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It doesn't look like the Talos Secure Workstation will see the light of day with it's crowdfunding campaign ending this week and it's coming up more than three million dollars short of its financing goal. [Editor note: It did not meet the funding goal.] Now there's another effort to offer a libre system but using off-the-shelf x86 hardware.
[...] Libreboot developer Leah Rowe is now launching a libre system out of the ashes of the Talos Secure Workstation. She wrote in an email to Phoronix, "It's a high-end desktop/server platform, available in either configuration. It also supports virtualization and PCI passthrough, unlike older systems, so Qubes would be compatible...TALOS looks set to fail. Crowd Supply has removed it from their homepage, and Raptor Engineering is writing up an announcement that TALOS is shutting down - they are going to link to Minifree and tell people to purchase Libreboot D16 from me."
But before getting too excited, this isn't a new platform but rather an existing AMD server motherboard that simply comes pre-loaded with Libreboot to free the firmware/BIOS and then loaded with Debian GNU/Linux. The desktop and server versions make use of an AMD Opteron 6272, a.k.a. the older 32nm "Interlagos" CPUs derived from Bulldozer and released back in 2011.
-- submitted from IRC
(Score: 4, Insightful) by bzipitidoo on Wednesday January 18 2017, @05:45PM
When the Pentium III came out, there was a ruckus because Intel had added unique processor IDs to the CPU. It was an invasion of privacy, etc. A little later, a significant change from Microsoft Window 2000 to Windows XP was the addition of the activation key, which provoked another ruckus. I stuck with a Pentium II machine for years, with the Windows part of the dual boot being to Windows 2000, not XP. Did that matter? As things turned out, it didn't.
Manufacturers can stuff all the privacy and freedom destroying capability they want into their CPUs. But let them actually use it to hurt lots of people, and they may find they made a mistake, just as Turbo Tax learned with their copy protection scheme that modified the boot sector, and Sony BMG learned with their root kitted audio CDs. I'd love to have LibreBoot, but I'm not going to live with obsolete tech to have it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 18 2017, @05:53PM
that's complete BS, nor sony or any big corporation has learnt anything about privacy and spy issues,
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday January 18 2017, @06:16PM
that's incomplete BS, they HAVE learned that a better PR campaign is needed, carefully planned, BEFORE screwing the public.
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Scruffy Beard 2 on Wednesday January 18 2017, @08:19PM
Overwatch (Blizzard Entertainment) is now banning cheating players permanently using some kind of hardware ID> maybe it is simply the CPUID, we don't know.
I am curious how they distinguish between genuine cheats, and people who bough used hardware: possibly sold at a discount when Overwatch stopped working for the seller.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Thursday January 19 2017, @05:31AM
As I recall, since Windows Vista, Microsoft has the OS build a unique fingerprint from the hardware. They wanted to stop people from simply copying a hard drive with a verified installation of Windows to other machines. That of course breaks the perfectly legitimate operation of moving the hard drive to new hardware. Even replacing hardware that had failed was tricky. MS got some flack for making Windows too fussy on that point. Merely changing the video card might cause Windows to decide it was not verified, and MS had to back off somewhat.
I've used a proprietary Fortran 95 compiler that used the MAC address to lock itself to a single computer. Was annoying, but I figured it out and circumvented it pretty fast. With VMWare, was able to make virtual machines with identical MAC addresses. The machines couldn't be on the same LAN of course, but for our purposes that wasn't a problem.