I don't like the fact that you can't disable ME, that it's not open source, and that it's vulnerable any more than anyone else. But this does seem like hyperbole much more than fact.
95% speculation. The last 5% comes from exercising basic pattern recognition.
I remind you that we're probably talking about interference from the organization that arranged this:
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/05/photos-of-an-nsa...
The existence of that program was pure speculation, until it turned out to be totally real.
>(b) fails Hanlon's razor.
This is completely irrelevant to any argument made between two informed participants. It's worse than speculation, it's a plea to glib colloquialisms. Any chance you've got evidence or even reasoned speculation supporting the theory that the worlds most successful CPU manufacturer has an incompetent marketing department?
> 95% speculation. The last 5% comes from exercising basic pattern recognition.
No, it's all speculation because pattern recognition is not evidence, as applied here. Like, is it possible that I am an NSA agent trying to persuade you that you are safe and shouldn't worry about ME? Of course it's possible. But do you have any evidence of that? No.
"Well, in the past the NSA has asked big companies for backdoors into their products" is a true statement with evidence. "That implies that in this case there is a 5% chance that is exactly what's happening" is 100% speculation because again there is no evidence. If you can find any, I am all ears because honestly I am not a fan of Intel, Intel ME, the NSA, government spying, big corporations taking advantage of consumers, or a number of other things I imagine you and I agree on. But I think I am being rational when I say that chances are this is a stupid bug or number of bugs, plus bad old school thinking on the part of the management team, and not a deliberate NSA feature.
Here is my bit of speculation: if the NSA asked Intel to include a backdoor, wouldn't they both have done a better job of creating it? Why introduce a bug when you can include whatever code you want in a closed source firmware? You can literally add any kind of C&C mechanism you want because nobody can see what you are doing and nobody would ever know. Is the NSA that stupid to to ask for a bug that can be found and exploited? Is Intel not able to offer a better technical solution? Wouldn't it be to both of their benefits to do this right from the start? Also, why only approach Intel and not AMD? AMD is not as popular but surely has enough market share to warrant spying on.
Why aren't you viewing the possibility of intelligence agencies ordering the Intel ME as one of these future historical facts? If the proof for that became known today, both the agency and Intel would scramble to introduce a better backdoor in the next generation CPUs / MBs and devise a marketing campaign to make it sound good -- and to bash their former selves for "making a mistake" while simply thinking "OK, we're gonna cover it up much better this time and we're gonna twist it in such a way that people would flock to buy it". It's what marketing and spies do; they twist facts. Why is that so non-legit for you?
Furthermore, you're asking why didn't they do a better job if it was a conspiracy. People in closed circles aren't exposed to public criticism and their thinking is affected in the process. They usually think "meh, good enough, nobody will ever find it anyway". They are humans like you and I and are susceptible to bad days or negligence due to being tired. Furthermore, it's very likely they were under pressure to make it work quickly so they took shortcuts. What makes you think the programmers of the intelligence agencies have godlike powers over their (very likely) military superiors? Answer is, they don't. Programmers have no executive powers and their counsel is usually met with skepticism if it doesn't fit the management's agenda.
When talking about intelligence, our best bet is to do educated guesses. If we had hard facts we would be targets. As mentioned in another reply of mine directed at you -- it's their job to hide the facts. So you requesting proof of these matters is basically refuting all possibility of intelligence agency commission of the Intel ME on the grounds of "hey, you are not the next Edward Snowden so your arguments are invalid".
Meh. You come across as a guy who basically says "my speculation is better than yours". Not constructive.
Your theory in the above comment is that the NSA or equivalent ordered Intel to build a C&C mechanism into their processors. Intel then did a perfect job covering up this request, but did a piss poor job of implementing it due to incompetence and has not managed to correct it for 10 years. There is no indication that this might be the case but because of other unsavory activities by the NSA or equivalent it can be assumed that at some point evidence will be uncovered that you are right and therefore we should accept it as fact. Do I have that right?
Judging by other activities of the intelligence agencies and working with pure speculation -- not hiding from these words, you are correct by calling it that -- I still think it's much more likely they commissioned the Intel ME.
You mention critical thinking in another comment. Critical thinking, the way I apply it, also requires a historical context to be applied to the situation one is analyzing. Agencies have been doing pretty shady stuff and some of it has been uncovered for the entire world to see.
Critical thinking, the way I apply it, says that the odds are there is a foul play. I merely wish you to recognize that this is the more likely scenario than a bunch of coincidences and/or people supposedly making the ME to serve data center sysadmins -- btw many of those sysadmins, including on several threads here in HN, said they never used the ME and named a plethora of other tools.
Obviously I am not trying to change the way you think in general. I believe we can both agree that none of us knows for sure. The human brain's strength is to work with many variables and be able to impose some order in the chaos by pattern recognition and using historical info. I am not gonna deny this can lead to people drawing awfully misguided conclusions sometimes -- and I've been guilty of that as well! -- but it's the best we have, especially having in mind what tiny imperfect brains we have to work with.
Everything I can name are circumstantial evidence. I accept that. It's the nature of the area. Intelligence data isn't easy to come by.
And I am saying that the confidence interval on that calculation is just orders of magnitude not tight enough. I am not denying that you could be right. It's just that I am giving that possibility something like a 1% chance of being true, while something like 85% chance of this being pure incompetence by Intel management and engineers (the rest being some other explanation that's neither malice nor direct incompetence). I don't think you and I can find a common ground on this estimation.
Again though, ME is a bad thing because it's not open source, it can't be turned of, and it's buggy. Regardless of who ordered its creation, it sucks.
You're also saying, implicitly, that therefore we must default to assuming it is incompetence.
That link isn't a given. Stating that it is incompetence is also speculation, not some kind of universal backup truth.
However, when it comes to that last 5%, I assert that the historical data does not back a claim that Intel's marketing department is incompetent.
Until it's financially worth their while, why would they spend money on it?
Major system vendors are now offering to apply bootleg removal situations at the factory on customer request[1]. That request is not free. People are willing to /pay extra/ for no-IME laptops.
Either Intels marketing and public relations department are asleep at the wheel, or they've gone to the top to request a friendly switch to disable this and been told by the legal department that they can't have one.
[1]https://liliputing.com/2017/12/dell-also-sells-laptops-intel...