Good comment. I appreciate the helpful suggestions from multiple people. Though I believe firmware compromises are quite rare at the moment, I don't know whether that will be true in future, and I find it worth learning more about what can be done to be safer.
Of course chips and architectures COULD be designed so that it's simple to check that a particular machine is in a good state as long as you have a trusted machine to check it with. But we're not there now. On Mon, Feb 2, 2026, at 3:09 AM, [email protected] wrote: >>> This is going to sound depressing, but the only way to know for sure is >>> to >>> pop the eeprom and program it with an external programmer. >> >> As someone who flashes a lot of laptop firmware roms, it's really not >> that bad. The soic-8 flash chips are not hard to remove with a $40 hot >> air station, and you can rewrite them with flashrom on a raspberry pi, >> a breadboard, some jumper wires, and a $10 clip. Takes a few hours to >> do the first time, but you get the hang pretty quick. >> >> -Ben >> > Been there, done that, but ..... > > The point is that not everyone has the wherewithal or inclination. > > This gets me off on a tangent. If you look at the history of any > mechanization, like the rise of the automobile, or the rise of the > computer, camera, etc. There is a primitive stage where "nerds" do this. > There is an intermediate stage where less nerdy nerds try to bring this to > the general population. (early adopters) Then then the stage of techy > non-nerds pick up on the nerds and capitalize on the nerdy ambitions and > subvert them to marketing stuff and gets really close to what people want > and use. (breaking success) Then the last stage where the MBAs with no > knowledge or respect of the technology create a system where users walk > away because it no longer does what it did or what they hoped. _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] https://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
