Forgot to CC the mailing list. ----- Forwarded message ----- From: "[email protected]" <[email protected]> To: "[email protected]" <[email protected]> Cc: Sent: Sun, 2 Aug 2020 at 4:54 pm Subject: Re: Obfuscated Code I am a beginner to reverse engineering, but I want to contribute by helping to make libre replacements for blobs instead of doing CTF challenges. I have a laptop internal Wi-Fi (2.4GHz, and 5.0GHz) and Bluetooth card which doesn't work due to missing free firmware. Along with the AMD GPUs mentioned recently (I want to buy a RX590), I want to ask what is high-priority. Seeing as I have the above mentioned hardware and missing Wi-Fi/Bluetooth firmware seems to be a very common issue, I think that may be a good starting point, even if the code is a loadable module or driver, rather than firmware in the source tree itself. Please don't expect me to make much progress quickly; we very much need more people to help. On Sun, 2 Aug 2020 at 4:07 pm, Alexandre Oliva<[email protected]> wrote: On Jul 24, 2020, "[email protected]" <[email protected]> wrote:
> I believe in the past I have heard that linux-libre removes obfuscated > code from mainline linux. That was presumably in reference to disguising dumps of pieces of binary firmware code as configuration data in arrays of bytes. This was common practice in Linux when we started. It has been largely deprecated there, in favor of loadable firmware files, later moved to a distribution outside the kernel Linux source tree. There are very few remaining examples. Though this move helped reduce accidental infringement, it did nothing to solve the actual software freedom problem: the non-Free firmware programs still exist, and are most often still required by drivers. The best way to solve that is to reverse-engineer those blobs, and develop Free versions of them. People who have the skills, the interest and the availability to engage in such tasks have been very rare findings. -- Alexandre Oliva, happy hacker https://FSFLA.org/blogs/lxo/ Free Software Activist GNU Toolchain Engineer
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