Quote from: 2112 on August 19, 2014, 07:04:27 PM

Miner software is just a lightweight shim around the fundamentally closed hardware of the ASIC.

This may be the case, but it is just as capable of doing some serious damage, as this example of a dodgy compiled sgminer binary shows:

Quote from: omgbossis21 on August 04, 2014, 04:54:19 AM

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=719526.0 - and demonstrates perfectly everything that the cgminer devs want to avoid, and I believe what PatMan was trying to highlight. Of course, the majority of users here would never download anything from an unofficial source, let alone use it - yet here we all are running Bitmain software with known security holes in the miner software thinking everything is fine & dandy?! So although you, or anyone else for that matter, may not agree 100% with what PatMan says (which isn't surprising, given the length of it Grin

), I think your description of it being a "deluded rant" might be a little OTT, even though it was said in a joking fashion.....still, he took it well Cheesy

I'd hazard a guess that 90% of noobs don't know how to use a MD5 checksum, let alone a decompiler to check what they just downloaded, they just "trust" that it's OK. If every manufacturer abides by what ever terms of the software license, and users were all made aware of the importance of Free & Open Source - the chances of the above happening would be drastically reduced, that's for certain.