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I don't mean to go all Richard Stallman (who is looking less and less like a crackpot every day!), but the moral of the story for users is, you should not insta

by weland 13y ago

I don't mean to go all Richard Stallman (who is looking less and less like a crackpot every day!), but the moral of the story for users is, you should not install anything that is not open to the scrutiny of the community. If the source is not available, anything could be in there. Intel decides to give include a virus that wipes your hard drive in the next update? Yeah, well, good luck. I'm not saying that having the source available is a guarantee because every user will definitely read it. I'm saying having the source available is a guarantee because, when a developer notices a weird service on his computer, he can immediately check out what it does instead of depending on Intel for it.

Sheepshow 13y ago
The real risk that I see is less malice on the part of anybody at Intel, but that some third party could inject some nasty binary into the nice binary and we would have no way of knowing. Web servers get hacked every day. If somebody gets in and quietly replaces one binary blob with another binary blob, good luck detecting it. Malicious source code is way easier to detect. This is much in the same vein as basically EVERY piece of software on Windows. We have no recourse in auditing the safety of our own systems. Yeah 99% of the time the software is benign, but then again so are the police. Personally, I have no reason to mistrust US police. Nonetheless, free states the world over demand recourse against them should they cause harm intentionally or through negligence; I demand the same from my software.