Happy Hardware Freedom Day

Blug_fred writes "For the first year the Digital Freedom Foundation (ex-SFI) is organizing Hardware Freedom Day. With 66 events worldwide split over 36 countries, they are not yet covering the whole world but it is a good start. So if you have always been wondering about hacking your own stuff, be it a piece of wood or some more complex electronic gears then it is time to join an open door day type of event. Sixty-six events is definitely less that the total number of hackerspaces around the world and you can check for other events happening in a hackerspace near you if none are celebrating today. Hopefully they will join the movement next year."

Comments

Meh

[Anonymous Coward]

I prefer the other holiday we have scheduled for today. Tomorrow I'll care.

Re:Meh

[crutchy]

why don't they just come clean and call it "bash microsoft and uefi day" so that people won't turn up to these events and wonder what the hell is going on

Today, as a holiday, is taken.

[Anonymous Coward]

Google 420.

4/20?

[Urza9814]

So who's the idiot who decided put this on 4/20? :D

Re:4/20?

[Anonymous Coward]

This! I can understand a bunch of spoiled white suburban kids smoking pot to honor Hitler, but this is ridiculous.

Re:4/20?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's the let out the "blue smoke" day! Some messed up hardware while some messed up their life...

Re:4/20?

[xanadu113]

Yeah, that George Soros and Richard Branson, they really messed up their lives, smoking pot. Such bums!

Re:4/20?

[Ruedii]

I guess you could say both are relevant on the basis that they are protesting misguided laws designed to protect us from ourselves.

Re:4/20?

[Anonymous Coward]

So who's the idiot who decided put this on 4/20? :D

Not everyone in the world is an American pot-smoking teenager with an inflated sense of entitlement, the morals of a sociopath and the belief that they are the most fascinating and progressive people in the world.

Of all the drugs to legalise, cannabis is the last I'd choose. Smackheads, coke fiends, ecstasy-wankers, speed-twats, crack-suiciders and the rest can go fucking kill themselves as quickly as they like in the privacy of their own homes. But weed-addicts just will not shut up about their drug of choice. They are the most boring people on the planet, making train spotters and gun-geeks look like rounded, vibrant human beings by comparison.

Re:4/20?

[tehcyder]

Yeah, that George Soros and Richard Branson, they really messed up their lives, smoking pot. Such bums!

So? F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway were great writers, and alcoholics.

Their alcoholism didn't make them great writers, nor did it make them better writers. The two qualities are orthoganal.

There are (generally ex-) heroin addicts who become successful artists, musicians and so on. That doesn't mean that becoming a junkie is a good idea if you want to become an artist or musician.

Happy *** day

[Dunge]

Everybody can call every day something special. I say it's fucking air can spray day.

Re:Happy *** day

[Anonymous Coward]

i have a shop with a mill and a lathe, a scope, a fine pitch iron, a torch, and few tons of material

every single day out of the year i try to eke a living by building things. cutting threads and gears, welding
structural frames, repairing old shit. i work 80 hours a week, and my hands are cut to ribbons

i don't need a 'day', just throw me a bone. maybe the ability to see a doctor

Re:Happy *** day

[tehcyder]

i have a shop with a mill and a lathe, a scope, a fine pitch iron, a torch, and few tons of material

every single day out of the year i try to eke a living by building things. cutting threads and gears, welding structural frames, repairing old shit. i work 80 hours a week, and my hands are cut to ribbons

i don't need a 'day', just throw me a bone. maybe the ability to see a doctor

Why don't you just get a job instead?

yep

[friedman101]

Ah yes, 4/20 - the day I finally free up all my ceramic hardware

Question

[Parker Lewis]

Is there a list of free spec hardware?

Re:Question

[Ruedii]

I don't have a complete list.

However, a lot of hardware has quite open specifications for making drivers, even if open source drivers aren't available yet.
(For instance all Radeon hardware has had complete developer's documentation released, but the Open Source drivers for the latest cards are far from complete.)

Confused

[PNutts]

I visited the site and am not sure what they're talking about. All I can say is there is a lot of non-open hardware in their photos. Oh, well... Time to free my monitor from displaying this bullshit.

Low response very disturbing

[SuperKendall]

"Hardware Freedom" day is a great idea, to teach people all over how to free devices they have they may think are not free.

And the place I would naturally go to see interesting reports of what people are doing is Slashdot.

But after a whole day only 15 replies? Is this saying something about Slashdot, or about the userbase? There were a lot of comments in articles covering topics like CLANG, so it doesn't seem like there are a lot less people on Slashdot today - just few interested in hardware at all...

For anyone throwing up hands because they think all devices today are closed off and hacking is impossible, read the book "Hacking the XBox" if you can. It gives a lot of great insight into how people still can analyze even modern apparently closed devices, and approaches to modern reverse engineering.

Re:Low response very disturbing

[hairyfeet]

Maybe because too many have turned it into as another poster put it "Hey lets bash" day although I would say it goes further than just bashing MSFT and UEFI but pretty much bashing anybody that doesn't follow the teaching of the great GNUcious himself RMS.

If you want people to care you have to stress the positives, we hear enough negative shit all damned day, last thing we want is to hear it on the weekend. What does open hardware do for ME, how does it help ME, what advantages are there to open hardware when its damned rare that my hardware actually last longer than the OS is supported?

Frankly every time I've seen an article on open hardware it quickly goes negative, it ends up being about "doom scenarios" like the way the GPL guys bash the BSD guys with these "ZOMFG they'll take ur stuff!" scenarios that never happen. I mean if all you care about is staying off of UEFI just buy a board off the coreboot list and call it a day. Pretty much all the AMD boards and chipsets are covered but support for Intel and Via is climbing so you have plenty of choices.

But if the ONLY positive you can come up with is hacking, something done by less than ohh..I'd say MAYBE 2% of the population if that? Well give it up Chuck, as the other 98% really don't give a shit. I mean why should they when the thing they bought does what they want or they wouldn't have bought the thing?

Put yourself in the role of selling this idea, I'm the public...what do you have to offer me? My netbook is 4 years old, my desktop is 3 years old and both do what I want, why would I risk possibly bricking the thing by hacking the hardware? And why would I care about hacking the Xbox? After all it plays games which is what we want it to do, what advantages does it give me?

Because frankly I think this whole thing isn't really well thought out, not if you expect the public to give a crap. After all they are more than happy to buy apple devices which are some of the most locked down, especially compared to Android, so you REALLY gotta sell this if you want anybody to care and from as few hits as this page got even geeks really don't give a shit.

wow!

[Anonymous Coward]

So someone can hack my lame 2.3 Android tablet like to be in a state that works again? XD

Re:wow!

[Jae686]

Or my Eken M001 with android 1.6. Oh wait, that thing NEVER worked properly!

No warning means no attendees

[Anonymous Coward]

Telling us that this is happening right now is not very helpful. If there had been a Slashdot article about it a week ago then I would have planned to attend an event.

Also hack your Tivo

[girlinatrainingbra]

I've updated the hard-drives in my parents' old Tivo series 2 machines. I don't have access to a series one. I wish I could update the software in these machines with useful things. And Tivo is what ultimately led to GPLv3, with the "Tivoization clause" included to disallow the end-run which Tivo made around the GPL v2 license.
.
As to the gradual decline in hardware/tech/software postings on /., I'm there with you. Look at my historical posts to see my rants about how the good tech topics barely get hits while the political and the anti-XYZ-software-company articles get most of the flames and hits... But every now and then, there are some interesting tech responses that still keep this site worth-while. At least they are still posting front-page articles about topics like this, even if many people don't post on them. When they stop posting tech like this, it'll be time to leave and let someone else turn off the lights after we're gone!

Re:Hardware is useless without a HOST file... apk

[Ruedii]

I've always thought they should replace the single "hosts" file with a "hosts.d" directory.

This would reduce conflicts between programs that edit the file, and improve flexibility.

p.s. we don't need 2 paragraphs about why all your posts are currently downgraded. (A single one line is fine.) Furthermore, you don't need to make such a long argument on your main post either. More words just make it seem you like to hear yourself talk.

Jeremiah Cornelius: Grow up

[Anonymous Coward]

Keep embarassing yourself Jeremiah Cornelius http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3581857&cid=43276741 since you posted that using your registered username by mistake (instead of your usual anonymous coward submissions by the 100's the past 2-3 months now on slashdot) giving away it's you spamming this forums almost constantly, just as you have in the post I just replied to.

Re:Jeremiah Cornelius: Grow up

[Anonymous Coward]

Shut up, Paul.

Bashing?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not convinced that this is about bashing anything, secureboot is a problem which it would be nice to make consumers aware of, but ultimately they'll never care and we're only likely to scare them in the wrong ways, this event seems far more targetted at "makers", people fiddling with 3d printers and arduinos and releasing their designs freely, i do wonder where they stand on the raspberry pi and its little vc black box, though.

Re:Bashing?

[hairyfeet]

Except Secureboot isn't a threat to shit, it even says clearly that it has to be able to be turned off it X86. Wanna know the REAL reason for Secureboot? Go to TPB and look up "Win 7 all versions" and you'll see why there is Secureboot, its because the pirates have managed to come up with a version of Win 7 that not only passes WGA but even changes the wallpaper on install so that to the end user its just another OEM box. Now will it work? Kinda doubt it, they had all kinds of nasty DRM in Vista and all it did was help make Vista unpopular.

But if its about the makers then it should focus on the makers and have a name that tells you who the target is. the fact that the one i was responding to was lamenting that nobody on /. seemed to care makes me think they WANT to have broad appeal but they simply haven't given it enough thought.

Re:Bashing?

[Anonymous Coward]

Piracy seems like an unlikely motivation for a disableable secure boot system, operating system piracy has always been very useful to them, but their attempts to make piracy a little less comfortable for less skilled users, on the other hand, has helped to increase the popularity of linux distributions among normal users, this is clearly a worry to them and something that should also become uncomfortable for that user group, locked down hardware and mandatory signing of software by microsoft are clearly perfect approaches to this(to be fair, i believe that it's also an honest attempt to do something about rootkits). non x86 hardware is a growth area, microsoft are well aware of this, secureboot here helps to ensure that they're selling an inseparable combined hardware and software platform that can produce revenue through content sales, rather than neat hardware without enough of a markup to be genuinely profitable, with a disposable os that could be replaced with desktop linux or android, thus bypassing the winrt ecosystem they're building.
Vista was unpopular for a variety of reasons, copy protection probably wasn't a major factor.

Re:Bashing?

[hairyfeet]

Really? MSFT already owns more than 90% of the desktop market so pretty much their ONLY real shot at growth will be by wiping out the pirates. hell in some countries you are looking at over 50% Windows piracy figures.

Now is this the way I personally would have went after it? Fuck no, i think there is a MUCH easier way and what is more being a little shop guy i could see it actually working here on the ground and that was Win 7 HP for $50 (or the equivalent in whatever country you are talking about) only I would have even went one further by offering Win 7 Starter for $35 to encourage those with older machines to switch As long as Windows Home was offered at $50 I saw piracy disappear, all the boxes crossing my desk were 100% legit. The SECOND Windows Home went back up to $100? I started seeing $200 PCs with $400 copies of Windows Ultimate installed.

Secureboot is just MSFT's way to try to fuck the pirates while keeping prices high, Secureboot lets the BSA spot which systems need a closer look at the license quickly and easily (because your average Windows user isn't gonna kill SB as it doesn't affect them) but without it I could sit 100 boxes in front of you and tell you that 30% are pirate versions and it would take ages to figure out which was what because as I said the modern pirate version not only passes WGA but will silently hide any updates to WGA so that the end user will frankly never know they are using a pirated OS. This is a pretty large problem when it comes to small shops and online sellers, your average guy simply has no way to tell if its legit or fake, I saw an interview once where Ballmer held up a pirated version they seized off a boat and even the holo-sticker looked 100% legit.

But if you think Linux is gaining squat I have some magic beans you might be interested in as its been flatline for more than 3 years now. the reason why is simple, Linux devs are prima donna assholes that not only don't talk to each other but have the WORST timing ever, look at how right as Vista was being released they killed the feature rich and stable KDE 3 and Gnome 2 for some buggy as shit replacements along with gutting ALSA for Pulse that to this very day is more likely to break sound on update as not. This is why NO B&M store carries a single Linux unit and why everyone from Asus to Walmart who have tried offering Linux on retail machines ended up walking away. Hell even I tried my hand at it, figuring a new Linux would be better than a decade old WinXP..its really not, sorry. I ended up losing money on the deal because of all the after sale support due to shit breaking. The final straw was when I went to the forums and was told several times to disable all updates including security patches.

Honestly the only place Ballmer has to worry about Linux is in the server room and its his own damned fault as they have been gouging the living shit out of the business market (as one poster noted here not too long ago for the datacenter edition he is paying over $16,000 for a single license and then crazy prices for CALs on top of it) which leads to corps being willing to pay some Linux guru 6 figures to deal with the bullshit that is Linux, not to mention the fact that since most servers are run headless all the BS that goes with Linux such as the buggy sound and graphics drivers and DE flip flopping really doesn't come into play.

But even with all the money Google has spent and OEMs offering the entry models at HALF of what their entry Windows models are ChromeOS hasn't gained shit, Ubuntu hasn't gained shit, if you want I could post the netstat charts for the last 4 years and show you Linux has been dead in the consumer space but I have a feeling you already know this. Nope Secureboot makes it easier to spot the pirates while giving the BSA something to look for in audits, again not the way I would have gone after pirates but its a free country and if MSFT wants to risk losing customers or having Win 8 flop thanks to DRM? That is their choice and as long as its trivial to disable who cares.