I didn't say it bricked the PC -- but they literally did brick shit that gets plugged in to the PC. It's a binary blob that comes with windows update and it breaks your hardware, intentionally.
It is a brick, because (1) It was working before, it doesn't work now, (2) The hardware is fucked, you plug into another computer, it still won't work (3) You can't expect anyone except for the experts to be able to fix it.
Sure, off the top of my head Nvidia drivers contain a binary blob you don't get to see. Does it brick fake hardware? No but this is a very special case.
Is it out of the realm of possibility that a vendor could ship a kernel module with a proprietary binary that could damage your hardware? Absolutely.
Why would people accept these proprietary closed blobs over the open alternative drivers? Because the open drivers suck. Can you fix that? Not in the near term.
So how is this not a problem for Linux? It's a problem there too.
If you use Nvidia, then the open driver sucks. It is like GIMP sucks, and that's a very real problem. But the open drivers don't brick my hardware, GIMP doesn't go and send my shit to the cloud without me knowing it, and won't refuse to let me edit whatever I want (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EURion_constellation).
This is a trade-off I am willing to make - that is all, nd I have mentioned it from the beginning.
I didn't say it bricked the PC -- but they literally did brick shit that gets plugged in to the PC. It's a binary blob that comes with windows update and it breaks your hardware, intentionally.
http://hackaday.com/2016/02/01/ftdi-drivers-break-fake-chips...
It is a brick, because (1) It was working before, it doesn't work now, (2) The hardware is fucked, you plug into another computer, it still won't work (3) You can't expect anyone except for the experts to be able to fix it.