If I was a government these are the exact sorts of projects I'd set up as a honey pot to tempt people who are doing illegal things to use my pre compromised hardware.<p>How can I trust NitroPad more than another laptop manufacturer? I actually trust this much less.
There will always be an abstract layer over which the user cannot/will not observe.<p>Until we mere mortals are capable of growing our own chips in carefully maintained vats, we are always going to be at the mercy of the wizards in their high tower, which represents the computing world today.<p>Computers are simply not something we can safely trust, for as long as they are built from a wide and diverse variety of components, and even then there is not a clear or responsible class of society capable of providing safe audits of silicon designs, without being immediately corruptible.<p>The only ways computing can contribute to trust is when society evolves, hopefully using a bit of computing power along the way, to trust itself inherently.<p>Even these third-party, open-source, audited systems are too untrustworthy. We need complete and open design and manufacture, the entire chain audited along the way, to come even close to having trustworthy systems.<p>With this in mind, I resist efforts of third parties to claim safe/security in their system integration efforts. Please, by all means maintain enthusiasm for the subject, but wake me up when the vat is warming up and the chips are growable, locally ..
> The Nitrokey Storage 2 additionally contains an encrypted mass storage with hidden volumes.<p>What use are the hidden volumes if it is already pretty obvious that they will be there? I am pretty sure that whichever party you are trying to protect yourself from with this, will know that a Nitrokey will have hidden volumes.
See also Librem Key for a free (as in freedom) alternative [0].<p>[0] <a href="https://puri.sm/products/librem-key/" rel="nofollow">https://puri.sm/products/librem-key/</a>
my initial reaction is that it's a hefty price to pay for a lightly modded x230, but not everyone wants or is able to do these mods themselves.<p>I'm surprised nobody is going so far as to do the other common mods (1920x1080 IPS, x220 keyboard swap, make the X220 keyboard have all its native functionality, whitelist mods, i7/16gb config) to offer the fully hotrodded ultimate form. Having done them myself and seeing the amount of work, maybe the market isn't such that they would sell at a price that makes sense for the seller.
>Secure
>8 year old Intel Processors full of CPU bugs<p>I don't get how you can call this secure. Without those CPU's it certainly would be an interesting device. But advertising it as secure and then using something like Qubes where those bugs break the very isolation Qubes is based upon ...
> "The Intel Management Engine (ME) is some kind of separate computer within all modern Intel processors (CPU)."<p>Maybe this was a translation to English, but it makes it seem like they're not sure what the Intel ME is.