It’s amazing what a difference a little bit of time can make: Two years after kicking off what looked to be a long-shot campaign to push back on the practice of shutting down server-dependent videogames once they’re no longer profitable, Stop Killing Games founder Ross Scott and organizer Moritz Katzner appeared in front of the European Parliament to present their case—and it seemed to go very well.
Digital Fairness Act: https://ec.europa.eu/info/law/better-regulation/have-your-say/initiatives/14622-Digital-Fairness-Act/F33096034_en
The difficulty of black box over white box is the reason obscurity has benefits…
You’re going to write your kernel and bootloader as well? Drivers for the hardware? And a compiler for those? And an assembler to build that bootstrap compiler? Build the CPU? The second any of these are “out of your control” you lose “absolute security”. The reason people say there is no “absolute security” is that it is not a useful concept to even consider. Since you have to approach it theoretically, you can easily end up stuck at the fact that every computation changes the state of the world and thus every computation can in some way be measured. It’s a useless endeavor even if it were theoretically possible because it leads you to absurd solutions against absurdly powerful attackers. You want security in a well defined threat model not some “absolute”.
Air gapping isn’t sufficient to prevent communication either. For example there are functional TCP stacks working over audio. Silence on the Wire is quite old at this point, but also explores esoteric exfiltration methods.