I think your post was lost in translation on me. Were you not asking about
free software friendly wifi chipsets/adapters? Your title is "searching for
open wifi". I didn't think you were talking about searching for an
unencrypted wireless access point. 'open' was probably not the best choice of
words here.
The Gluglug X60 is a refurbished Lenovo laptop which has digital restrictions
removed (via an alternative free BIOS), but I didn't say anything about that
in this thread so I'm not sure what your getting at or why your putting
ThinkPenguin down.
In the other thread I did comment on Lenovo laptops being a bad choice of
laptop to get for a variety of reasons. I was not specific to Lenovo although
did point them out as leading the way in taking away our freedoms. This is no
different than what I've stated in many many threads (long before Gluglug was
even imagined). HP, Lenovo, Apple, Sony, Dell, and Toshiba are poor choices
for running GNU/Linux due to these companies support for digital restrictions
and/or other proprietary components.
I think the situation the community has been put in is repulsive and
intolerable. People are being forced to choose between two terrible
situations. Gluglug didn't have the resources or a choice in the matter and
I've refrained from saying anything negative. The reason we're in this
situation where laptops from companies that are hostile to freedom are being
utilized is that the people who are doing the non-trivial task of porting
don't care-or are otherwise being paid by people who don't care. The work
Gluglug is doing is more at the end of all this. I'm not sure if Gluglug is
helping move things forward or not. What I do know is porting coreboot is a
non-trivial task and its the work others have done which is why Lenovo
laptops were chosen to be freed by Gluglug. Like ThinkPenguin Gluglug's made
a choice (for better or worse) on certain aspects of the projects they're
working on and unfortunately there were no good choices in this case.
The best one to go (or have gone) with is probably the Leemote from a few
years back. It's not exactly a full fledged laptop though mind you. It's a
netbook. Unlike the Gluglug though nobody is going to recognize it as a
Lenovo and thus it is not going to be promoting a company which is taking
away our freedoms. Plus the company making the Leemotes wasn't implementing
digital restrictions. Even if they weren't shipping with 100% free software
(I think they shipped with Debian which was/is a non-free promoter to some
extent, but then had a 100% free distribution, gNewSense, and maybe Parabola
which worked with it). In any event the hardware with the older Leemote could
be semi-easily freed.
I think we need to move away from x86 to get a totally free laptop and even
then certain parts would probably be non-free. The parts I'm thinking of I'm
pretty confident are still non-free in the Gluglug. If they are not it is due
to the age of these models- but am pretty confident that there aren't any
100% free parts for some components despite the age and thus they must be
running some non-free software. There are other components (besides the BIOS)
which have code. Keyboard controllers, hard drives, and other bits of
non-free micro code abound all over the place we do not normally think about.
One example is a component that (in at least some, probably all Lenovos)
apparently spys on the user and reports back to a server somewhere. I do not
have the full set of information on it. I've only briefly talked to one of
the hackers which examined it. This over the weekend (I was attending HOPE in
NYC) and I'm not perusing more info. If/when that information is published
you can read about it then. I'm sure people will be talking about it here as
it is exactly the kind of thing the community is concerned about. It sounded
to me exactly like what was discovered by the Replicant project in Android,
but in this case was in a BIOS-like component on these systems.
