@dushman Despite being proven wrong time and time again, you still cope and seethe.

There is no firmware - there is MaskROM hardware that contains circuits.

Of course the hardware is proprietary (all hardware is) and of course they also welcome free hardware designs, but even then, the resulting manufactured hardware would still be proprietary; https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-hardware-designs.en.html


They don't hesitate to point out that installing a microcode update is installing proprietary software software update, that doesn't respect the users freedom and that doesn't have source code.

If you review the license on the microcode, it quite clearly contains malware; "No reverse engineering, decompilation, or disassembly of this software is permitted."


If the Free Software Foundation was to start recommending convenient proprietary software, it would become the Proprietary Software Foundation due to such ruinous compromise; https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/compromise.html

Spectre and Meltdown are vulnerabilities that are only a problem if you run proprietary malware on your computer; https://www.fsfla.org/ikiwiki/blogs/lxo/pub/who-is-afraid-of-spectre-and-meltdown.en.html

You are perfectly safe from any of those kind of attacks if you don't run proprietary malware on your computer.

Even with all the proprietary microcode updates installed on your computer, if you execute proprietary malware, you are not safe, as more and more vulnerabilities keep being found (some which can only be fixed in hardware) and intel fairly quickly stops releasing microcode updates - therefore "staying secure against the latest attacks" would entail throwing out your computer and buying a new one every 1-2 years (which is ridiculous).