News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Smartphones and the location data marketplace by amelius on Saturday December 21, 2019 @07:08PM (#21854171)
> But the irony is that the device manufacturer could easily disable this backdoor in favor of their own.

I'm not sure it works that way. Perhaps the NSA could force certain US companies to specifically design and install backdoors, and require these backdoors to be always active. (One of my possibly ungrounded/paranoid fears is that they do this with Intel ME).

Re:Smartphones and the location data marketplace by sfifs on Saturday December 21, 2019 @11:00PM (#21855091)
The balance of likelihood is they do on both Intel and AMD management engines as that's what any competent agency should do in this age. To my mind, there's no other real reason for the explosion of interest in ARM chips on server. ARM design is sufficiently well understood and simple that usable chips can be designed and fabbed away from the control of US companies even if it provides poor performance trade offs.