by Carla Schroder
Managing Editor
There is a saying that “Freedom of the press is limited to those
who own one” (attributed to A. J. Liebling,
one of the best journalists and essayists ever.) Thanks to the
Internet, more people than ever can be their own publishers. This
has caused considerable consternation in the ranks of professionals
of all kinds: journalists, scholars, scientists, and so forth, who
aren’t happy at the idea of all of us rabble invading their turfs.
Which brings me to another saying: “Nature abhors a vacuum”. If
there weren’t all kinds of gaping voids and unmet needs left by the
professionals, we rabble wouldn’t be impelled to invade.
Governments and businesses aren’t very comfortable with this
either, because things they want to keep secret are uncovered and
leaked to the world. I would have some sympathy for them if their
ideas about what should be secret weren’t so Draconian and
one-sided- they have no problem with spread-eagling our lives at
their slightest whims, but heaven forfend they should be restricted
or held accountable for their actions in any way.
I got to thinking about this because of the Foxconn
Deliberately Sabotaging Their BIOS to Destroy Linux ACPI
article. Technically this isn’t an article, but a post in some
forum somewheres, and grammatically it doesn’t meet even the most
lenient standards. A lot of folks would be put off by the author’s
name- “TheAlmightyCthulhu”. For all we know that’s his or her real
name. So by “professional” standards it is unworthy of notice.
Fortunately we rabble measure by a different yardstick, and can
see the real value of this post. Which is some random computer user
somewhere on the planet had the expertise to dissect and analyze a
BIOS flaw, and then had the best bully pulpit of all time, the
Internet, to share his findings. Despite the rise of this brave new
police state era, we don’t need to know anything about
theAlmightyCthulhu. We don’t need his home address, or work
history, or DNA and fingerprints. We don’t need to know who his
family is and a record of everything they’v ever done. All we need
to know is in that forum post- if the information is true and
correct, it stands on its own. He even gives instructions for
reproducing his work.
theAlmightyCthulhu’s conclusion that it is a deliberate ploy to
sabotage non-Microsoft operating systems is debatable, but
plausible. It wouldn’t be the first time. Remember, even though
Foxconn claims that Linux is not officially supported, that is not
the issue- ACPI is a standard, and apparently Foxconn has broken
it.
Whither the Pros?
So why does it take some unknown Ubuntu user to uncover this sort
of thing? We end-lusers have cursed buggy, hostile BIOSes for years
now. We have long suspected that they have quality problems, and
that they contain nasty little surprises for non-Windows operating
systems, but didn’t know how to find out for certain. We can infer
a lot from poor behavior, but that’s not enough to motivate a
reluctant vendor to do anything about it. Then along comes
theAlmightyCthulhu with a mini-lesson on disassembling and patching
a buggy BIOS. It doesn’t look so mysterious after all- he did it
without any special hardware, just special, easily-available
software.
Of Course We Must Complain
On a related note, this story got Slashdotted, and as usual the
comments are a dizzying blend of idiotic, trollish, and
knowledgeable, with a predictably large percentage of “Quit
complaining, you were stupid to buy Foxconn in the first place.”
I’m puzzled as to how a person is going to know that a certain
brand is inferior when complaining is frowned upon- what is it with
these people? They think there are no victims, only morons. We have
every right to raise heck with vendors who dump shoddy products on
us, and to publicize defects when the vendor refuses to acknowledge
or fix them. There is zero chance of them improving if we never
tell them what we want. You can’t easily avoid Foxconn components
in any case because they are an OEM supplier to many big
name brands, including Dell, HP, Apple, and Microsoft.
Kudos to the pushy people who don’t take guff from vendors and
manufacturers, and who share useful information. Information is
power- that’s why NDAs (non-disclosure agreements) and paranoia are
so endemic.