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ROM in hardware can be phisically mitigated up to a discrete time. The potential damage would be something, but never more. With nonfree firmware, you are a slave from the vendor, because he could release a new backdoored firmware anytime making even more damage to the users' freedom.

OFC libre firmware is the best, such as the ath9k supported wireless devices.




> With nonfree firmware, you are a slave from the vendor, because he could release a new backdoored firmware anytime making even more damage to the users' freedom.

You don't have to take the updated firmware, though?


We are talking about binary blobs that are bundled with drivers usually and sent to the device at initialization time which means you'd have to individually fix the version of n drivers in the package manager of your distro to avoid thay. This is doable but some people think it is easier to not have your distro shipping them in the first place.




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