> If that binary code was on a ROM, would it be less malicious? Cannot more recent and up to date binary code be more malicious than old one in the ROM? Just because backdoor development is progressing as time goes and old backdoors may be less dangerous compared to modern ones?
> If the binary code is malicious, don't buy the hardware it is > associated with. Often there is no other choice except taking the oldest hardware we can afford to find. Please take into account, I am a very noob in security area and it is just my IMHO. Anyway there was another distro like LibertyBSD which was an OpenBSD without some already seldom blobs like firmwares. And another OpenBSD fork is declared to be going to appear: Hyperbola (it is Linux based yet for now), completely pure from BLOBs too.