Choosing hardware Again, open source is the IDEA!

When you purchase a computer and connect it to internet, everything in your computer is connected to other people’s computers. It is from your Operating system to your BIOS, your CPU to your graphics card, even your mouse!

At the basic level, let’s say you have bought a gaming keyboard and you have latest hardware/software, which is windows 10 now (I won’t talk about Windows 11 as it is not even stable yet) and right away you will see a notification that that keyboard wants to connect to internet and install software and a profile for you. However, if you are not on the net, it won`t ask.

There are a lot of problems with the software used even before installing BIOS. And these backdoors are hard to use, yet almost impossible to fix. Operating systems tries their best to cover them, but at the end of the day, how secure they are to talk about security and privacy. One example can be Intel Management Engine and AMD Platform Security Processor. These are exactly small operating systems on your CPU running if this CPU has power. These systems have full access to your computer and internet. And these can be accessed by an adversary to de-anonymize you.

These have caused big problems in the past. And a lot of software are suspected of being backdoor into any system like EFF and Libreboot – which is why I don’t suggest Librem -.

For AMD Laptops you can disable this feature in BIOS. For Intel there is no straightforward way to disable it, there are some scripts on the net. This is our best bet right now. So, in this case I would recommend AMD laptops over Intel ones.