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Comment by jasonkostempski | Hacker News Reader

Are there any projects out there that throw the baby out with the bathwater and just restart computing from the ground up with freedom as a foundation? I'd love to participate something like that and I think it'd be a great way to respark 80's like hacker movement.

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Libreboot and coreboot are trying to open source things on the software side of things (think dd-wrt or openwrt or tomato for routers, custom firmware basically). With hardware it's a bit of a different story. You hear about attempts from time to time, but getting away from Intel / AMD is really hard. The suggestions from the article about alternative architectures seem to be our best bet currently.

Their attempts will be just that. There's a SHA256 signature required to verify the ME code - no signature, no boot (or boot for 30 mins less commonly). They won't share the keys with just anyone.

It's sha256?

I wonder if a Bitcoin shared mining setup could co-op some of those hashes to brute force the keys.

Alternative architectures is definitely the most pragmatic thing to go for. I was going off on a bit of a tangent from the article and just wondering if anyone has tried redoing the 70's - 90's without trying to be compatible with any existing technology but still learning from the mistakes.

Pure speculation: Any entity that obtains the (financial, other) resources necessary to help facilitate such fundamental subversion is eventually convinced that the status quo is necessary to our survival.

The crowdfunded Open-V implementation of RISC V comes to mind.

https://www.crowdsupply.com/onchip/open-v

However, it doesn't look like they're going to come remotely close to hitting their funding goal. Fabricating chips is expensive.

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