I thought this was the face.

Tämähän on niin kuin murhenäytelmän jälkeisestä lööpistä: ”ei saanut tarvitsemaansa apua”. Mikä ei tietenkään yllätä koskaan, niinhän se tässä maassa menee, vähän aikaa tapahtuman jälkeen vatuloidaan että mitä olisi voitu tehdä toisin ja sitten taas unohdetaan, eikä mikään ole muuttunut.

What steps will reproduce the problem?
1. Open http://www.jamendo.com/en/track/696555
2. Click ’Play’

What is the expected output? What do you see instead?
The player (on the right column) loads and begins playing, with a Like button under other sharing options. I’d expect the button not to be there as I’m using FB Disconnect.

What version of the product are you using? On what operating system?
FB Disconnect 1.0.2 in Chromium 13.0.782.218 (build 98754 Linux), Ubuntu 10.04.

Please provide any additional information below.
FB Disconnect does block one Like button, the one below the artist’s name, from showing up on the page.

Onko se Moccamaster? Minusta sinunlaisellasi paatuneella kahvinistilla pitäisi olla Moccamaster.

Tuo ”melkein oksensin” kutittelee jotain muistikuvaa tai sellaisten joukkoa hassusti. Ihan kuin olisin kuullut ilmauksen sellaisenaan ennenkin, mutta pystyn palauttamaan mieleen vain South Parkin (jossa Stan oksentaa joutuessaan tekemisiin Wendyn kanssa) ja Neil Hardwickin kertomuksen mielestään hauskimmasta tietämästään vitsistä, jossa mies on tehnyt laulun siitä, että on niin rakastunut että kärsii ummetuksesta.

Minäkin pidin tästä uudesta Holmes-tulkinnasta. En yhtä paljon kuin Brett-, mutta tämä pärjäsi eri saralla: modernisoinnissa oli onnistuttu hämmästyttävän hyvin. Se on iso saavutus, sillä useinkin modernisoinnin tulokset ovat piinallisen huonoja, ne huokuvat juuri tuota mainitsemaasi päälleliimattuutta.

Incidentally, I’ve been looking into open alternatives to BIOS the last couple of days due to the fact that very few desktop systems’ BIOSes support setting a hard disk password. This seemed to me like the perfect niche for the free DIY solutions: something that BIOS/mobo manufacturers most likely will not fix due to limitedness of the target market, where said market consists of die hard nerds like me who like weird things such as (gasp!) encrypting their data.

I was disappointed to find that, although Coreboot should work on my setup, none of the open source payload solutions seem to support ATA security either.

So I ended up patching my BIOS with another proprietary blob to achieve what I wanted.

(Was there a point to this? Maybe just that the open solutions that are out there are not only limited in compatibility but, even when compatible, still not the end-all to limits imposed by a proprietary BIOS. Of course, they do have the benefit of being more easily modifiable, so if you know your low-level languages, you can build a custom solution yourself. I just wish I was that competent.)

Solved!

On the ’Advanced’ page of the BIOS, there was a switch for the Onboard LAN Boot ROM, and by default it was set to disabled. I switched it on and can confirm that ATASX works on this board.

I now see the ATASX documentation does make a mention of this in passing, saying ”you have to activate the ability to boot from network card”. So this was a simple case of RTFM on my part. :)

I’d still be interested to know how if at all this’ll work with an SSD.

According to my understanding and based on what Jonas wrote above and also [1], doing the freeze post-BIOS would be useless securitywise; it’s not even a workaround, as any malicious software then just inserts itself into the MBR. This really needs to be fixed at the BIOS level to be effective at all.

[1] http://www.coreboot.org/pipermail/coreboot/2005-May/011688.html

I’ve been thinking of getting an SSD with built-in encryption, such as the Kingston SSDNow V+ 100E Series. From what I gather, utilizing the encryption would require that the BIOS supports HDD passwords. This is what lead me to ATASX.

My current motherboard is an Asus M4A78-EM with the latest available AMIBIOS for it, revision 2101.

For all appearances, I’ve successfully configured the ATASX.ROM module for my setup, managed to embed it into the main BIOS ROM using mmtool, replacing the existing PCI ethernet module (10EC:8168) with it and flashed the resulting ROM file into my BIOS chip.

Yet, during the boot, there’s no indication that the extension is in fact there: the prompt for security setup doesn’t appear and, when listing the harddisks, POST doesn’t say anything about the security extension as it does in the example images.

Did I read the documentation wrong when I thought this method didn’t involve burning an EEPROM? Have I made some error in the process, or is it just that the AMIBIOS for this motherboard somehow isn’t compatible with ATASX?

And in the end, would even having support for ATA security enable me to utilize the built-in encryption on modern SSDs? I only came to think of this when I read in another thread there’s a user with an SSD for whom ATASX apparently doesn’t work (if I’m reading the Google translation right).