Libreboot X200 laptop now FSF-certified to respect your freedom

Posted Feb 5, 2015 21:19 UTC (Thu) by dlang (guest, #313)
In reply to: Libreboot X200 laptop now FSF-certified to respect your freedom by flussence
Parent article: Libreboot X200 laptop now FSF-certified to respect your freedom

I think that depends on how you define "modern" and "usable" :-)

Also, it's not "no binary blobs", it's just "no binary blobs loaded from the OS", you have lots of binary blobs in the system sitting in flash. Many of them are updateable (firmware on the hard drive for example)

Libreboot X200 laptop now FSF-certified to respect your freedom

Posted Feb 6, 2015 3:54 UTC (Fri) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link] (1 responses)

Oops. You're right, I totally forgot about storage and other pluggable things (is the free firmware safe against BadUSB-style attacks?)

Libreboot X200 laptop now FSF-certified to respect your freedom

Posted Feb 6, 2015 6:52 UTC (Fri) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link]

> is the free firmware safe against BadUSB-style attacks?

No.

If a device is reprogrammed, the free firmware has no way of knowing that, so it will accept that the device is what it claims to be, just like all other systems.

If the free firmware is stored on something that can be reprogrammed (which it almost certainly is or you wouldn't be able to get the free firmware on it :-), then the free firmware can be overwritten by something else.

If your hard drive has been tampered with to return one set of data when it's first turned on, and then a different set of data later, you won't be able to tell that the kernel you boot and the kernel file that you do a checksum of at a different time aren't the same thing (and yes, examples of this sort of thing have been done)

As someone (I think Al) said in one of the QotW, if you connect a raspberry Pi to a modern hard drive, odds are that the drive end of the cable has more processing capabilities.