Architectural bugs Spectre and Meltdown have caused major panic and still worry many. Oddly, some proposed mitigations that require installing proprietary blobs have not caused similar worries, despite growing awareness about prevalent data collection, built-in backdoors, and the risks of placing too much trust in software and hardware designers with interests not aligned with those of users. Who can we trust, then? What lessons are there for the free software community? Being suspicious of Web blobs and foggy computing, and not victimizing anyone through them, do we have anything to fear but fear itself?
Speakers: Alexandre Oliva