What is a well known 'public secret' in the industry you work in that the majority of outsiders are unaware of?

NotSpez@lemm.ee to Ask Lemmy@lemmy.world – 629 points –
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Your PC runs firmware written by some companies with really sloppy engineering and security practices. Whenever possible opt for a computer that runs open source firmware (coreboot).

Windows vendors make extra money by putting spyware on your machine. That's a big chunk of why a Dell machine is cheaper than a machine from a trustworthy Linux vendor: they have a secondary revenue stream that is adversarial to you as a person.

Which is why you install Linux over it right away.

Dell also sells laptops with Ubuntu preinstalled (and I still wipe it and install Manjaro or whatever, but...)

Du you have any like about bios and sloppy engineering that I can read up on

The article you're linking to starts with security researchers who installed their own backdoor which went undetected. Then it continues with a warning about the dangers of not being able to check if the firmware actually is a firmware actually from the vendor and not a manipulated one.

While I'm pro open source and agree that there are dangers not knowing what firmware is used I fail to see how an open source firmware / bios world be immune to be switched out.

What am I missing here?

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