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by davexunit 855 days ago
What is more risky to you: Leaving known vulnerabilities such as spectre unpatched or the possibility of Intel adding a backdoor for some unknown purpose that wasn't present in the shipped hardware?
2 comments

The former is more risky from the security point of view. The latter is more risky from the freedom point of view. (And, while an FSF supporter, I choose to be more secure.)
Vulnerabilities such as spectre are only relevant if you run untrusted non-free software. Also these vulnerabilities show that sandboxing is not effective on current CPUs, and specific mitigations does not solve the problem in general.