "objectively harmed" by it. That part is just false. Disclaimer: I work for Purism on the Librem 5. [0] https://puri.sm/posts/librem5-solving-the-first-fsf-ryf-hurdle/ https://puri.sm/posts/librem5-solving-the-first-fsf-ryf-hurd...
- ldarby 5y ago
  How much engineering effort went in to this, instead of other improvements like reducing power consumption / increasing battery life? I would have bought a Librem 5 but haven't only beceause of the power issues (which is same reason I didn't get a Pinephone).
  - seba_dos1 5y ago
    Compared to other areas, I'd say "negligible" - but I wasn't involved personally (only joined the team later on), so take it with a grain of salt as it's not impossible that I'm missing something. The M4 core was already there in the SoC sitting unused, it's not like it was added just for firmware loading ;)

by oefrha 5y ago

MathMonkeyMan 5y ago

I referred to that when I mentioned "loopholes." It's a contradiction for sure, but either you have a "libre" device with non-free components isolated over a serial interface, or you have a less capable device. Disingenuous, maybe.

throwaway81523 5y ago
I have sometimes thought of ditching my phone plan and getting a wifi hotspot, just to stop the phone carrier from messing with the software in my phone through OTA updates and whatnot. All communication would be through TCP and that would stop the phone carrier from talking to the mobile baseband processor, which could be completely disabled or removed. It would even allow ditching the whole phone and using a wifi-only tablet instead. Both sides (the wifi box and the phone) are hard to make entirely free, but by isolating them from each other, some higher control can be achieved.
- aesh2Xa1 5y ago
  Another HN user, tptacek, has made comments going back years now that point out how modern Android (at least Pixels) and iPhones all isolate the baseband behind a serial/USB peripheral interface. I'm not sure you would gain anything at all by going with your surmised setup above.
  - tata71 5y ago
    Many carriers do OTA config stuff when you insert their SIM, cooperated with by your carrier.

seba_dos1 5y ago

> that users of the Librem 5 phone are objectively harmed in three ways That's not true though. First: things that were done in order to move the blobs out of PureOS weren't hidden in any way, to the contrary - they were loudly announced as "steps towards RYF certification", describing exactly how that's supposed to work in public blog posts[0]. I can't see how that counts as "[users] unaware of the existence of the blobs". Second: the blobs are perfectly accessible to anyone who wants to study them - not only you can download them from repositories online, but you can even access the flash where they're stored on your device; you can also read and modify the code that loads them. What's more - you can even bypass that loading mechanism and load them directly by yourself from the main CPU if you don't care about keeping the blobs out of your rootfs (and some alternative OSes do that already). Which gets us to... Third: users do have the ability to replace the blobs. Not only can they run an OS that loads the blobs directly - they can even reflash the storage where the blobs are being stored. And no, no disassembling, special tools or weird hardware tricks are necessary - you can just lift the read-only lock purely in software (it's a one-line change to the device tree), which is there mostly to prevent you from accidentally shooting yourself in the foot than anything else. You may disagree whether the additional effort that went into creating these solutions was worth it - and that's a valid opinion to have, but nothing's artificially locked out from the user, so nobody is "objectively harmed" by it. That part is just false. Disclaimer: I work for Purism on the Librem 5. [0] https://puri.sm/posts/librem5-solving-the-first-fsf-ryf-hurdle/ https://puri.sm/posts/librem5-solving-the-first-fsf-ryf-hurd...

ldarby 5y ago
How much engineering effort went in to this, instead of other improvements like reducing power consumption / increasing battery life? I would have bought a Librem 5 but haven't only beceause of the power issues (which is same reason I didn't get a Pinephone).
- seba_dos1 5y ago
  Compared to other areas, I'd say "negligible" - but I wasn't involved personally (only joined the team later on), so take it with a grain of salt as it's not impossible that I'm missing something. The M4 core was already there in the SoC sitting unused, it's not like it was added just for firmware loading ;)