I don't really understanding what you are saying.

What I'm saying is that a SIM card is a computer designed to operate in a way that I find philosophically repugnant and deleterious to individual rights. As a computer, it both stores and processes data, but is specifically designed to exist as a black box that locks out the owner and frustrate attempts for the owner to exert control over how or what data is processed on their device. Thus, it violates the principles of open computing in a fundamental, and very dangerous, way. The technology is specifically anti-consumer, anti-citizen, and anti-property-owner. SIM cards are not there for your benefit, and do not serve your interests. They are designed and built specifically to disempower you, their owner and operator.

I don't like, and do my best to avoid using, technology like that. You should, too! Normalizing this kind of technology ultimately causes real harm to real people. Industry and government have a deep and abiding desire to make us all into passive consumers rather than empowered and active users of computers and networks. Technologies like SIM, CableCard, proprietary firmware, etc. are one of the main tools they leverage to accomplish this.

I believe that computer owners should be free and empowered to leverage their property in any way they see fit. Technology should work for, not against, its owner.

Don't even get me started on how much I hate SIMs... almost as much as CableCard. I don't like being locked out of hardware that I paid for.

Ooooh. USB 3 and everything. Much thanks!

Fair point. I can envisage scenarios where modifying the SIM remotely would be helpful. Then again, I can envisage scenarios where it could be a very, very bad thing. My main point was user empowerment - if I can choose between two models of a device, one with a hardware lock, one without... I'll be happy with that.

Not like cellular device security is anything but an oxymoron anyway...

The headline doesn't say anything about the FSF endorsing an "incrementally more free" laptop.

Furthermore, how much of an increment is this, really? Coreboot versus a BIOS? Woop-dee-doo. RMS has been recommending the Lemote Loongson for a long time, and it not only has an open source BIOS, but actually does address some of those other issues like CPU and embedded device firmware. So not only is FSF late to the party, but they're recommending an inferior (from the "free" standpoint) solution.

Can you link me to one? I still use an old SD card and reader for exactly this reason.

I think my larger point stands anyway, though. Why aren't write locks absolutely bare bones standard on any writable device?

I'd be OK with this, under one condition - a hardware-based write protection lock that is absolutely 100% not able to be bypassed or circumvented in software.

I'll never understand why this incredibly basic feature that is so easy to design, cheap to implement, and valuable to device security went the way of floppy disks. How awesome would a thumb drive with a hardware write lock be?

This laptop contains proprietary Intel chips. We know that hardware makers like Intel have colluded with governments to insert undocumented die-level and firmware level "features" into their products that could serve as backdoors and otherwise weaken the device's security against sophisticated attackers.

Where is the open source, audited CPU? Ethernet controller firmware? Wireless firmware? Microcode updates?

The other three out of four were too fearful of their survey answers being logged by the NSA...

It isn't for the cop to decide which law to enforce or what line exists

Actually, to a degree it is. It's called "discretion", and if police officers didn't have it, the amount of laws on the books would render them ineffective and (even more) disliked by the community. Discretion can be abused, and laws should be written better, but the alternative to police discretion is a bunch of people over because they were going 65.001 MPH on a highway and making people into sex offenders for having a pee in the alley behind the bar at 2AM.

Look, it's somewhere off in la-la land to imagine that Bruce Schneier is some sort of plutocratic/semitic manchurian candidate or Emmanuel Goldstein, but if you are willing to ignore contradictory evidence in order to maintain that opinion, I can't help you. All I can do is what I did: to point out that Schneier's magnificent reputation is not some kind of manufactured "put-on" by the media, it's hard-earned and entirely legitimate. You might have just begun hearing his name, but for good reason he's been regarded as an authority held in supremely high esteem by the cryptographic, information security, and digital liberties communities for decades.

You a jew too? You sound it, since money and gold = your God.

I stopped paying attention somewhere around there, although I was bored earlier.

Not a racist.

I'm going to have to respectfully disagree. If you actually believe what you just wrote, you are quite a racist. Your whole world-view is informed primarily by what race people are and how you imagine that it relates to their individual traits, pursuits, goals, and what twisted conspiracies they hold membership in.

Schneier = another built up by press figure only.

What?! Schneier is the author of Applied Cryptography, the essential text in the field. He's the creator of the Blowfish and Twofish algorithms. His information security firm, Counterpane Systems, was bought out in an eight figure deal by British Telecom. His blog, Schneier On Security, is one of the most closely followed by infosec professionals and digital liberties advocates. In short: Schneier's reputation in the information security industry as an expert par excellence is hard-earned and well-deserved, his credentials singularly impressive, and his ratio of positions staked to positions invalidated unusually high.

No, Schneier's impressive CVs don't validate arguments supported merely on invocation of his name, and certainly no one is superman or is incapable of error or omniscient even within a field of expertise. To label Schneier's reputation as "a built up by press figure only", however, is singularly ridiculous.

I want to like System76, but the one I had was overpriced junk.

Who builds a trackpad with an indistinct sensing area? Worse, even when you did manage purely by luck to have your finger on the pad's surface, the sensitivity was awful. And for that matter, who builds a modern laptop with multiple video outputs that can't drive an external display at 1080p simultaneously with the LCD? Ugh.

Well the article proves having 0% of a controlled substance is all that's required to be arrested.

I'm sure there were trace quantities of controlled substances on the money in his wallet, or something.