Re:I Love Arch, but GNU Guix Is My New Distro
by marcan_42 on Saturday November 20, 2021 @10:15PM
(#29293881)
The problem is that they have long given up on rationality; they and their devoted followers are an echo chamber of "blobs bad", "my software freedom", etc. They've stopped listening to rational discussion :(
I personally think the correct criteria is that of security boundaries and change control. If I've got a graphics card with proprietary code (regardless of whether its in ROM or loaded into RAM), with a proper IOMMU, the attacks it can perform on me are limited (eg TEMPEST). The video card itself is not Free or secure, but it's unfortunately something I have to use to interface with my Free/secure computer, just like my keyboard with its proprietary firmware. And as long as I can load any version of firmware onto that video card, then I retain administrative control where the manufacturer can't revoke functionality after I've purchased it.
Disk drives with proprietary software (which is all of them) are not an attack vector, because a drive should only ever be seeing encrypted data to begin with (eg LUKS).
A network card is a bit more worrisome with its direct network access (ie backhaul), but a Free/secure design shouldn't be trusting the network either (unless you have Free/secure switches), so this does not meaningfully change your security properties.
Obviously the above assumes Free/secure drivers, because drivers are running inside the security boundary of the OS.
CPU masks and microcode run afoul of my strict criteria, but are practically inescapable. Proprietary masks/microcode are required for every amd64 system (correct me if I am wrong), so it makes sense to say you have a Free/secure amd64 modulo those proprietary bits (as say Libreboot already does). And with so few versions of CPU microcode, the question of whether to trust a given microcode update is equivalent to whether to trust a given newly released CPU, and shouldn't be viewed as a software Freedom issue.