On 08/03/2018 at 13:28, Andrew McGlashan wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On 08/03/18 10:05, Taiidan@??? wrote:
>> In exchange for money they are now advertising and endorsing a maker of
>> fake libre hardware by letting them have a booth at libreplanet an
>> endorsing their debian copy "PureOS"
>>
>> https://libreplanet.org/2018/sponsors
>
> Really? I am pretty positive about Purism right now, I'm not sure the
> criticisms are valid.

In fact it's just another take of Taiidan against Purism, it's his job.

>> Purism is NOT free hardware and certainly not "grassroots" as their
>> mysterious founder somehow has a bottomless pit of money to burn on
>> hardware costs and propaganda campaigns.

[...]

> Are these things an illusion?
>
> https://puri.sm/posts/purism-integrates-heads-security-firmware-with-tpm-giving-full-control-and-digital-privacy-to-laptop-users/
>
> https://puri.sm/posts/librem-now-most-secure-laptop-under-full-user-with-tamper-evident-features/
>
>> I encourage everyone who cares about the future of free computing to
>> contact the FSF about this.
>> Here are posts that help explain the purism situation better than I can.
>> https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/3anjgm/on_the_librem_laptop_purism_doesnt_believe_in/
>
> In IT terms, that Reddit thread started a long time ago.... perhaps it
> is irrelevant these days?

No, it is not relevent, and Taiidan knows it, as he was explained time ago,
in 2017-11-03:
https://lists.dyne.org/lurker/message/20171103.162330.6499510a.en.html

He falsely writes that all Purism did was "running ME cleaner which they
didn't make", while in fact what they did is this (quoting from the November
email):


https://puri.sm/posts/deep-dive-into-intel-me-disablement/

    When the ME is disabled using the “HAP” method (thanks to the Positive
    Technologies for discovering this trick), however, it doesn’t throw
    an error “because it can’t load a module”: it actually stops itself
    in a graceful manner, by design.

    [...]

    The two approaches are similar in that they both stop the execution
    of the ME during the hardware initialization (BUP) phase, but with
    the ME disabled through the HAP method, the ME stops on its own,
    without putting up a fight, potentially disabling things that the
    forceful “me_cleaner” approach, with the “unexpected error” state,
    wouldn’t have disabled. The PCI interface for example, is entirely
    unable to communicate with the ME processor, and the status of the ME
    is not even retrievable.

He slants Purism because they allegedly have a "mysterious founder [who]
somehow has a bottomless pit of money", provides with no proofs of his
allegations, and smears FSF because they found out Purism's claims to be
true and their hardware to be among the most free available today. And he
keeps peddling the hardware produced by Talos Engineering. Let's compare
Purism and Talos:

1) Purism is crystal about who run the company and who is working for them:
https://puri.sm/about/team/, https://puri.sm/about/board/

2) In the past they had Jacob Applelbaum and Stefano Zacchiroli (former
Debian Project Leader) in the Board of Advisors:
https://web.archive.org/web/20160322025039/https://puri.sm/about/

https://web.archive.org/web/20170105163722/https://puri.sm/about/advisory-board/

3) Talos is shrouded in secrecy, as nowhere in their site is available
a list of who's who: https://www.raptorcs.com/

4) They are backed by IBM, according to Taiidan:
https://www.mail-archive.com/dng@lists.dyne.org/msg17532.html
"They didn't have corporate backers before, now they do."
[...]
"Getting corporate backing isn't fishy, IBM wanted to support a POWER
workstation project via the OpenPOWER foundation."

As this is nowhere stated on talos' website I wonder how does Taiidan know
that IBM is behind them: does he work for Talos?

5) Whatever Purism develops, they release and publish under an opensource
license and contribute code to Coreboot;

6) Talos promises to let specs be public in the future, but there is nothing
available right now: https://www.raptorcs.com/content/base/software.html

And Taiidan is aware of this:
https://www.mail-archive.com/dng@lists.dyne.org/msg17532.html
"the public will get the spec sheets and HDL's when the hardware is
released"

This too I cannot find on their website, and no date is set. Why is
this? How does Taiidan know what they are going to do in the future?
Why are people supposed to trust this anonymous poster?

7) Purism strives to produce a fully libre system, so much so that they
axed an initial plan to equip their laptops with NVidia GPUs. At Talos
instead they value more vendor-bashing that producing the most libre
possible system:

   https://www.mail-archive.com/dng@lists.dyne.org/msg17534.html
   >>> as there are no open source non-intel gigabit NIC's
   >>    Is not having Intel hardware more important than having opensource
   >> components inside a TALOS workstation?
   > Yes it is.

8) Taiidan spreads FUD, disinformation and plot conspiracies against Purism
and provides with no evidence to back his claims:

   "Purism is NOT free hardware and certainly not "grassroots" as their
    mysterious founder somehow has a bottomless pit of money to burn on
    hardware costs and propaganda campaigns.

    Purism donates to their own crowd-funding campaigns to make them seem
    more successful and whenever negative facts about them are posted on the
    internet some random guy shows up to insist that the person is
    mistaken."

    "they claim to have "disabled" ME [...] they have not as disabling ME is
    both impossible and illegal."
    (see https://puri.sm/learn/intel-me/ and
    https://puri.sm/posts/deep-dive-into-intel-me-disablement/ to read how
    this was done)

    "(archived due to the powers that be removing these posts after
    receiving political pressure)"

9) How much does it cost you believing anonymous people's promises about
their allegedly free and open hardware (except for components that are
open but are from Intel)?
https://secure.raptorcs.com/content/TL2WK2/purchase.html $4,925.00

Buying from proven, documentedly IME-disabled provider Purism costs you
$1,599 for their top-of-the line laptop.

Truth is, Purism has been delivering products for years, their statements
are verifiable, just like their code, while Talos has nothing to show for
their words, sorry, for Taiidan's words, as their hardware offering page did
not progress beyond the "Pre-Order Acceptance" status:

Today: https://www.raptorcs.com/content/base/products.html
https://web.archive.org/web/20170707122844/https://www.raptorcs.com/content/base/products.html

A previous crowdfunding of theirs was turned down by the free hardware
community:

https://www.crowdsupply.com/raptor-computing-systems/talos-secure-workstation

14% funded
495 backers
$516,040 raised of the $3,700,000 goal.

Purism instead managed to capitalize from it's increasing popularity on
the crowdfunding front, too:

https://puri.sm/shop/librem-5/

155.26% funded
4,339 backers
$2,328,966 raised of the $1,500,000 goal.

They are Purism's source of funding, together with their customers, not
just the not any "mysterious founder", Mr. Todd Weaver. The only mysterious
people and money are Taiidan and those behind Talos.