top | item 21519443

(no title)

CaptSpify | 6 years ago

Those switches are software under the hood though, at least as far as I can tell. I installed freebsd on my purism laptop, and it no longer shuts off the camera/microphone.

discuss

order

hombre_fatal|6 years ago

Really? The marketing says they are hardware switches: https://puri.sm/products/librem-13/

> Two hardware kill switches, microphone/camera and wireless/bluetooth

> Now with a physical toggle switch, when your camera and microphone are switched off, you know they are off. Wireless and Bluetooth are combined in a second hardware switch to control all your radio signals inbound and outbound.

That would be a flat out lie if it wasn't actually a hardware switch which is hard to believe for a company whose entire identity and reputation is tied to these exact features.

CaptSpify|6 years ago

I don't have video/audio working on this install, so I'll try to get that set up later and make a video.

I do have a video of the wifi in action though: https://tmp.thekyel.com/month/wifi.mp4

I reached out to them a couple of times, and they asked if I had rfkill installed, I told them no, but it shouldn't matter if it was a hardware switch.

They told me that they would look into it, and then never responded after that.

leethargo|6 years ago

Maybe they mean that the switches themselves are hardware, but the deactivation is implemented in software, only triggered by the (harware) switch.

kardos|6 years ago

That's a major accusation. Can you do a video or blog post where you show this happening? Eg, start recording something and hit the switch and show it continuing to record.

alpaca128|6 years ago

Switches on one device don't necessarily indicate how it's done on a different device.

As far as I remember Purism has always claimed that it's hardware switches on the phone, and I don't see why they'd lie because it would be very easy to verify.

m463|6 years ago

I've never installed purism's version of linux, and they seem to work - I recall the camera/microphone disappear from the usb bus, shown in syslog. I don't remember what happened with the wifi/bt as I leave them off.

I could go check this behavior.

I haven't tried freebsd - could it be freebsd doesn't check for a hotplug?