Boing Boing: "Intel x86s hide another CPU that can take over your machine (you can't audit it)"

[Paul Boddie]

On Monday 20. June 2016 17.25.53 Tomasz Nitecki wrote:
> 
> On 20/06/16 14:14, Erik Grun wrote:
> > Another thing that bugs me is AMD.
> > Do they have something similar to Intels Damagement Engine?
> 
> I'm afraid they do. It's called 'AMD Platform Security Processor' [1].
> 
> [1] https://libreboot.org/faq/#amd

Here is a link to previous discussion about this topic:

http://mail.fsfeurope.org/pipermail/discussion/2016-April/010912.html

For lower-end systems, I've already mentioned things like EOMA-68 in my blog, 
and it does appear that this will now start crowd-funding in the near future:

http://rhombus-
tech.net/community_ideas/micro_desktop/news/Parabola_GNU_Linux_and_XFCE4_running_on_EOMA68_A20/

The relevance here is that EOMA-68 has prioritised chipsets that are 
supportable using only Free Software and which don't require opaque, 
proprietary binaries. Indeed, I believe that the initiative aims to get FSF 
certification, which in this case means a rather strict attitude towards 
"firmware" bundled with the kernel.

The previous discussion on this list mentioned a lack of alternatives for 
high-end computing. EOMA-68 doesn't really intersect with that since one of 
its goals was to enforce a low power budget.

Paul