October 17, 2006
Binary drivers
Amazing. Not that this exploit has been discovered. That’s no surprise at all. What’s amazing to me is that people will still continue to load large blocks of unknown, unauditable code into their kernel or as an xorg driver.
Guys, you are already potentially handing over control of your machine to someone who isn’t even willing to let you look at what they are doing with it. Now it turns out that what they are doing is writing poor code so that you are in fact handing over control to any sufficiently skilled attacker, and there is nothing you can do to fix it.
Actually, why am I bothering?
“Yes, but what about shiny games?” I imagine will be the response. I understand that for many this is a simple matter of priorities, but I just wish people would realise that when they hand over hard earned cash to a company, they are not just doing what is most convenient for themselves, but they are supporting that companys ideals and further empowering them. And that indirectly affects everyone.
Filed by Administrator at 11:45 am under Linux and free software
Playing devil’s advocate, what’s the alternative? Not handing over hard earned cash?
There isn’t neccesarily a convenient alternative if you want to play the latest and greatest games. The best alternative right now is to buy Intel video hardware. Unfortunately that currently only comes included on motherboards and not as seperate video cards. For those who don’t need the latest games though and just want enough 3D power for things like tremulous, Quake 3 or xgl/aiglx then there are plenty of ATI cards still available that support those things quite happily with the open xorg drivers. Going back to the Intel cards, there are rumors of seperate cards being produced some time in future, so that’s one to watch. Finally, something to keep an eye on is the Open Graphics project ( http://wiki.duskglow.com/tiki-index.php?page=Open-Graphics ) which has been quite active now for a fairly long time, but unfortunately still has a long way to go before you can buy production hardware from them.
It’s time we had a law demanding access to source code. If you administer a computer, you should have the right to see the source code of any program running on it, even if you are not allowed to distribute copies of that program. You wouldn’t eat food without an ingredients list, would you?
Anyone who complains that this would “force people to hand over information to their competitors”: do you seriously believe that ATI aren’t reverse-engineering nVidia’s graphics cards, or that nVidia aren’t reverse-engineering ATI’s graphics cards? And that’s why I’m suggesting it be made law, so as it will affect every market player equally.