The collected works of jsloan - Page 2

I think I know the answer to this, but I want to hash it out and make sure ...

So, let's say I have a recent (2014) macbook air and I load a completely free-as-in-freedom Linux distro on it.

On the one hand I have a free, open source OS with free open source programs (sshd, screen, xterm, etc.), so that's nice.

But on the other hand, the macbook air is incapable of running libreboot or some other free bios replacement, so there could be a very, very deep backdoor or malicious code running on my system at a very deep level that I can never do anything about.

And then on top of that, presumably there are some hardware pieces (wifi card, sound card, whatever) that don't have free drivers, so then I need to use black-box binary blobs (or just not have sound or something).

Is that it ? Suspicious black box bios and (possibly) suspicious black box hardware drivers ... are there any other pieces I am missing here ?

Well... let me elaborate by saying that I am not necessarily looking for a "perfect" computing environment that has no non-free components.

Right now I am running OS X on a macbook air, so obviously I can compromise quite a bit.

What I *am* interested in doing is figuring out precisely where the dial is set. If I load a linux distro on a mac laptop, just where am I setting that dial ?

What components (besides BIOS, which we know for sure) would require non free-as-in-freedom code ?

I might even still use them. I probably will. I just want to *know*.

robespierre wrote:

jsloan wrote: are there any other pieces I am missing here ?

Yes. The whole system architecture.
The northbridge on these systems, supplied by Intel, contains a separate processor called the Managability Engine that is totally invisible to the OS and bypasses all its access controls. It can be accessed remotely over the Internet to gain full, undetectable, control of the machine and cannot be turned off.
This on top of the 386SL System Management Mode, which executes invisibly to the OS and is still present in every x86 sold.

Ok, thank you. This is the kind of answer I was interested in.

Isn't this true of any laptop though ?

I think the Bunnie Huang laptop has a northbridge in it. There are one or two "golden" old thinkpads that the super-free diehards always recommend, but I don't know if those are old enough to not have northbridge.

How would you avoid this ?

I have a number of responses to the above postings, but I want to first discuss the computer-within-the-computer that is the Intel manageability engine (or whatever it is called in 2015) ...

It looks like there are a lot of tools for updating, configuring, and managing the IME ... or do I misunderstand with my google searching ?

I *think* I don't want to dive into that rabbit hole and introduce that complexity into my life ... but am I correct that if I did, there is in fact a way to control and monitor the behavior of the IME ?

In fact, it appears that the IME is sort of there for corporate IT to manage assets and access control and so it makes sense that there are super-super-user tools for managing and monitoring the IME ...

Comments ?

Their entire platform is FreeBSD so I guess this makes sense. Are they the only people doing this ?

http://www.rsync.net/products/zfsintro.html

This page, which was recently on the HN frontpage:

https://decentralize.today/uncorrectabl ... .b5ilejf73

has a similar, but different, rundown of alternative (non-x86) platforms and their various pros and cons. Thought it was an interesting addition to the OPs own rundown ...