[Arm-netbook] ARM netbook

[lkcl luke]

On Wed, Jul 4, 2012 at 1:25 AM,  <freebirds at hushmail.com> wrote:

> simply unscrewing a screw. The 3G needs to merely be an empty SIM card slot.
> I definitely would not want WiMAX or something similar that cannot be
> removed and could be discretely activated by an abuser, hacker, government,
> etc.

 right.  what i mentioned earlier about 3G is therefore very very
relevant to you.  you can *NOT* trust 3G, GSM or any other cellular
modem to be unhackable.  they are *designed* to allow arbitrary code
execution through over-the-air transfers.

 just as a reminder: that includes mobile phones *as well* as 3G modems.

 i understand fully about the distro thing.  whilst openembedded can
do a full build of angstrom+kde and verify its checksums along the
way, it's several days worth of arseing about.  with debian you have a
pretty much inviolate GPG web of trust back to the developers, and
thus have a cast-iron guaranteed way to ensure that the packages have
not been interfered with.  i'm not sure, but there *should* be a way
to verify the integrity of a system, but you would need to boot up
(firmware, u-boot, kernel) from "known good" / "trustworthy" media in
order to be absolutely sure (i.e. follow the standard procedures of
chkrootkit but extended to cater for the chosen ARM-based platform)

 l.