Why wifi free drivers important?
I know that Trisquel doesn't use any non-free drivers or software by default
I am interested in wifi drivers, since they are some problems with using wifi cards very often.
Why is using non-free drivers for WiFi cards so important?
Is there any particular reason (as security issues), related to better not using non-free drivers above their free equivalents?
Best regards
Because it takes away your freedom, in the same way that any other non-free program would.
I'm rather asking about some specific forms of my freedom violations. Like, for example, non-free software for WiFi card devices have some known practicies of sneaking on any of my data, to manage it in some hidden way or to collect any information in the background.
I am a translator!
You were asking about security issues, you can find an example at https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2017/04/over-air-exploiting-broadcoms-wi-fi_4.html. From what I understand, the researchers found a way to send code to the wifi chip and trigger its execution. In https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2017/04/over-air-exploiting-broadcoms-wi-fi_11.html they explain how they managed to use it to write to the kernel memory on the host CPU. When you can do that, I guess you can do anything (like steal keys). In that research, they used bugs in the wifi firmware, the bugs did not look intentional.
I am aware of backdoors that were discovered in non-free router software and looked intentional. From what I have read, this could have been made for things supposed to be useful for the user, but it could be used for anything, like sneak on users. While I have not heard about backdoors directly in the wifi firmware, this does not mean it would not be possible to make some. If a backdoor or malicious behaviour is triggered by some very special event, it may be nearly impossible to discover.
Free software is not automatically secure or bug-free but any malicious feature or backdoor can be quickly discovered and anyone with programming knowledge can help identifying and fixing bugs.
I simply don't trust closed source code and try to use as little as possible. When I am able to choose a FOSS option over a closed source one why wouldn't I ? I got my wifi card from Think Penguin and it's speeds are fine for me. I only have 150 Mbps internet anyway.
I don't know about anyone else, but free software in general is valuable for privacy more than even freedom. No privacy = no freedom.
Thus, free drivers are needed for both.
Some care about this idea of freedom, more than even anti-drm efforts. Or to put it another way, even if two hardware types have the same level of privacy, security, etc... at the cost of a small bit of freedom...
They will go for the one that has more freedom.
Truth to be told, if the only way someone will use free software is to coax them with some freedom and actual privacy, then its better to tell that someone to use the hardware type with less freedom but similar levels of drm.
IE, no drm to get in the way!
:)
I recall stallman wrote something about this once. He said, its better to use osboot back when libreboot was separate from it and similar, then the stock bios.
As a last note, this is my final thought:
If nothing else, always resist DRM. Its a cancer that needs to die.
Although he does say that better still to get more freedom then that.
Hmm, seems Stallman may have had that removed from his website. Aka, the part about being better off using osboot than the stock bios.
Either that or I was imagining things, but in any case way though, can anyone deny that Stallman's ultimate goal is to get people as much freedom as possible?
The thumbing down of my post is meaningless for this reason.