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Comment by cncjchsue7 | Hacker News Reader

So don't say 100%? Not hard.

Human speech is not mathematical formalism. What would even "open-source" mean in case of hardware, is there a consensus on it to begin with? Is it only 'every firmware is open-source and available', or would you want the whole floorplan of the chip?

So given that the word doesn't really apply to hardware, I believe they used it correctly (100% means the set of things where it makes sense to be used) and are not misleading. In fact I strongly dislike some of the "open-hardware" marketing of some previously mentioned devices, when that is obviously false and misleading.

"Not needing binary blobs" would be a start, wouldn't it?

I don't know, depends on a lot of stuff. If you are interested in this property from a security perspective, then no -- it's trivial to have hardware backdoors without any binary blobs.

This likely would also mean that it can't be flashed, so if you care about future maintainability, this is also a negative -- it can not be updated/fixed in the future, which may or may not make sense depending on what part we are talking about.

But if there are some kind of signature validation then it gets even more complicated (like e.g. iphone screens knowing if they are from apple or not).

> I don't know, depends on a lot of stuff. If you are interested in this property from a security perspective, then no -- it's trivial to have hardware backdoors without any binary blobs.

This is a "necessary but not sufficient" thing.

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