Re: Well, like it or not
All well and good - except that it'll end up being an insurance company scenario, with them finding every conceivable excuse under the sun to refuse liability.
1242 posts • joined 16 Apr 2018
Believe me, the bootloader is the least of your worries. With the current Windows-on-Snapdragon tablets, you do have an unlocked bootloader, Linux aarch64 can boot, but there's no graphics acceleration, making the thing entirely useless. Blame Qualcomm for that one.
See: https://github.com/aarch64-laptops/build
You might like this then: https://github.com/CalcProgrammer1/openrazer-win32
Linux is flexible, free / FOSS, light, tinkering-friendly, but not secure.
"The self-interested thing and the altruistic thing," he said, "are one and the same."
Huh? Has someone forgotten to disconnect this thing before they left for home?
but the mission is significant as it is the first interplanetary effort mounted by an Arab nation. As such it is the source of considerable pride.
If the technology is sourced from Japan, the actual probe was built in the United States, and the expertise is sourced from the West, where's the "Arab" angle? That they funded the project?
It's good that they did *something*, but had they channelled these funds to actually train people who would build the aircraft and manage the mission from top to bottom (perhaps like the Mangalyaan project), it would have been a source of actual pride. Until then, it's just another demonstration of how rich these guys are, not of their actual will to contribute.
"Another point worth noting: there's no guarantee the A12Z chip in the Developer Transition Kit will appear in the first consumer Arm-based Macs, which are expected to land later this year. "
The other well-known Developer Transition Kit, the one for PowerPC to x86, had a Pentium 4, while the final release had a Core Duo chip (which was much more powerful).
They would be better off porting to ARM and releasing an ipad pro-pro with full macos.
Won't happen, at least currently.
What I would note is that MS' attempt at ARM laptops have not been a spectacular success and the only place I've seen a lot of Google's devices are those dumped on kids in school.
What about phones, which are pretty much mini PCs without a keyboard?
What about the Raspberry Pi and its clones?
What about ARM servers? (I know that ARM servers tend to be specific-purpose as opposed to general-purpose, but hey, it's there)
This is also hedging lots of bets on your perceived immunocompetence.
It's a little like playing Russian roulette.
As far as it's known from Intel documentation, Intel MEI loads its firmware from an SPI chip on the motherboard, the same one that holds the BIOS/UEFI.
This project's whole point is to keep only a minimum of MEI components that would still permit the CPU to boot (while obliterating ME functionality).
I said x86 (the architecture), not Intel CPUs themselves. Your question was about how the choice of architecture could affect backdoor presence.
Backdoors could be built in any hardware including open-source hardware. You have to have perfect control of the supply chain, from the individual silicon wafers, even the machinery used to cut and process the wafers, to the couriers transporting your finished CPUs. An impossible amount of control, plain and simple, even for nation-states.
Same goes for software. You have to write your own assembly code if you want to be 100% guaranteed to be free of backdoors.
A stateless laptop isn't a Chromebook. It has persistent storage, but that persistent storage is external to the laptop.
The whole concept of stateless means that the laptop itself doesn't have any chips capable of storing anything (including malware) - everything is moved to an external USB stick. Therefore, malware can't persist in firmware on the machine because the user can replace the stick on demand.
Purism is the ideal candidate for designing the stateless laptop.
Don't know why they don't ... the concept surely makes sense.
You pretty much nailed it here.
Maybe they have a skunkworks project to get their chip to run a full version of macOS, but they haven't demonstrated anything yet.
To be honest, some "practical" proof exists.
Ages ago, the original iPad Air (only the iPad Air) can run Mac OS X Mavericks, because Apple had included ARM binaries of the whole system in the Mavericks release.
Unless you can totally control every partition of that flash storage.
Until you can change out the operating system for anything you might see fit.
Until it runs a real operating system, not a mobile operating system wearing a T-shirt five sizes too big.
The previous release was faster than an i7-8700U, so faster than basically all laptops on the market at the time except gaming laptops and workstation laptops running H-Series chips.
These figures are very suspicious. They are based on benchmarks, which are prone to all sorts of fiddling. And that's for the same SoC on the same OS ... let alone when both are different.
But on the other side, perhaps this is why ARM Apple laptops are coming in 2021 or thereabouts?
It's a MediaTek chip - so a mixed bag, it may be very easy or nigh-on impossible. And Motonovo phones are traditionally anti-modding.
There are no-root solutions that use a dummy local VPN (that routes your traffic to an app on your device) ... but that's fishy unless the one you use is open source.
If you want a really moddable phone, go for a used flagship model (or low-end if it really has to be new) that has a Qualcomm chip and a leaked/available factory programmer. Xiaomi even officially supplies them (instead of them being leaked like LG's or OnePlus's ones).
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