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: 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.