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Rd6n6 | 4 years ago

There is a very short list of hardware they do endorse here. I’m not sure if it uses those loopholes or not

https://ryf.fsf.org/

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marcan_42|4 years ago

They do. That bluetooth dongle? Hundreds of kilobytes of proprietary ROM implementing an entire Bluetooth stack (these things always implement at least the lower layers and invariably also support doing the upper layers for HID emulation mode). Those ThinkPads? Embedded microcontrollers with updatable proprietary blobs in Flash memory that you can't audit, and which have direct access to all system RAM via the LPC bus.

duskwuff|4 years ago

What's funny about this list is how much of it amounts to a few companies -- ThinkPenguin, Libiquity, and Technoethical -- rebranding commodity hardware like Atheros wireless cards. There's nothing unique about this hardware which makes it more "free" than any other off-the-shelf Atheros cards, and the drivers were open-source long before any of these companies got involved.