There is no way to verify silicon. This applies to every single chip. If you are using off the shelf hard cores in silicon, you need to trust the vendor. That's just how it is. It's not practical for end users to take silicon chips into a SEM, delayer them, and verify that the design is what they expect. Verifiability aside, there aren't even any high performance CPUs with fully open RTL/netlists available.
> If you are using off the shelf hard cores in silicon, you need to trust the vendor
if i dont have options for alternatives, i think its completely rational to use something without trusting it. i would say that this should be a default attitude
Sandboxing and fencing off untrusted parts is fine.
I find the approach of Librem 5 understandable.
However the distinction between blob on chip flash and blob on system storage is nonsensical to me. I would much rather have a sandboxed untrusted part I can update rather than a sandboxed untrusted part that I can not update.
Unfortunately I have not seen anyone actually give a reason why the line should be drawn there instead of closed source blobs are not ok period. Doesn't matter where they live. None of us are arguing in favour of blobs.
>Unfortunately I have not seen anyone actually give a reason why the line should be drawn there instead of closed source blobs are not ok period
this makes it sound like FSF supports these blobs. how i understood the situation is that they tolerate them until an alternative presents itself. this is a valid position to take and does not make them hypocrites/cult/religion etc
They are literally endorsing Bluetooth dongles with half a megabyte of proprietary ROM as "respecting your freedom". That goes a little beyond "tolerating", don't you think?
'Respects Your Freedom' is a (trademarked?) label that comes with clear and readily available certification rules. according to FSF, these are products that are simply the best options available as far as FSF's free-software ethics are concerned. in this sense it is simmilar to 'fair trade' labels you find on products. since you guys love extreme examples, i could ask you if when you use an Apple computer do you expect to be able to eat it
actually since you work with macs, do you think Apple respects your freedom or do you think they are more ethical than FSF?
I will answer your last question. Apple absolutely does not respect your freedom. They infringe on your freedom. Depending on the definition of ethical, they are vastly less ethical than the FSF.
But they also never claimed to be ethical. They never claimed to guard a moral ideal. They have claimed many things (protect privacy of users, guarantee security of users) which they did not act upon, and they have received flack for that. But they didn't claim to be ethical. Not even in a aspirational way like Googles "Don't be evil" moto.
The FSF, however, claims that ethics is it's prime driver. And by endorsing hardware with proprietary blobs (placed on chip flash instead of system storage) they display hypocrisy. They choose the very pragmatism they criticise others for choosing.
And that is something religions do aswell.
I have asked you why is the line there and you have not answered.
I think Apple are a corporation with interests that happen to result in them building secure, high performance, quite trustable hardware. Since they have the motive to do so, and since everything I've seen suggests they indeed are, and since their hardware officially allows me to run my own software on it, I would much rather use their hardware (with my own OS/software) than whatever the FSF labels as RYF, which is a label that, in my view, says nothing I care about, not even about my freedom.
Whether Apple is ethical or not is a different question. There is plenty of criticism to be fired at them for various issues. That's a personal call for people to make. I'm not saying you should go buy Apple hardware. I'm saying it's significantly more trustworthy from a security and privacy standpoint than x86 machines. Do they respect my software freedom? About as much as the RYF machines. They both let me run my own OS and they both rely on proprietary firmware for various things. The FSF's certification criteria do nothing for my software freedom (which has nothing to do with whether blobs are in ROM or RAM), they just hurt security, which is something else I care about.
We all have to make our own decisions about what to purchase based on the information available to us. That is why having such information is so important. If you value repairability more than anything, you should probably get a Framework. If you value security above all, you should get a Precursor device. If you want a trustable machine that's still high performance, you should get a Mac. If you want to run Windows games, you should get a gaming PC. If you value your freedom... there isn't anything truly free out there. RYF machines certainly aren't it, nor more free than many others by practical measures, nor transparent about their design.
Hence why I criticize the program. It's not achieving anything positive. It's just a feel good thing; the FSF says it respects my freedom so I can feel good about being Free™ while running more proprietary firmware than many other off the shelf machines.
Just to put things into perspective, I believe Google have done more for computing device freedom than the FSF, because the Chromebook team is notoriously pretty much the only large team which actually pushes for open source everything pretty hard, and they're important enough that some vendors listen, and they have the money to develop things themselves. For example, if you look for an open boot/OS stack for the Tegra X1, the closest you're going to get is the Chromebook Pixel's. Only the RAM training blob is closed source (and there is a reverse engineered replacement these days). Everything from the low level bootloader to the GPU drivers are open. This is no thanks to Nvidia - for pretty much all other customers they offer proprietary bootloaders. Also, I'm pretty sure some Chromebooks even have open source EC firmware, which those ThinkPads the FSF loves so much don't.
