[[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider ]]] [[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies, ]]] [[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]
> I think that none in Free Software would support being forced to use > proprietary software filled with malware that injects malware in their > free software with hardware designs it is the exact same situation just > instead instead of "compiler" you have "fabricators". You're right that the two are similar. But there is a crucial difference. We can get around the problems at the level above the processor level by writing software. We can't deal with the problems inside the processor that way. Suppose a processor has malicious functionalities. There are three ways it is likely to be implementd: 1. By unchangeable circuits. 2. By firmware in ROM. 3. By secret firmware in RAM. These three are equivalent because, in all three, we are equally helplsss. In theory, in case 3 reverse engineering would be able to fix it. But we can't do any reverse engineering -- we can encourage people to do such it. Thus, we treat all three cases the same. -- Dr Richard Stallman (https://stallman.org) Chief GNUisance of the GNU Project (https://gnu.org) Founder, Free Software Foundation (https://fsf.org) Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org) _______________________________________________ libreplanet-discuss mailing list [email protected] https://lists.libreplanet.org/mailman/listinfo/libreplanet-discuss
