Backdoors in the CPU microcode, backdoors in the proprietary firmware of your motherboard / hard drives, backdoor through Intel Management Engine / AMD PSP. They’re all hardware level backdoors that can’t easily be disabled / replaced on newer systems.
There are only a select few of systems out their that can run a fully free BIOS with no IME, but those systems are about 15+ years old and on 32-bit platform. In terms of freedom, we’re fucked. Even if you do switch to GNU/Linux, you’re still not entirely free.
That is all true. The way to fix this is by always being pro-active, it can mean:
Voting with our wallets. Show that you will always spend on the more privacy-respecting option, even if no perfect option exists.
Raising our voices, to family and friends. Elaborate why we need open tech.
Lobbying for open hardware and software initiatives. The goal is to make openness and freedom more profitable than closed tech.
Pro-activeness is important. Assume that our generation was perfectly privacy-demanding, that this was truly a core value that everybody held. If the next generation became lax on this issue, and didn’t care as much, things would start to deteriorate. Totalitarianism would creep in. So the current generation are always the torchbearers of freedom, we have to do our part.
Backdoors in the CPU microcode, backdoors in the proprietary firmware of your motherboard / hard drives, backdoor through Intel Management Engine / AMD PSP. They’re all hardware level backdoors that can’t easily be disabled / replaced on newer systems.
There are only a select few of systems out their that can run a fully free BIOS with no IME, but those systems are about 15+ years old and on 32-bit platform. In terms of freedom, we’re fucked. Even if you do switch to GNU/Linux, you’re still not entirely free.
That is all true. The way to fix this is by always being pro-active, it can mean:
Pro-activeness is important. Assume that our generation was perfectly privacy-demanding, that this was truly a core value that everybody held. If the next generation became lax on this issue, and didn’t care as much, things would start to deteriorate. Totalitarianism would creep in. So the current generation are always the torchbearers of freedom, we have to do our part.