I remember asking in one of their articles if they had planned to reign over (or partner up) the project over to Valve once it was ready and said they had no plans.
We use HP EliteBooks and EliteDesks extensively at work. I even used to set them up in my old job, and as far as I’m aware, it doesn’t connect to the Internet or “phone home” by default (although that could’ve changed in recent models). In any case, one of the nice things about the HP BIOSes is that it’s very configurable - you can disable the automatic BIOS update checks, network adapter etc. I forget if there was an option to just disable the network stack, but what you could do is configure the UEFI network settings so that they’re invalid - ie, set it to a random static IP + random DNS etc (eg: 0.0.0.0) so that it can’t connect even if it tried.
Be aware that some tools might be in conflict with each other. I recommend auto-cpufreq + thermald. You could add TLP to the mix, but then you need to configure it carefully to avoid conflicts.
Immutable is awesome. The user instead uses flatpak, snap, and/or nix to install their packages and apps. If you want a mutable environment, you can use containers and their many system integration tools like distrobox.The system has rollback functionality thanks to ostree, abroot, or similar technologies, so in case an update goes awry, you can roll back to a previous working image. Update anxiety no longer exists for me
I’m worried about the HP firmware-bios thingy. Does it call home?
It’s for these kinds of reasons we should be demanding open source firmware from major vendors or only buying hardware from vendors that already have open source firmware (System 76, Tuxedo, etc).
That was quite the read but pretty worth it. He talks about a lot of the mistakes he made not just in relation to his crime, but as a developer, project leader, and general human being.
He discusses what things he would have done differently, and how he thinks that could have changed things not only for him but his software as well.
He mentions multiple times how much he wishes that the conflict handling and social classes he has access to in prison, were available to him in school. He ends the letter with a call to action, for just that asking people to try and affect legislation to get more youth access to this information to avoid cases such as his.
Formerly I used Terminator, because I liked to split the screen. Then I moved to Kitty because having a GPU-powered terminal sound amazing, and now I’m using gnome-terminal because I’m trying to get back to simply and default.
The UEFI firmware shouldn’t connect to the internet at all. You can’t rule it out entirely, but the threat is pretty small. Theoretically, it can access your hard drives, but again, it’s very unlikely that your BIOS will exfiltrate your data and send it somewhere. If you want to be sure, use LUKS for full disk encryption.
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