[conspire] Quiet, Freedom-compatible NAT/firewall/misc box?

[Rick Moen]

As a brief follow-up on this one bit:

> The lower end, which is what low-power is considered to be, rightly or
> wrongly, is dominated within the hardware industry by the
> embedded-computing mindset (that surrounds ARM).  As Don Marti will tell
> you (he having been Editor of _Embedded Linux Journal_ for some years,
> the embedded-computing offshoot of _Linux Journal_, secrecy and
> proprietary components are totally routines in the embedded space.  GPL
> enforcement against embedded-computing hardware companies typically
> fails for a number of reasons including chipset churn being so rapid
> that the violator can just stall for a few months until the model in
> question gets EOLed and then says 'Hey, we've ceased violating.'  Rapid
> chipset churn also means that reverse-engineering is less fruitful
> because so many things are moving targets.

The very high rate of chipset churn is related to another aspect:  In
embedded computing (as an industry), the expectation is that nothing
needs to be upgradeable, because you're expected to just throw the thing
away and get a newer one, rather than upgrade it.

E.g., normal non-developer people with Android smartphones aren't
expected to ever upgrade Android.  They're expected to get new 'phones.
And this mindset is absolutely routine in ARM-based computing, which is
basically embedded computing.

So, those of us who expect to run secure, fixed, updated kernels are
regarded as freaks and outside the target market.

Smartphones and tablets are likely to remain security nightmares, for
that reason alone, and the mindset stands in the way IMO of the hardware
being good for Linux use.