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And more importantly, replace it with a system that makes it impossible for this type of controlling wealth to exist in the first place, otherwise history will repeat itself once again.

A phone’s baseband (modem) runs its own proprietary firmware with full RAM access.

Eternity hasn’t been updated in a while, but it still works great.

I’m starting to think this Epstein person wasn’t a very good guy.

Who is this Eddy guy anyway?

1973 is when the Heritage Foundation was founded.

For me it’s YouTube.

You had an A3000? Those are not cheap today. Hell, Amigas in general are expensive.

FL Studio and most VSTs already work in WINE.

Hope that this will completely kill the corporate Internet and switch to exclusively using FOSS federated or decentralized services for everything.

Just as John Frankincense intended.

It’s both. Yes, there is no war but class war, but a massive part of the divide and conquer strategy that the ultra wealthy have been waging on humanity for centuries, if not millenia, includes a massive amount of racism and sexism in order to distract the masses from their actual oppressors.

Racism can easilly be traced back to the elites brainwashing the population (no baby is born racist), but it is absolutely a real thing. A big part of the reason why white privilege is a thing in the US is due to historical racism and slavery in the US. There was a whole civil war fought because the elites wanted to own black slaves, and we still see echoes of that to this very day.

Started playing Half Life 1. Never played any of the Half Life games before.

As for a recommendation, Chrono Trigger and the Silent Hill games (1-3, including the remake of 2).

I personally have a GNU bias as well (watching Stallman talk is what got me into free softwars to begin with), but the allowing of non-free software is in Libreboot and not canoeboot. Canoeboot was created as a direct response to GNU Boot, since GNU Boot is just a fork of Libreboot with all blobs removed, but it wasn’t being rebased often, if at all.

https://canoeboot.org/news/policy.html

but as for a laptop, that’s just the most free you can get right now (do correct me if I’m wrong)

I linked one at the end of my post. Not going to be cheap, though, since it’s Framework. It’s also not going to be very fast. I don’t think the board is free, but niether are any Thinkpads. There is freely licensed official documentation, though for their laptops, although I’m not sure about the third party RISC-V board: https://github.com/FrameworkComputer/Framework-Laptop-13

As for the point about security, in the cases where it comes to state run cracking groups or other high skilled crackers like what is mentioned in the linked article, it is not enough to just have as free of a system as possible, but also as secure and updated of a system as possible. You mentioned in your top level comment that people should use devices that run 100% free software as a direct response to this news article, but leaving any gaps open will allow for these crackers to infiltrate. The plain and simple version is that both are important.

Does the X200 even support VT-d to run something like Qubes with a Linux-libre kernel?

You also didn’t cover the point about embedded firmware blobs, like embedded microcode in every x86 CPU since the Pentium Pro, and not just microcode updates.

Also maybe separate your points into paragraphs for legibility.

https://canoeboot.org/ is developed by the same person who makes Libreboot, and is more updated than GNU Boot.

Although using something like this or GNU Boot will prevent you from obtaining microcode updates, which can leave you vulnerable to exploits. The CPU already has baked in microcode and updates are signed by the CPU designers (AMD and Intel in the case of x86 computers). Regardless of whether you update it or not, it is still proprietary code running on your computer. If you really don’t want any proprietary code running on your computer, just get a RISC-V board (although I’m not aware of any actual RISC-V silicon that is 100% free, but there are 100% free designs out there).

Stallman and GNU never placed much importance on free hardware designs, as normal people do not have the means or the machinary to manufacture something as complex as silicon or PCBs with small details, for instance, but that ignores FPGAs, PCB manufacturing plants, and small-quantity silicon production, which are all more modern progressions of technology.

The purpose of GNU and the FSF is not to prevent supply-chain attacks and to ensure security, but to empower users with the freedom to modify the software that runs on their computer. It just so happens that those idiologies align most of the time.

It is also a bit unrealistic to expect a society to just stop using smartphones, so we should be working on creating fully free smartphones, which are projects that some companies (Pine64, Liberux, Purism) are working on accomplishing. Even those phones still use ARM SoCs and proprietary modems. The proprietary modem problem especially is the biggest one, as getting something like a software defined radio certified by both cell carriers and the respective government organizations is a beast in itself. Every device needs a valid IMEI code to use a SIM card, after all. Also I believe SIM cards themselves can do processing, but don’t quote me on that.

Not to mention the fact that there are no WiFi chips that work without firmware blobs that operate on any standard newer than 802.11n. SDRs might be more feasible here, but government regulation would still be a problem. https://github.com/Nuand/bladeRF-wiphy/

If you’re looking for a RISC-V laptop, Framework has a board available based on the semi-popular JH7110 SoC used in the VisionFive 2: https://frame.work/products/deep-computing-risc-v-mainboard

a) Improvement doesn’t necessailly mean good or effective in the long term.

b) The design ceases to matter when the execution doesn’t match. Actions speak louder than words. We have also given the federal executive branch much more power than necessary, and they have continuously ceased more power, whether that be through intelligence agencies acting extrajudicially and unconstitutionally (NSA, CIA, FBI, etc.), waging war on drugs (and therefore, the American people) and militarizing the police, the president having immunity for all crimes that are “official acts”, etc.

There is also the undemocratic Supreme Court, who with Marbury v Madison, gave themselves the ability to essentially unilaterally enact laws.

I can’t comment on EU politics because I don’t know much about it.

Turns out, when you allow any one person to have massive amounts of power (money in the case of capitalism), they will do everything possible to seize more power.

You can also consider the fact that elitism was a massive part of the founding of the US, which is why we have situations like the Senate where land votes more than people, the Electoral College which does the same thing, not banning slavery from day 1 which we’re still seeing the effects of to this day, not having any method for federal direct ballot initiatives, etc.

The issue is capitalism itself, as individuals are still allowed to hold power over other people one way or the other.