GameRager: 1. Well it's good to hear from someone with some experience, but as another poster said: Some chips/etc can have backdoors built into them that one might not know about unless they reverse engineer the parts in their systems/etc.....and other things are hard to be intotal control of as well.
2. True...I offered it merely as a counterpoint to think about/chew on mentally.
3. One might also say we're all prisoners of earth/time/our mindsets/etc...even when free men/women.
I get your point, but this is basically about whether one is speaking philosophically or pragmatically. Pragmatically there is relative freedom even though there's a philosophical case for it being non-existent.
As an aside, security backdoors created by hostile governments are an interesting point, but clearly not the same thing as the question of the explicit policies of the creators of various operating systems, and also do not seem to influence personal choice of operating systems.
GameRager: Well it's good to hear from someone with some experience, but as another poster said: Some chips/etc can have backdoors built into them that one might not know about unless they reverse engineer the parts in their systems/etc.....and other things are hard to be intotal control of as well.
Arundir: This is a interesting read:
https://www.archive.ece.cmu.edu/~ganger/712.fall02/papers/p761-thompson.pdf Reflections on Trusting Trust
Yes, that's an absolute mindblowing classic.
Edit: since few will read it, the (genius) creator of Unix wrote about how a compiler could be modified to produce executable code that cracked security when run, when it recognized that it was compiling certain operating system files, with no need for the source code to be modified.
So the compiler is run on innocent code and produces dangerous code. Then, going meta, the compiler itself can receive this treatment, so there is then no trace in any source code of anything devious.