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Comment by rxm | Hacker News Reader

There was another thread on ME. At some point ME will get hacked or the golden certificate stolen, at which point someone will have a lot of access.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8813029

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> My first thought was that it seems increasingly clear that Stallman has been right all along. The problem is that being philosophically right doesn't always mean being practically right. In order to create the perfect Stallman-esque machine, one would have to design everything from the logic chips up from scratch, because in the end, no third party can be trusted. He says this himself about the Loongson system he uses daily; he considers it a compromise but one heavily weighted in his favor. In short, Stallman has been right all along, but there's little we can do about it from a practical standpoint.

Cherry-picked from that thread. I just have to point out this awful slippery-slope argument.

Just because we list slippery slope as a fallacy, does not mean it never happens like that.

Basically Intel owns the desktop and server market. They sneak stuff in that we may not want. What can we do at this point?

Divest.

Vocally support Power8 and RISC-V projects and ensure Intel knows you're angry.

Like what happened with the NSA? Not to be rude, but you can be vocal all you want, but as long as the majority of the public doesn't care, there's not much you can do.

I don't think being vocal is enough. Snowden was vocal. What has changed?

https://reddit.com/r/StallmanWasRight/

Or some government(s) will convince, legally force, or clandestinely steal the key. I'd put the US and China at the top of the list of governments that have probably already done it...heck, ME might be a backdoor deliberately created at the US government's behest.

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