Librem 14 "Road warrior" deliveries when?

I don’t think this is giving them the benefit of the doubt given their privacy oriented stance. YMMV however.

Yes, it makes perfect sense.

A threat agent so powerful that they are able to intercept the whole batch of laptops, however they can’t solder better than a 6 year old child when adding their spy microchips.

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You can totally disagree with jaylittle but that’s clearly not what he was implying. I’m pretty sure he’s saying that these laptops should definitely go through QA and checks sufficiently strong that these changes can not go undetected if we want to believe that the boards are free from tampering.

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I can totally appreciate this statement, and I’m certainly not inclined to let anybody off the hook for the miss on QA.

I guess I would just feel even more bothered if this was a Purism solution after receiving the units as opposed to manufacturers trying to meet deadlines. If this is a common enough occurance on production models it stands to reason that the mainboard should probably have undergone changes. That being said, not much can be said yet, the sample size is still too small.

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I imagine that given the customer base of purism, its not a far likely that a strong agent tries to intercept the supply chain. If an obvious hotfix have slipped past the checking points and arrived to the customer, think about a more sophisticated supply chain attack.
I’m in support of purism and their goals toward privacy and security. But this mistake is of a high severity.

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There should not be a sample size of even 1 for laptops marketed and priced at up to 3500 dollars for privacy and hardware security to ever ship to a customer looking like kids at a junkyard in pakistan added last minute soldering, 1 unit is one too many. It would not be accepted from a disreputable vendor, certainly not from one whos main and perhaps only selling point is security.

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it does not really matter who came up with the “Solution” , it took a customer opening up their laptop for this to be discovered. That is bad for a normal vendor. It is B A D for a security focused vendor.

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Definitely not disagreeing here!

Ha! Yes. If I were to see this in my L14 I’d be pissed.

Agreed, I’m feeling the outcome of this situation is going to make or break whether I keep the order.

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Looks like Kyle did point out that it wasn’t Purism in this quote:

So that makes me feel a little better that it wasn’t knowingly done at/by Purism, but now the fact still stands about how this was a miss in QC.

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unknowningly is just as bad though…
this is a major PR disaster and security concern, and when security and quality are your main selling point for extremely expensive laptops. If i am even thinking that the inside may look like the “R-Tarded” version then somethings gone terribly wrong. I paid top dollar specifically for peace of mind, not to have to take it apart myself to confirm wether or not its the junkyard version…

I get what you are saying but his reply was also not in response to this specifically,but in response to someone suggesting that purism had people working overtime doing their own soldering last minute to fix/add something. Its great that is not the case but then what is the case? what the hell happened?

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Yes, leaves zero confidence in Purism’s QA check abilities.

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How many are now opening their phones wondering what Purism missed there as well?

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That thought certainly has been going through my head…

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Wonder how people who have an L5 USA on order feel about this too.

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Your clarification is correct.

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Tried to open a DM, just wanted to ask a little about your relationship with Purism and the story surrounding how you developed your opinions about Purism. If you can spare the time, I’d appreciate it if you could allow me to message you over the forums so I can ask without cluttering these threads.

@jaylittle

Sorry, I don’t accept DMs on the forums here due to the high level of vitriol that I am generally met with. It’s bad enough over on reddit that I occasionally have to turn off DMs there as well. Most of the answers to your questions can be found in the blog posts I published on the Librem 5 back in late 2019:

https://jaylittle.com/post/view/2019/10/the-sad-saga-of-purism-and-the-librem-5-part-1
https://jaylittle.com/post/view/2019/10/the-sad-saga-of-purism-and-the-librem-5-part-2
https://jaylittle.com/post/view/2019/10/the-sad-saga-of-purism-and-the-librem-5-part-3

You can also find additional contact information on my website if you’d like to reach out. In addition, I have created a thread on /r/Purism and my DMs are currently enabled over on reddit, if you’d rather just discuss things there:

Cheers!

Victim-Playing much? I try to figure out if Librem14 is the right laptop for me. The bad soldering is a major concern and delayed any decision making. Are your posts helping? No. It’s just vitriol with contradicting claims of Purism or 3rd parties making modifications.

Please just stop until we know more.

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We won’t know more unless we push Purism to reveal more. As things stand now the most substantive bit of information we have from Purism is my conversation with Kyle Rankin on an IRC channel on the topic. Beyond that we have a couple forum posts from Kyle and a couple Reddit posts from MrChomebox.

Purism has made no official statement. There are no blog posts. They have not reached out to customers. In my conversations with Rankin, he appears to already be maneuvering to absolve Purism of both blame and responsibility. It’s too early to say for sure, but if past behavior is a predictor of future behavior, I fully expect this to be swept under the rug at the earliest possible opportunity.

But hey, go ahead and put your money down if you’d like. We all have the opportunity to vote with our wallets. I’m just sad that you are still considering voting for an outcome that goes so much against your own best interests as a consumer.

Please just stop. You got pieces not the whole picture.

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