Freedom and security issues on x86 platforms
I&#x27;ve been looking into this recently.<p>Basically, the things mentioned on the text, made free software bios and firmwares impossible, some of the free software projects that exist now are mostly &quot;binary blobs loaders&quot;, having more binary blob than free software code running.<p>There is some good analysis on why even Intel can&#x27;t fix this if they wanted to, unless they stopped shipping some features entirely, their Intel ME system rely on a couple of proprietary third party code, that has on contract with Intel explicit prohibitions of Intel ever letting anyone seeing their source, or the keys needed to sign them.<p>Also, Intel ME can&#x27;t be really trusted, the code is not really &quot;reverse-engineeringable&quot;, and it works as a full second OS of sorts, it even has its own JVM running, if someone somehow decide to inject spy software into it, you will never know, also I assume that the first destructive virus to latch into that stuff, will take the world truly by surprise depending on when it triggers (for example if it spreads silently but triggers the destructive payload on a specific date).<p>Also, these features can be abused to abuse the market itself, for example by intentionally making the hardware underperform, and then sell &quot;superior&quot; hardware that has the only difference some software.