Can we stay in full control of our personal computers and privacy?

Reflections on trusting trust is here. Sure, you can replace boot bios but it's been impossible to be certain all parts of your system have not been subverted for decades. Any peripheral with microcode which is updated is implicitly part of your trust model and most SD cards include an 8 or 16 general purpose CPU or a very generalised FPGA or better. Keyboards, mice, disk controllers, inserted devices, screen control logic is all outside your control before you discuss the CPU and OS you consider "this machine"

> Everything is encrypted and pseudo-“secured” by “Trusted Hardware” that you totally can’t understand because it is entirely proprietary and undocumented

I fear this dystopia isn't "25 years" away, and more like 5. Once governments realise they can mandate OS vendors to block "unauthorised" applications from being installed, it will become very difficult to buy a computer that boots "unauthorised" OSes, or at least to go online with such a device.

> In a world in which computing is increasingly omnipresent, we are running the risk of losing control and privacy.

We already lost most of it... time to get it back.