Open Hardware/Modding: Retro, RISC-V, Purism, Raspberry Pi, and More
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Ruben Schade ☛ A bit of 486 CPU nostalgia and history
I’ve blogged about my 386 and Pentium-era hardware before, but not the 80486. This post is a bit about the history of the CPU, and my plans for my own 486 build in 2023. Because that’s what rational people do!
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HPC Wire ☛ Chinese Company Developing 64-core RISC-V Chip with Tech from U.S.
Chinese chip maker SophGo is developing a RISC-V chip based on designs from the U.S. company SiFive, which highlights challenges the U.S. government may face in regulating open architecture.
Sophgo is developing the SG2380 high-performance chip based on designs in the RISC-V community. The company also announced a new SG2044 chip that it plans to release next year.
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Purism ☛ Terms of Use
Think back to your last cellphone setup. One of the first things you do is accept a bunch of End User License Agreements. It begs the question, why do you need terms of use for a device you purchased? Shouldn’t you own and control what is done with your device, not the device manufacturer and app creators dictating terms to you?
As defined by CISA, An EULA is a legal contract between you and the software publisher. It spells out the terms and conditions for using the software. An EULA might require you to allow the software publisher or a third party to collect information about your internet activity in exchange for the use of the software. This information could include not only the websites you visit but also information you supply in online transactions, such as your name, address, credit card number, and items purchased. Once collected, the security of this information is out of your control. This is a fact highlighted by the number of recent, high-profile database attacks.This makes many “free apps” on Android and iOS rather expensive in terms of user privacy. They make money by collecting and selling your data.
PureOS is built of freedom-respecting software and protects the end user’s rights to use, modify, and reuse any component for any reason. Moreover, apps do what they are meant to: no creepy data collection or reselling of personal data.This is compared to Android, which hands intellectual property rights to the app creators and enforces user agreements. In a nutshell, you don’t own the apps on an Android phone; you only have the right to use an app, not analyze it, build upon it, or modify it for another purpose.
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Purism ☛ Intel AX200 Wi-Fi/Bluetooth Shipping for New Orders
New orders of Librem 14 and Librem Mini v2 are now shipping with Intel AX200 Wi-Fi and Bluetooth cards, replacing the Qualcomm Atheros AR9xxx series.
Like the Librem 11‘s integrated AX201, the device firmware is provided by the PureBoot Firmware Blob Jail.
We made this decision with care and to promote customer control over their own devices.
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Linux Gizmos ☛ Radxa NX5 development kit starts at $99.00
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Education/Raspberry Pi
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Raspberry Pi ☛ An update on our work in Africa
You might remember that in my last two blog posts, I mentioned that our key objective in the African region was making sure Raspberry Pi products are readily available at the right price point for the huge numbers of hobbyists and educational and industrial users across the continent. Increasing our footprint of Approved Resellers in the region has been central to achieving this objective, and I am pleased to share our current list of African Approved Resellers:
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This brings the count of Approved Resellers in Africa to 14, across ten different countries — over 50% more resellers than a year ago.
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Raspberry Pi ☛ Code Editor update: Support for HTML and mobile devices
New support in our free online Code Editor for mobile and tablet devices, plus for HTML and CSS, so kids can create website projects with it.
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