Taurinus X200 laptop now FSF-certified to respect your freedom

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in hardware on (#NZ56)
story imageThe Free Software Foundation (FSF) has awarded its Respects Your Freedom (RYF) certification to the Taurinus X200 laptop sold by Libiquity. The RYF certification mark means that the product meets the FSF's standards in regard to users' freedom, control over the product, and privacy. The Taurinus X200 comes with Libreboot firmware and the FSF-endorsed Trisquel GNU/Linux operating system. Importantly, Intel's Management Engine (ME) firmware with its applications like AMT (remote out-of-band management/backdoor system, part of "vPro") and PAVP (audio/video DRM) have been removed from this laptop. The laptop ships within the USA and may be purchased from the Libiquity Store.

Re: A step backwards (Score: 2, Interesting)

by evilviper@pipedot.org on 2015-09-30 00:34 (#NZFM)

I think the overriding factor is that its all currently closed source, with chunks being supplied by 3rd party developers
A server BMC is really just an low-resource embedded ARM based computer, mounted on the motherboard. Obviously that's something pretty easy for a Linux image to do. In fact I distinctly remember reading about some group working on writing just such an open source BMC firmware, but I can't motivate myself to go try and look it up again.

You can't just replace any BMC firmware with your own image, as they are cryptographically signed like the rest of the server firmware, but if you're working with the OEM, there's no reason you couldn't have an open source BMC image, and maybe work around the need for signing by only allowing updates via a boot-time BIOS prompt, a physical jumper, or similar physical access requirement that wouldn't work as well with (remote) servers.
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