zlacker

>>doener+(OP)
Is this something we could achieve with a corporate alliance? I know a lot of tech companies would like to give their employees secure laptops. I also know that there are large costs associated with making hardware, especially if you are talking about dropping ME.

A dozen companies with 1000 employees each and a budget of $2,500 per employee gets you $30 million, which is surely enough to get a decent, qubes-secure laptop with no ME. You aren't going to be designing your own chips at that point, but you could grab power8 or sparc or arm.

Are there companies that would reasonably be willing to throw in a few million to fund a secure laptop? I imagine at least a few. And maybe we could get a Google or someone to put in $10m plus.

>>Taek+P9
With an alliance you can achieve agreement, not quality. Everybody will say, they agree to a standard, then you get a 200 bullet point document, and 5-10 years later you get expensive, certified solutions that in reality only contain 20 of the 200 points, acting like they contain 180 points, and certainly excluding the important ones because these are hard to solve and expensive to implement.

Quality you can only achieve by possessing the right skills and making the right long term investments.