You get my upvote, because I respect your perspective and I agree in principle. But at its logical conclusion, this idea puts up some serious practical barrier

You get my upvote, because I respect your perspective and I agree in principle. But at its logical conclusion, this idea puts up some serious practical barriers. Even if you only use an OS that you’ve personally audited, and even if you’ve gotten past the potential Thompsonian compiler issues, you’re still left with a minefield of possibly-adversarial pieces of software that might interfere with your computing experience. Have you audited your BIOS/UEFI firmware [0]? Your CPU’s microcode [1]? Your WiFi/Bluetooth adapter’s firmware [2]? Your HDD controller’s firmware [3]? I acknowledge that I’m advancing something of a “slippery slope” argument here, but I still care about the question. Where do you draw the line? Obviously being able to audit all of it yourself perfectly would be awesome. But to me that just seems impossible. So how much is enough? EDIT: beaten by astrodust! [0] https://www.pcworld.com/article/2948092/security/hacking-teams-malware-uses-uefi-rootkit-to-survive-os-reinstalls.html https://www.pcworld.com/article/2948092/security/hacking-tea... [1] https://www.dcddcc.com/docs/2014_paper_microcode.pdf https://www.dcddcc.com/docs/2014_paper_microcode.pdf [2] https://blog.exodusintel.com/2017/07/26/broadpwn/ https://blog.exodusintel.com/2017/07/26/broadpwn/ [3] http://spritesmods.com/?art=hddhack&page=1 http://spritesmods.com/?art=hddhack&page=1