this post was submitted on 18 Aug 2023
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Privacy
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Can you truly own any hardware, though?
Absolutely yes, if you buy hackable and repairable hardware you can do whatever you want with it. Especially if you install software on it that is FOSS.
By my question I mean:
Any hardware is made by some other people. Any hardware is work under a firmware, made by other people.
All that is a) regulated by licenses b) never can be trusted fully to work as you think it should work. Even if it based on open source - due to the "problem of untampered compiler".
If you have no total control over your hardware, can you say you truly own it?
What percent of control is acceptable? How to measure it?
As of August 2023, the best way to avoid the problem of
AFAIK Is using an MNT Reform With GNU Guix as its OS, I really liked this article "The Full-Source Bootstrap: Building from source all the way down". This approach could, potentially, solve the problem of the untampered compiler. Damn, maybe it already does.
As for the MNT Reform, the only thing I'm not sure is open is the actual processor firmware, but the schematics for its usage are available and even the Wifi firmware is open, so there remains the problem of actually verifying the hardware you get is actually the hardware you ordered, but that is a bit more complicated I think.
To be sure you should build processor from a scratch and then write your own compiler directly in machine code.