@mjg59 >Freedom isn't necessary.
Well there it is.


Unlike a PCIe Wi-Fi card, remote network servers don't have DMA access to the main memory space (IOMMU is a pretty shoddy workaround).


Microcode in ROM in an intel CPU is hardware circuits that don't have a proprietary software license attached to it that restricts you and you do have the right to do whatever you want to your own hardware - even to sell it.

As far as I can tell, the microcode in ROM doesn't contain malicious circuits, as intel knows that a decapping enjoyer is going to take a look eventually and report on any found malicious circuits.


Meanwhile, microcode updates are software, with nasty proprietary license terms that require acceptance and this line from the software license confirms that the updates are partially proprietary malware;
>3. No reverse engineering, decompilation, or disassembly of this software is permitted.

That's right "reverse engineering our updates and finding the malware is not allowed, even though we've made every effort at doing so extremely difficult with encryption and an undocumented instruction set and only around a dozen people knowing how microcode updates work".


All software running on a computer should be free and I am working towards achieving that.

Encouraging the user to accept a proprietary license for proprietary peripheral software only leads the user away from freedom, as such software almost never gets replaced (there are arguments that RAM loaded proprietary software is easier to replace than EEPROM installed proprietary software, but for some reasons EEPROM installed proprietary software gets replaced much more often? (maybe it's something to do with how the RAM loaded software often has license terms and digital handcuffs that try to prevent replacement, while EEPROM included software on peripheral devices usually has no such restrictions)).