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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Here's the context, for anyone who didn't see the AMA:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/5x4hxu/we_are_amd_crea...

This is currently the top-voted question with almost four thousand upvotes. AMD gave a noncommittal "we'll look into it" response, but now at least they're aware that a lot of people actually do care about things like this.

RISC-V comes to mind as an open and free instruction set. The step to an actual implemented-in-silicon processor is pretty big though, and for any such chip it's hard to verify that it really is as free as it's claimed to be. You can't diassemble your CPU (or perhaps you can, but for very few values of "you").

Yeah, basically you have to have a bunch made and destructively analyze some of them (https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/141077-how-to-crack-open...).

That'll build confidence that the others aren't compromised.

The costs could be reasonable (http://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/7042/how-much...) under a kickstarter-style campaign.