So I've been hearing a lot about how Intel ME could supposedly be very intrusive. I mean it probably has access to everything, including memory. So obviously it can be exploited. I know Intel probably doesn't disclose its functions for competition reasons. Because of that, it's also got conspiracy theorists going wild on some 1984 government spying BS. I mean the government did make the request for Intel to manufacture CPU's for them without Intel ME, which concerns me.
I'm just wondering if anyone else wiser than me here has any ideas as to what it does or at the very least what you think it does, should we be concerned. Probably some low level stuff for sure.
By stripping you mean uninstalling the software drivers and editing the registry?
Lucas Richardson
>buying incel ever Ouch
Isaiah Hughes
Think IPMI. It's useful to sysadmins. And yes, the NSA almost certainly has access to everyone's computer on the planet.
Brandon Richardson
I have drilled a hole in the bottom of my laptop, read the firmware with a raspberry pi, parsed it with ME_cleaner python script, and then flashed the resulting image back. The ME is reduced to a roughly 90.2KB signed image remnant in my BIOS that can init the hardware.
If you have to ask about drivers and registry you've got bigger fish to fry. Get off windows.
Well good thing I have a core2quad system from a decade ago, if I ever care about what I'm doing. Kind of don't see the point of using it though. I've got nothing to hide.
Charles Perez
aye, I've got windows and an fedora linux machine
Grayson Bailey
Wtf is ME?
Jackson White
As much as it bothers the libertarian part of me, the NSA is still governed by US law. They are actually restricted from sharing data freely with other agencies.
Jack Richardson
Do the core 2 processors have the ME?
Nicholas King
The government model CPUs are like signage monitors without TV tuners or inputs other than HDMI. Less features means less things to go wrong and less security holes to patch.
Jose Miller
Literally every single facet of the windows backend is plugged with spyware that straight up sends your keystrokes, voice, images, desktop, file hashes, mouse & GUI interactions, and system logs and usage.
Microsoft open sourced their calculator but didn't think about stripping out their spying framework before doing so. We can get a nice look at what they do. They also spy on whatever you paste into the calculator field. It's fucked.
Ask some guy doing it for dosh on ebay or locally to remove the ME code for you and test it if you want.
Evan Price
Any processor before 2008 doesn't have ME
Joshua Diaz
Any server hardware worth its salt already has its own management interface hardware built into the mainboard and doesn't need Intel's ME baked into the CPU. ME is literally only good for glowniggers as a backdoor and for hackers as another set of targets. >I've got nothing to hide. That's what everyone thinks until someone decides to fuck with them.
Jonathan Ross
Yes.
They didn't sign it yet so you can strip it without the system's watchdog noticing you're not part of the botnet for 30 minutes and initiating an immediate shutdown.
Aaron Morgan
>The government >Following the law >Ever >ESPECIALLY 3 letter agencies and spooky glowniggers that don't have names
Michael Perez
Imagine IME malware that acquired the private keys.
It just hops like wannacry from PC to PC and just bakes itself into your firmware.
What kind of payload would you put in it? I'd fucking diversify. Why just do one thing? Load up and let loose.
Just took a look at the C++ code, and it's pretty fucking intrusive. I'm a bit shocked as something as petty as a calculator records stuff like that. Guess that will make me want to reconsider switching 100% to linux, but I'd have to deal with the headaches of gaming on DXVK, forego some performance due to lack of updated proprietary drivers, and a bunch of other minor gripes with gaming.
Cameron Morales
Nvidia has little incentive to reach Vulkan:DX parity. Mesa though... If you go with AMD/Intel, Mesa's graphics drivers have negligible overhead, compared to native DX11.
Anywhere from 1:1 to 4% less in my tests and it's still getting better.
Only thing I'm waiting on is EAC for the sake of EAC but my whole library is functional now.
