this post was submitted on 28 Sep 2023
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They should stop supporting cops!
I'm afraid to ask but... how are they supporting cops?
TLDR: Hired a guy whose previous work was 'using tech to do mass surveillance for the British* state, bragged about it, when there was drama over it, they laughed it off as 'this drama could only possibly be astroturfed and no one reasonable would ever be against this'.
Edit: Fixed mistake
And that means those chips are likely compromised and full of backdoors by now.
Very likely, although officially the guy isn't working on the boards at all but in building stuff like official cases and shit -- That's just the official story, and given their overall cageyness to speak of the controversy plus the fact that they can always rely on bootlickers to defend them -- Yeah. I wouldn't be trusting an RPi with anything sensitive at this point.
Are there any chips that can be these days?
Genuinely no clue.
As I understand it if you want to have full trust on something, you'll just have to channel your inner Richard Stallman and never use any tool you don't fully understand. That means that to ensure your chips don't have some insidious state surveillance backdoor you'd be mandated to not just have boards that have an open-source design... But to learn advanced electronic engineering so you could personally study those designs and ensure beyond doubt that they are secure.
That said maintaining a healthy distrust of any megacorp is a lot easier, if less guaranteed.
We need a public non-profit chip manufacturing company.
We need a public non-profit _________________________________ company
True
How would they achieve that?
Not bragging about hiring a dude whose entire portfolio is invasive mass surveillance would be a start.
Edit to add: Since the genie's out the bottle on that, a little bit of transparency over what the dude's role in their company actually is and what their intentions are, or heck, literally anything would be nice.
Like, personally I think 'ceasing to be a cop' is the best thing a person in the police could ever possibly do and pretty much proof they are salvageable as a person, so I'm already inclined to think positively of the espionage dude they hired. But their complete and total opacity, all the way down to blocking/banning anyone who criticised them over it, suggests that his presence in the company is not just a case of 'he's good with tech and we hired him', but rather that his expertise in surveillance specifically is the reason he was hired, and yes, there will be insidious things in new Pi models.
To be honest on my end I see this as a PR Disaster first and foremost?
Like, I generally prefer to assume incompetence over malice where it is possible, and in the incompetence hypothesis -- This is just some extremely bad room-reading skills considering who RPi caters to (Open Source people) and our personality (fundamental distrust of any authority, hatred for anything perceived as 'control', further intensified by the constant surveillance in modern proprietary software, etc.) -- I don't think having this man in the team or not is going to change what RPi is like in any way... Not because I assume he's a good dude, but because presuming imperial governments have any interest in backdooring and surveilling projects like the Pi, then that backdoor either already exists and has existed since the first model ever OR it was added much earlier, quietly, without them blabbering about hiring an ex-spy. That's just how it be with those things.
~~I generally assume anything I don't personally understand is going to have something insidious, to be honest. Like I told the other person, the only way to make sure your hardware isn't compromised is to have its schematics and the know-how to understand everything that goes on inside it.~~