The Antisocial Laptop
scattered-thoughts.netSeems like a feature to me.
Worried about the NSA or other nefarious forces tapping your mic or webcam? Worry not! This mainstream, off-the-shelf laptop will terminate its internet connection the moment someone tries to access its webcam! If that hasn't stopped it, the laptop will dutifully reset itself. Purism ain't got nothin' on this.
No built-in cameras or mics would be an excellent feature, even for phones. I would have already pre-orded the Librem 5, for the same price, if Purism had offered that.
Cameras and mics are useful for videoconferencing calls. Attaching a mic and cam via USB can be done, but that's extra crap you have to haul around in your luggage; it's much more space-efficient to have it built into your laptop.
The answer is really simple, and I'm disappointed that I seem to be the only one who can think of this: why not just have a mechanical toggle switch that turns off these devices? (No, don't let it be a software switch, it needs to actually disconnect the devices from the computer; it can do this with transistor switches but the devices still need to be off the computer's internal USB bus, and there must be no way for software on the computer to reactivate them secretly.)
How would you make phonecalls on the Librem 5 without a mic?
Attach a microphone with USB or Bluetooth, and then turn off or detach it when done. Same for a webcam.
On of the few instances where I imagine a bad design would actually improve security because no malware developer would ever want to endure the headache of trying to reliably exploit these things.
> my mental model of causality was limited to the design of the machine - software interfaces and physical connections - and was completely missing the possibility of non-intentional interactions via the physical world.
I love hearing of stories like this. Similar line of thought to my personal favorite interview question: ""What happens when you type google.com into your browser and press enter?" (Answer in as much depth as you like.)"
When you write software at any level on top of the OS the number of possible causes for bugs starts out at unmanageable. If you allow for unreliable hardware, the possible cause count rises to unthinkable. As a result, I prefer to pretend that hardware doesn't exist when at all possible.
I used to work in firmware, and spending hours chasing down a software bug only to find that it was a hardware issue, and vice versa is a maddening process.
Reminds me of http://web.mit.edu/jemorris/humor/500-miles
> "We can't send mail more than 500 miles," the chairman explained.
I was wondering if this would be about how having your laptop open in a meeting is bad form on a few different levels (distracting, signaling, body language)
Depends on the workplace, and specific behavior.
At my current workplace it is perfectly fine to bring in your laptop and continue work in a meeting. The context is that this is an engineering organization and everybody is cranking on their laptops all day and we expect work to get finished. In a meeting you are expected to pay some attention though, and contribute. It would be rude if a high-level executive were running the meeting though.
It is rude if you are completely engrossed in your laptop when somebody is speaking to you directly. One fellow (now gone) would sometimes ask a question to me and then become engrossed in his laptop when I replied. That was rude, but rare. And it is just basic listening skills.
At my previous workplace we generally didn't allow open laptops in meetings, and that made more sense as there were more meetings with other non-engineering groups that didn't have the same work culture.
If you wouldn't act that way with a high-level executive why act that way with your coworkers- do you respect them less?
It's as easy as saying "Do you mind if I take notes on my laptop while you answer your question" if you really have to.
Again, depends on the workplace. And the meeting context.
I walked into a meeting today and said “some people think it is disrespectful to have your laptop open during a meeting” and everyone laughed. And it was a diverse group, men and women, a wide age range, from different parts of the world. People are professional, respectful and notably productive in that meeting. With laptops.
Regarding a high-level executive, it’s just that those kinds of meetings are not engineering meetings.
I was thinking about getting an XPS, but I could not understand if this is resolved in the latest editions of XPS/precision or not.
I have the XPS 13 9360 and love it.
2 day battery life and zero problems on multiple versions of Fedora over the past 2.5 years.
I have a precision 5520 (although the 5530 is out)
I was going to do like a "sysadmin review" of the thing but I think there's not much appetite for 1.5y+ old laptops.
Anyway, I can give you my take as I've been collecting notes.
The laptop itself is great, the model I have is 32G DDR4 with a Xeon 1505Mv6 (Kaby Lake)
I use it with Archlinux (I also used fedora) and everything "just works", the laptop itself gets quite hot under load and the fans are loud but operationally it's basically perfect with no wifi/audio/$other quirks or bugs that I've had to work around.
I've used pretty much every feature of the laptop under Linux with the exception of the webcam. (which, I physically turned off VIA the BIOS).
I opted for the 9c battery and still get 8hrs of battery, the battery is currently at 91% of it's max design capacity. I use it on battery twice a week and it depletes to 20%. (to give you an estimation on wear).
The keyboard is shallower than I like (coming from a Thinkpad X201s), but it's definitely not cramped and relatively easy to get used to, touchpad performs well, multitouch works out of the box.
I have the Dell Thunderbolt "TB16" dock at home, and on first use it works /relatively/ flawlessly. If you use the docks ethernet then you have to disable offloading of checksumming[0].
The dock also doesn't love when it's disconnected and reconnected. I assumed this was because the TB16 is basically a PCI 4x bridge, but manually forcing linux to remove the PCI devices (and bridge), removing, connecting and performing a rescan of the PCI bus did not make it available again. For now if I need to remove my laptop from the docking cable I do it once with the knowledge that I will have to reboot if I want to be docked again. Which I consider to be a large inconvenience.
The BIOS is great, it has a very wide array of features which are not gimmicks, the UI is a bit painful but it has features such as 'office hours' where the battery will charge fast, but only trickle charge outside of office hours so that you don't wear your battery out too much. Or even capping the full capacity of the battery (since li-ion batteries are stressed when they are at full capacity) -- I haven't found a way to edit these values live yet, but I'm sure it's possible to edit the BIOS from the userland in linux.
I miss having an Ethernet jack, but not much you can do these days to get one. The compliment of ports is healthy and overall I'm very happy with the machine. I just wish the dock wasn't so fickle.