On Tue, Sep 26, 2017 at 4:06 PM, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton lkcl@lkcl.net wrote:
they made it look like, because everything else was libre, there was really absolutely no harm done by having the ME firmware, you really had nothing to be concerned about, you could buy one of their machines and have a totally secure system.
I don't recall that to be honest. From what I understand they said the laptop would ship 100% libre from the beginning while they ended up shiping a traditional laptop with killswitches and the ability to run coreboot in the future, something that they achieved now. And they have a decent number of articles about their work on disabling the intel ME.
we know this to be absolute horseshit in an extremely significant way libreboot.org/faq/#intelme
now, it *just so happens* that someone recently discovered that the NSA has clearly had their fingers into intel processors... because they requested a DISABLE function of the ME back-door co-processor.
without such a disable function there would be absolutely no way that the NSA could authorise Intel processors for use either on their own premises or for any government usage.... because the exact same feature they demanded could be used to spy ON THEM.
fucking ironic.
now.
is ANY of this mentioned on purism's main sales web page?
I don't think it is and that switch was only a very recent discovery. It's ironic, the moment intel moved the AMT to x86 everyone got into breaking it. And there is a scheduled talk on how to run unsigned code on any intel ME system for a conference in the next couple weeks.