evenwicht

Generally AMD had a poor reputation so indeed AMD chips ended up in budget product lines. But the tables have turned retrospectively because no one realised from 2008 to 2013 that AMD unwittingly had a pro-consumer privacy advantage, however accidental.

Unfortunately nobody ever put AMDs APUs into actually good laptops,

The CPU is part of what makes a machine “good”. You could say Thinkpads were good for their repairability, upgradability, and stability of design across models – exactly the factors that Apple is the poorest at. If good means /rugged/, then in fact there are some ASUS, Acer, and non-thinkpad Lenovos that had a stainless steel chassis (with pre-spychip AMDs).

Conneseurs of the time would not care to track the various models of perceived junk. But retrospectively it started making sense to do so – once knowledge of the spy chips was well established. But this is a very niche community who gives a shit about spy chips. Masses of normies just care about specs and performance which is who we would rely on to document the hardware.

That’s something different. The PSP is separate and runs parallel to the TPM. The two coexist because they serve different purposes. “As of 2025, a TPM is provided by nearly all PC and notebook manufacturers in their products.” So 12 years following the introduction of the PSP, the TPM is still in play.

I thought the TPM was relatively innocuous for those not running oppressive software. But perhaps I should revisit this, considering this from wikipedia:

“In 2015, Richard Stallman suggested replacing the term “trusted computing” with the term “treacherous computing” due to the danger that the computer can be made to systematically disobey its owner if the cryptographical keys are kept secret from them.”

I previously thought TPM had no remote relationships. But remote attestation is certainly an anti-feature if the hardware can talk to the cloud without the control of users on a FOSS platform. Is that the concern that you have? I need to get a handle on this.

Perhaps you need uMatrix to go far enough to trigger their protectionism.

Only works if the phone is modern enough to have usb-c plus you must buy some hardware from Amazon. Fuck that.

If you have a FOSS router laying around, you can simply put it into wifi bridge mode which inverts the wi-fi so it’s used to connect to the uplink, while the ethernet ports serve up the cloud. No need for a phone.

If you have a spare non-FOSS router w/USB and phone, the router may be able to usb-tether to the phone. E.g. a Fritzbox would likely work for that.

The community is the first of its kind. There is nothing in the fedi with the same name, past or present.

Anything made in that period is inaccessible from our local instance,

Why would it be? It makes no sense that age matters. I just arbitrarily searched for a community that was newly created on one instance from another instance, and it was found. I had to wait around 3 seconds because the check is done in realtime.

No, I figured if I could recall the name I could get a nostalgic fix by searching it. I found this:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DESQview

I recall DESQview was much lighter weight and better performing than Windows, but had limitations. I did not recall that the windows were text only within, but that’s starting to fill some holes in my memory.

To be fair, I was quite vague. I think there are multiple right answers… but I recalled one starting w/a ‘D’ and that’s what I was trying to recall.

In those days, DOS was the OS. Windows and DESQview were just window manager apps that ran other apps.

What is that? I don’t think that’s what I had in mind. I think it’s DESQview I was trying to think of. Anyway, not important… it was just driving me nuts I could not remember.