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This sort of thing cracks me up when juxtaposed with the unshakable belief in Apple "security" held by many Apple users.

Look at the stuff Jeff Atwood frequently gushes about the iPhone's "world class mobile hardware security"... hilarious!

I have noticed that the real hardcore security guys fall into one of three camps: they either don't put anything personal or meaningful on their phones, or they use burners all the time, or they run android phones with custom-compiled kernels. Only the first group uses Apple products.

If the FBI is not completely incompetent, they will always tell people they can't hack the phones they can hack, and vice versa. Obviously.

This is a small interview he did (regarding his setup): http://terry.davis.usesthis.co...

He's been banned over at hackernews, reddit and a few places for posting the messages of God which he divines from an index of phrases and a PRNG. His revelations are often liberally intertwined with racist comments and violent swearing.

He's posed a slight dilemma for a few communities, as no one seems to know how exactly to react to his situation.

Here are a list of his demands in order to make god happy: http://www.templeos.org/Wb/Doc... . These include MS killing SecureBoot and VMware implementing PC speaker beeps.

http://richard.stallman.usesth... has a hint under "What hardware do you use?"

http://richard.stallman.usesthis.com/
From 2010:
"I am using a Lemote Yeelong, a netbook with a Loongson chip and a 9-inch display. This is my only computer, and I use it all the time. I chose it because I can run it with 100% free software even at the BIOS level."
http://www.wired.com/magazine/2009/12/st_essay_china/
"Lemote positions its netbook as the only computer in the world with nothing but free software, right down to the BIOS burned into the motherboard chip that tells it how to boot up."
Vs the US "backdoor-free chip designs" that made the news? http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/09/nsa-router-hacking/
Tailored Access Programs "“templates” for breaking into common brands and models of routers, switches and firewalls."

The BIOS, you say? Stallman's way ahead of you there.

Rob Pike's setup on a Macbook Air with Plan 9 From Userspace is nearly there. See rob.pike.usesthis.com/, and there's no way that a full 9p system shouldn't be usable on a phone or tablet.

From Rob Pike:

Twenty years ago, you expected a phone to be provided everywhere you went, and that phone worked the same everywhere. At a friend's house, or a restaurant, or a hotel, or a pay phone, you could pick up the receiver and make a call. You didn't carry a phone around with you; phones were part of the infrastructure. Computers, well, that was a different story. As laptops came in, people started carrying computers around with them everywhere. The reason was to have the state stored on the computer, not the computer itself. You carry around a computer so you can access its disk.

In summary, it used to be that phones worked without you having to carry them around, but computers only worked if you did carry one around with you. The solution to this inconsistency was to break the way phones worked rather than fix the way computers work.

Actually, the only part of the internet he uses is email, and he fetches and sends that in batches over dial up modem a few times per day, and then he works offline.
http://richard.stallman.usesthis.com

Basically, he is stuck with a tiny little netbook running an obscure linux...I'm sorry, GNU/Linux distro. http://richard.stallman.usesthis.com/

The netbook seems pretty obscure too. The link on his own site to the info page on it returns -

Not Found
The requested URL /english/yeeloong.html was not found on this server.

Basically, he is stuck with a tiny little netbook running an obscure linux...I'm sorry, GNU/Linux distro.

http://richard.stallman.usesthis.com/

dude .. Stallman doesn't use the internet .. he might connect to send/receive email, but that's about it:
http://richard.stallman.usesthis.com/

the problem with this is the FSF is RMS. The man is so ultra radical he uses a Loongson Netbook because that is the ONLY portable that fit his ultra radical idea of "free". So are the FSF gonna demand that school districts by truckloads of underpowered Loongson netbooks to be "free as in freedom"?

And according to TFA anything that runs Windows, OSX, Flash, hell pretty much any current tech except for a completely "free" Linux, excuse me, GNU-Linux, is totally out of your control and therefor they will fight it. problem with that is anybody who has tried to run a completely free Linux like GNUSense knows what a royal PITA that is. You can pretty much give up on off the shelf laptops because half the hardware won't work, so you are talking about having to have the schools design their own laptops to meet the FSF's definition of "free".

So I'm sorry, but the guy is a few bubbles off plumb. His idea of "free" is so radical and strict it excludes pretty much anything you can reasonably buy, and I don't know about you but if a school gave my kid a laptop I'd want it to be running something they might actually have a chance of using in the real world. lets be honest-the odds of a kid coming out of school and working for a business that uses Linux desktops, much less ultra strict Linux software that meets the FSF idea of free, is pretty much zip.

So while I'm completely against the spycam crap, once again instead of asking for a doable solution, like having Ubuntu or another user friendly distro included in the running to lower costs, the FSF uses what could have been a good situation for showing there are choices and turns into into another push for their ultra zealotry that wouldn't work for 99.999% of the population. Yeah, that's really helpful there. Any school district with any common sense will take one look at the FSF and what they consider to be free and write them off as total loonies, which to be fair RMS kinda is.

Wish I could mod this up to 6. This is not that hard to understand. Assume my options are Linux, Mac, Windows.

Linux: It's just not that easy to get everything that you want to use working. Just cause you are a geek doesn't mean that this is your setup: http://richard.stallman.usesthis.com/
Windows: cmd.exe anyone?
Mac: bash, MacPorts to install all the OSS stuff, MS Office since I don't think that responding to client emails by asking them to send it in a "non-secret" format would go over very well (http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/no-word-attachments.html). Also Flash, as much as I hate it it's what you need to watch internet video right now. From a practical standpoint it really is the best of both worlds, and the software options are already great and getting better every day.

You don't need to be open minded or even that smart to see why this is an appealing option.

RMS knows where you can buy a completely FOSS computer