Transporter

I take things from point A to point B

  • 73 Posts
  • 32 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
Cake day: June 17th, 2023
  • TransporterOPtoPop!_OS (Linux)•How does coreboot manage to be better than BIOS/EFI, besides being open-source?English
    12·
    2 years ago

    There are two main aspects to coreboot in my opinion that differentiate it from other firmware ecosystems:

    The first is a strong push towards having a single code base for lots of boards (and, these days, architectures). Historically, most firmware is build in a model I like to call “copy&adapt”: The producer of a device picks the closest reference code (probably a board support package), adapts it to work with their device, builds the binary and puts it on the device, then moves to the next device.

    Maintenance is hard in such a setup: If you find a bug in common code you’ll have to backport the fix to all these copies of the source code, hope it doesn’t break anything else, and build all these different trees. Building a 5 year old coreboot tree on a modern OS is quite the exercise, but many firmware projects are near impossible to build under such circumstances.

    With coreboot, we encourage developers to push their changes to the common tree. We maintain it there, but we also expect the device owner (either the original developer or some interested user) in helping with that, at least with testing but more ideally with code contributions to keep it up to current standards of the surrounding code. A somewhat maintained board is typically brought up to latest standards in less than a day if a new build is required, and that means that everybody has an easy time to do a new build when necessary.

    The second aspect is our separation of responsibilities: Where BIOS mandates the OS-facing APIs and not much else (with lots of deviation in how that standard is implemented), UEFI (and other projects like u-boot) tends to go the other extreme: with UEFI you buy into everything from build system, boot drivers, OS APIs and user interface. If you need something that only provides 10% of UEFI you’ll be having a hard time.

    With coreboot we split responsibilities between 2 parts: coreboot does the hardware initialization (and comes with its build system for the coreboot part, and drivers, but barely any OS APIs and no user interface). The payload is responsible for providing interfaces to the OS and user (and we can use Tianocore to provide a UEFI experience on top of coreboot’s initialization, or seabios, grub2, u-boot, Linux, or any program you build for the purpose of running as payload).

    The interface between coreboot and the payload is pretty minimal: the payload’s entry point is well-defined, and there’s a data table in memory that describes certain system properties. In particular the interface defines no code to call into (including: no drivers), which we found complicates things and paints the firmware architecture into a corner.

    To help payload developers, coreboot also provides libpayload, a set of minimal libraries implementing libc, ncurses and various other things we found useful, plus standard drivers. It’s up to each coreboot user/vendor if they want to use that or rather go for whatever else they want.

    credit: [deleted] user on Reddit.

  • TransporterOPtoProton •How Many Free Accounts Can Someone Create?English
    1·
    2 years ago

    I read between the lines, that you are aware of TOS.

    So yes you can have ONE free account.

    Each family member can have their own free account.

    Should you have problems, you can contact support.

    Or some says:

    You can have more than one free account, provided you don’t create too many, and there is no official limit on how many are too many.

    a few answers given by Proton Mail Team in the past to that recurring question :

    While you can have more than one free account — say, a backup email address — having too many free accounts is not considered an acceptable use of our service. Also please note that attempting to create multiple accounts will trigger more difficult verification methods such as Email or SMS.

    https://www.reddit.com/r/ProtonMail/comments/kvym8o/is_it_allowed/gj3nlp6 (beware!)

    As free accounts are subsidized by paying users, you cannot have too many free accounts. If you would like to have multiple addresses, you need to get a ProtonMail Plus or Professional plan.

    https://www.reddit.com/r/ProtonMail/comments/lh2s23/help_me_my_email_was_disabled_due_to_abuse_and/gmvaxuo (beware!)

    Generally, having multiple free accounts is not considered an acceptable use of our service to prevent abuse. However, if you don’t use ProtonMail for bulk-signups, creating free accounts for others, sending spam, and other prohibited activities listed in our Terms and Conditions, you have no reason to be worried.

    https://www.reddit.com/r/ProtonMail/comments/latls7/re_free_accounts_and_pricing/gluioph (beware!)

    Generally, having multiple free accounts is not considered an acceptable use of our service to prevent abuse. However, if you don’t use ProtonMail for bulk-signups, creating free accounts for others, sending spam, and other prohibited activities listed in our Terms and Conditions, you have no reason to be worried.

    Alternatively, our Plus plan allows you to add five additional email addresses to your existing one, making it easier to have various addresses and manage them from a single mailbox.

    https://www.reddit.com/r/ProtonMail/comments/mlkewt/multiple_protonmail_accounts/gto3fad

    As we point out in our FAQ, generally, having multiple free accounts is not considered an acceptable use of our service, as it has often been misused and abused. However, if you don’t use ProtonMail for bulk-signups, creating free accounts for others, sending spam, and other prohibited activities listed in our Terms and Conditions, you have no reason to be worried.

    https://www.reddit.com/r/ProtonMail/comments/oaeyjp/is_multiple_accounts_prohibited/h3jahf7 (beware!)

  • TransporterOPMtoVeracrypt•What is more secure Veracrypt or Cryptomator?
    2·
    2 years ago

    Looking at the published feature set of Cryptomator, it seems to be exclusively a file-based container. Whereas VeraCrypt additionally offers partition (including the system partition to protect the OS) and whole drive encryption.

    Creating a quick Cryptomator vault, I noticed the key generation was automatic, VeraCrypt includes user-based input (mouse movement) as part of its key generation. In my opinion, done right / taken seriously, this offers better entropy.

    VeraCrypt offers 15 encryption and 4 hash algorithms to choose from.

    VeraCrypt also offers PIM (Personal Iterations Multiplier) modification / customization.

    VeraCrypt can use a keyfile.

    VeraCrypt offers hidden volumes for plausible deniability.

    Looks like Cryptomator sets up a fairly deep directory structure, creating an encrypted file for each file added to the vault. This eludes to not only how many files are in the vault but also reveals size and date/time information. VeraCrypt’s container is just a single file of predetermined size, date/time stamp update is optional but off by default.

    I believe these items make VeraCrypt more secure but at the cost of requiring the user to be more sophisticated.

    I’m not a hater, Cryptomator’s ease of use may offer encryption to someone who may not otherwise leverage it and that is valuable.

    Depending upon use case, performance may come into play which may be worth measuring.

  • TransporterOPMtoVeracrypt•What is more secure Veracrypt or Cryptomator?
    1·
    2 years ago

    The two programs are used for different things. VeraCrypt encrypts your disk, Cryptomator encrypts per file. It means the file/folder structure is not encrypted, but at the same time you can sync encrypted files over the cloud. VeraCrypt doesn’t encrypt files on the file system itself, it encrypts the whole file system.

  • TransporterOPMtoVeracrypt•What is more secure Veracrypt or Cryptomator?
    1·
    2 years ago

    Cryptomator is first and foremost meant to backup files on a cloud service, adding end-to-end encryption.

    Vera Crypt is meant to encrypt a bunch of files, a disk partition or a system disk locally.

    Both of them are needed, but their use case is completely different. You could use Vera Crypt to encrypt files before backing them up in the cloud, but it would be very inconvenient.

    I think you can use Cryptomator for local encryption as well, but I’m not sure how it compares with Vera Crypt in that use.

  • TransporterOPtoFramework Laptop Community@lemmy.ml•BIOS Settings
    4·
    2 years ago

    As a side note about BIOS

    Framework’s official stance on Coreboot:

    “As this keeps popping up even after multiple responses, let this be the “official” response so we can put this to bed, at least for now.

    It is not that Framework “does not care” about Coreboot, it is that we have a very long list of priorities for a very small team (we are less than 50 globally and have existed for less than 3 years) and while being able to support Coreboot would be fantastic, it is just not a priority for Framework right now given the sheer number of initiatives that we have to launch now and in the immediate future. We pivot from one NPI (New Product Introduction) to the next, back to back, and have since our first product launch. Our firmware/BIOS team is small and is supplemented by an outside 3rd Party partner. The consistent, “well, just hire more people then” is unfortunate as those in the know understand that’s not how it works, especially for a small, private company trying to exist in a very mature market segment. While tech in general is shrinking, layoffs are in the news constantly, and global economies are getting hit hard, we’re still here, releasing new products, and working hard to support everything we’ve already launched.

    If and when we decide to add Coreboot to the docket of active projects, we’ll let the Community know, but if you want Framework to continue to exist, and you believe in our mission, we’ll have to continue to ask for your patience. If not having Coreboot is a blocker for you, personally, to join the Framework Family, we do hope that we can earn your business in the future.”

    https://community.frame.work/t/responded-coreboot-on-the-framework-laptop/791/239

  • TransporterOPtoFramework Laptop Community@lemmy.ml•As a casual user will I notice the difference between the Ryzen 5 vs 7?
    1·
    2 years ago

    the 7640u and 7840u are both rated for a default TDP of 28w, although it is configurable as low as 15w by the laptop manufacturer.

    That reference seems to be using the default for the 7840u, whereas they’re using the configurable minimum for the 7640u, which is misleading.

    The 7840u and 7640u are actually the exact same chip, just the 7640u has 2 CPU cores and 4 GPU cores disabled.

    Ryzen is pretty good at putting cores to sleep when they aren’t needed, so when at idle or running a load that can’t take advantage of those cores the 7840u should behave pretty much the same as a 7640u and have similar power consumption.

    Then when under heavy loads both CPUs will likely hit whatever the maximum power the cooler can handle is, however having more cores each running at lower power (ex. 7840u) generally performs better than fewer cores each running at higher power (ex. 7640u).

    So under heavy loads the 7840u should actually have better performance with similar power consumption, however the better performance allows it to complete the task quicker and get back to low power idle sooner, overall improving battery life.

    So theoretically the 7840u should overall have similar to slightly better battery life than the 7640u assuming all software is implemented properly (I was an early adopter of Ryzen 3000 desktop CPUs and it took several driver/BIOS updates before it would reliably put unneeded cores to sleep and significantly reduce idle/low load power consumption).

    ++

    credit: u/RiftBladeMC on Reddit and @[email protected] on Lemmy.

    original link: https://old.reddit.com/r/framework/comments/13dz5nb/comment/jjnv1nq/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

Moderates