No, you've missed the point. Don't you understand? The software cannot be trusted whatsoever unless you control the entire stack. So you haven't solved anything. Also, if you think a paragraph is long winded then I'm sure you have never listened to Stallman.
You can't control when an apocalypse happens, so you might as well just not prepare for it.
That's essentially the same argument, which is ridiculous. Of course you can. And you should. Just because you can't control the entirety of a system, doesn't mean you can't take steps to minimize risks and exposure, and shrink the attack surface.
That is a stupid analogy. I'm talking about a machine. You are not in control unless you build the machine yourself. Even if you were provided schematics, you cannot be sure they are accurate. The point is free software does not minimize risk. It's a false sense of security.
For things you actually care about, such a surveillance, what if I told you there is a hardware backdoor in your CPU allowing the government to spy on you? Do you realize that is already known? What about the fingerprint scanner. How can you be sure the same is not true of the hardware storing that information?
I built a CPU myself out of 74xx logic, but I can't be sure that every input on every chip isn't also connected internally to an integrated computer that stores everything it sees and can transmit it to a van at 20 metres range (easily enough for someone to drive up to my house and retrieve the contents periodically).
The attacker can then reconstruct everything that happened on the CPU and work out what I've been up to. Or, more likely, throw away almost everything and only look at what was printed to the console, because everything interesting goes to the console anyway.
In fact this would be easier-than-average to achieve because the clock speed is low, I don't run the machine for very long or very often, and the density of actual electronics to "free space" on the ICs is very low (more space for shenanigans), and all my schematics are on my github project so even though you don't know which chip is connected to which other, you shouldn't have too much trouble deriving it.
So what now? Do we just give up? Is all computing fundamentally impossible? Or do we accept that nothing is perfect and just get on with it?
