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Developer Gavin L Rebeiro has posted[*see note below] a five-part article series at Techrights on how to deal with the ongoing Raspberry Pi fiasco by salvaging existing hardware with a replacement operating system.
- Part I: Acknowledgements
- Part II: Introduction
- Part III: Fundamentals
- Part IV: Doing The Task
- Part V: All The Rest
He covers the background, the technical principles, some methods for mitigation, proposes using NetBSD in place of the GNU/Linux, Raspberry Pi OS. Finally, he walks through installation of NetBSD.
We don't want to be spied on; what happens when we're faced with an operating system that spies on people? We throw it in the trash where it belongs! I am boycotting the Raspberry Spy myself (you're free to join me in doing so) but I don't want people to waste hardware that they already have. So we're going to walk through an interesting path of installing a different operating system on the Raspberry Spy; I want to show you a few things that will empower you to take greater control over your computing.
We'll gently walk through and explore the following: how to install an operating system on an embedded device (a Raspberry Spy, in this case) over a USB-to-UART bridge (UTUB). This is the main project we've got on our hands. Don't worry if you've never touched embedded systems before; everything here is accessible to people with a modest set of prerequisite knowledge and some basic apparatus.
We'll delve into things with more depth as we move forward with our project; if you don't understand something when you first encounter it, just keep reading.
NetBSD might be a bit of a leap for some, so it should be noted that there are other GNU/Linux distros for the Raspberry Pi which do not include the problems addressed above.
The focus of the series is on individual privacy, but a parallel threat exists for institutions because, after the recent changes, any use of Raspberrry Pi OS will show up at their most hostile competitor, Microsoft. The company has had a do-not-lose-to-Linux-at-any-cost attitude for decades and has various slush funds available to fund attacks. EDGI was one such program which did a lot of damage around the world and has been described in fair detail in the Comes v Microsoft case.
[* Ed's Note (2021-03-12): The author has let us know that his original article is available as a PDF, as techrights' version wasn't faithful. -- FP]
Previously:
(2021) Raspberry Pi Users Mortified as Microsoft Repository that Phones Home is Added to Pi OS
(Score: 5, Informative) by Pav on Tuesday March 09 2021, @01:06AM (1 child)
Microsoft is the company that not that long ago shifted their European headquarters from Berlin to Munich, some would say as sweetener to encourage the Munich local authority to suppress/end the Munich Linux desktop project... which was basically a LDAP based deployment and management platform for Linux/MS/etc... clients/servers/networks. (One of the successor projects is called FusionDirectory by the way... it's worth a look). You DON'T think this latest thing won't be used to identify large deployments of RPi's, and to embrace/extend/extinguish? BTW, Google has their fingers in certain Debian packages also... which phone home without the users knowledge (and I'm not just talking browsers here) - can't remember which ones off the top of my head.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 09 2021, @03:37AM
Not just debian, but many many others. And don't forget to mention how much of the consumer news media on the Internet is owned by them, or has them as a major stockholder.
The scope of their influence over consumers day to day lives is at least as big as googles, it is just structured as different kinds of assets.