Huang: Spectre/Meltdown Pits Transparency Against Liability

Here's a blog postfrom "bunnie" Huang on the tension between transparency and productliability around hardware flaws. "The open source community coulduse the Spectre/Meltdown crisis as an opportunity to reform the statusquo. Instead of suing Intel for money, what if we sue Intel fordocumentation? If documentation and transparency have real value, then thisis a chance to finally put that value in economic terms that Intelshareholders can understand. I propose a bargain somewhere along theselines: if Intel releases comprehensive microarchitectural hardware designspecifications, microcode, firmware, and all software source code (e.g. forAMT/ME) so that the community can band together to hammer out any othersecurity bugs hiding in their hardware, then Intel is absolved of anypayouts related to the Spectre/Meltdown exploits."