I'm planning to splurge in the next few months on a new gaming computer that ranks as Excellent or Outstanding on the Logical Increments guide. That guide recommends nothing but Intel CPUs past the Great tier (two tiers below Excellent). Considering Intel's outstanding track record of cooperation with law enforcement and national security agencies, I'm having second thoughts about putting an Intel CPU on my computer.
That said, however, I'm not planning to use this computer for highly confidential matters. The only legally questionable use I intend for my new computer is pirated software and entertainment. I intend to dual boot between Windows and Linux, so my pirated software would be just Windows 7, Microsoft Office and a bunch of games. My pirated entertainment is saved on an encrypted hard drive so it's not even accessible under Windows. For day-to-day internet business that requires privacy I would be using Gentoo Hardened as I currently do, and for actually confidential stuff I won't even use an AMD64 computer, instead I plan on doing that on a single board computer hooked to an old VGA monitor.
Is that enough to not be fucked so hard by the botnet?
Unless you really need single threaded performance or newer instruction sets (like AVX2), the 83{2,5}0 is okay. Also, grow up.
Gabriel Campbell
The problem with Intel CPUs is the management engine, which is a hardware backdoor sold as a feature. As far as I know, AMD has something comparable.
Ethan Campbell
Very, due to Intel's Management Engine which is a signed update away from being a full hardware back door (2013 and on AMD processors have the same problem with AMD's Platform Security Processor). Which is even more worrying due to the US government's recent push to get a legal precedent for forcing companies to sign malware, with which hardware back doors implemented in that way would become standard for any hacking done by the government (given they'd need no additional exploits over other options, would be vastly more effective than other options, and would depend on security holes that won't go away unlike other options).
