On 14/12/2016, Timothy Pearson tpearson@raptorengineering.com wrote:
Not everything can be created on a smart phone or tablet, and in point of fact, _most_ things cannot.
I understand that many users or developers of small projects don't need powerful hardware, but please don't make the grave mistake of assuming that everything will continue as-is on the development side if said hardware is not available.
Timothy, thank you for your work to design and crowdfund TALOS. TALOS is the first platform I have seen advertised that has:
- auditable schematics, firmware, and software;
- ECC;
- IOMMU and other features that might support the security features in Qubes or similar;
- at least as much power (RAM, CPU speed, etc) as a typical mid-range laptop.
That is a very compelling combination of properties: auditability is important for avoiding malicious corruption or disclosure of data; ECC is important for avoiding accidental corruption of data (and perhaps for foiling "rowhammer" attacks); IOMMU/virtualisation/etc are important for allowing the user to benefit from "security by isolation"; and the prospect of having enough power to run a few moderately demanding desktop applications simultaneously, on top of VMs, is crucial in order for the user to actually make use of all the aforementioned properties in a practical way.
Wherever the TALOS project goes from here, I do hope we shall see a computer with those properties available on the market soon, at an affordable price. If it comes from Raptor, so much the better.
I wish you the best of luck for the remaining hours of the crowd-funder.