| You're free to empty your wallet to the corporation you mentioned, while really it's just pissing into the ocean. The point I'm making is that software freedom can be hurdled by so-called "security" measures. When a bootloader can reject something you built yourself or a friend on the basis it didn't come from a large corporate software vendor, the computer places more trust in its manufacturer than its owner. This is especially problematic with smartphones and tablets. There was a time when computers weren't pre-programmed to judge what the user is doing. You could load up any program and it would execute it. You could say this is insecure, but that depends on how you look at the problem. SecureBoot has been proven to be ineffective at securing the boot process, but effective at thwarting attempts to replace MS-Windows with Linux. Apple and Google are even more hostile, with the former openly admitting they isolate their users by calling attempts to bypass their scheme "jailbreaking". It doesn't matter which multi-trillion dollar company is doing it, they're all hostile towards software freedom in my opinion. Your argument on Intel is just red herring to me. 2 wrongs don't make a right. It's like saying corporate greed is okay because there's always bigger corporate greed out there. Whereas I'm de facto against all moves that hurdle software freedom. I haven't taken the time to read the documents you linked, but it appears you're making a strong case against supply-chain attacks. For now, I think there's still plenty of room for disagreement much like how computers in military zones can be made deliberately insecure by our petty citizen standards, simply because their threat model is something else entirely. I don't want blobs because as you allured to, there's a real need to be able to inspect hardware and software for correctness. Any blob that gets in the way of that, I want it gone forever. Even if you don't do bootloader programming, I think its good practise to build as much as you can yourself. Gentoo happens to be a good fit for this on the GNU/Linux side as you can build everything but also intervene only for those few packages you really want to have fixed a particular way. |
Then I also don't have the time to read and address your response. There's no further discussion to be had where one side is no longer willing to display basic courtesy.