Free Software

During the last year hell seems to have frozen over: our corporate overlords neighbours at Apple, Google and Facebook have all pushed for crypto in one way or another. For Facebook (WhatsApp) and Google (Allo) the messenger crypto has even been implemented by none less than the famous, endorsed-by-Edward-Snowden anarchist and hacker Moxie Marlinspike! So all is well on the privacy front! … but is it really? EDIT: A French version of this post is available here.

Since posts like these often helped me setup some device, I thought I’d write one as well this time. Also it is advertising for a good free operating system. TL;DR Everything works almost perfectly, good hardware, good software! You should give it a try :) Hardware I have got a fairly high-end config: Intel® Core™ i7-5600U 16GB RAM 1920x1080 Display, non-glare, non-touch 512GB Samsung SSD

Last summer I blogged about secure messaging and why FSFE cares about it (and why you should, too!). Since then a few things have changed, and I want to give you an update on the situation.The conclusion of my last article was: TextSecure and Kontalk are both good apps in our eyes, however, TextSecure has a much larger adoption and its protocol has gone through more reviews. The protool is integrated into CyanogenMod, recommended by leading security experts and the project just recently gained lots of media attention and $400.

Most you have probably set your system aliases to receive root’s e-mail, and that of course is a very good idea so you are kept up to date. On the other hand you do send a lot of information about your system through the wire, often package diagnostics with information about locally installed vulnerable software and many other things that might help a person or entity gain access to your computer.

I finally managed to update graphics/luminance to 2.3.1. Thanks to lme@freebsd and pawel@freebsd for feedback and commit. This is last version that runs with Qt4. As we recently got Qt5 into the ports I will try to update the port soon again. I also have some new ports coming and hope to get around to fixing/updating my other ones. Stay tuned. I am making strong use of RedPorts now. In case you don’t know the service, I really recommend it.

As most of you know, I use FreeBSD as my main Desktop-OS. But I also keep a ArchLinux around that I use (almost exclusively) for gaming. After being disappointed with the way it is headed since a while already, I am now completely fed up with it and am desperately seeking an alternative. [rant]ArchLinux claims to keep it simple, but over the last year or two it has accumulated an increasing about of bloatware, especially all the stuff that Lennart Poettering is spewing out.

I thought I’d cover how I got to my current dual-boot on my Transformer. The main difference to other setups is, that my Transformer’s data partition is encrypted, which makes some steps more difficult.The Goal After following these instructions you will have a regular dual-boot on the transformer, like on any notebook or desktop, i.e. when booting the device you get to select which OS to start. The Android experience is in no way diminished, everything works as before.

This is a pretty serious one: there are no proper E-Mail apps for Android tablets. Yes, I know there is K9, but K9 is only good for phones. Seeing that the K9 people also develop the proprietary (and for-money) Kaitan Mail, which is for tablet and high-resolution phones, I have little hope of seeing K9 being upgraded any time soon to being usable on tablets. The only alternative I have seen so far is the stock Jelly-Bean(and after) Mail program, which looks decent on my screen and which I use right now.

Next weekend we are going to have a small hackathon in Berlin to port/fix/implement disk encryption on various Android devices. Android has full disk encryption since 4.0, but it only works when using regular filesystems, e.g. ext. If you have a device that doesn’t offer proper block devices, because the hardware doesn’t do wear-leveling et cetera, you will probably have YAFFS2 as a file system or something similar that does this on software side.

Ok, so you know that I am using Android, and that I am not too happy with the situation. Ultimately Android is a JAVA-based operating system for phones, so maybe I shouldn’t be surprised that trying to replace a FreeBSD (or proper GNU/Linux) laptop with it, will cause some grief. But, than Android does have some cool things (which I might elaborate on in another post), and the availibility just forces us as political Free Software users to take the OS seriously and care about its users.