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. 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.
Just out of curiosity I just started building the Linux kernel to see what my system does, but the CPU isn’t going over 10% load and is hovering around 40 degrees. I just ran make without any parameters, is there a way to get it to use more than a single cpu core at a time?
It would probably ruin them and their work though. While I have little sympathy for the plights of billionaires, it's difficult for people to not allow that level of ridiculous wealth and power to affect them. These people have found a much healthier path to success. I'm sure the living ones are all financially comfortable without the ridiculous distortion of excess wealth.
Also though I'd object to anyone being a billionaire since it's absurd.
That's not necessarily true. My cousin is the nicest person you could meet, he was a programmer who tinkered around with a package delivery tracking system, and Fexex bought him out for almost 2 billion. He became one of our wealthiest citizens overnight. And he's amazing, he doesn't exploit people and he is not a bad person by any definition.
I think the point is that anyone who gets and keeps that much money is not a good person. A billion dollars is more than any person could ever need for themselves. Consider that having a meager 10 million in the bank at a pitiful 2% return of interest would provide $200,000 per year, which is a very comfortable life. Who can justify keeping 100x that? And how can you justify it when a tiny fraction of that would revolutionize thousands of people’s lives?
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