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A comment on What is AT&T doing at 1111340002?. Parent comment

Re:What is AT&T doing at 1111340002? by jiggawatts on Sunday November 07, 2021 @01:39AM (#29137100)
The NSA specifically orders motherboards without these management components. No one else can typically get them, they’re not available to people like you and me.

I think some things are overblown and unjustified paranoia.

Other things? Justified paranoia.

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Re:What is AT&T doing at 1111340002? by ranma42 on Sunday November 07, 2021 @03:40AM (#29137548)
> No one else can typically get them, they’re not available to people like you and me.

Isn't that just setting the HAP (High Assurance Platform) bit in the ME blob to disable it after bring-up? For Intel platforms it is possible for the end-user to modify the firmware themselves in many cases. https://hackaday.com/tag/hap-bit/

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Re:What is AT&T doing at 1111340002? by RalfWausE on Sunday November 07, 2021 @02:44AM (#29137340)
My approach as an practicing paranoic: Use retro Computers.
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Re:What is AT&T doing at 1111340002? by DeathArrow on Sunday November 07, 2021 @11:07AM (#29140572)
How much retro are we talking? If retro enough we can't use them for any modern use case.

Maybe something like a RISC-V core written to a FPGA by yourself is pretty safe.

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Re:What is AT&T doing at 1111340002? by LargoLasskhyfv on Wednesday November 10, 2021 @03:19AM (#29172334)
You can have both.

* https://github.com/MiSTer-devel/Main_MiSTer/wiki

Combine retro with FPGA as you like(within the constraints of that development board).

Or waste Watts by using software emulation.

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Re:What is AT&T doing at 1111340002? by RalfWausE on Sunday November 07, 2021 @03:09PM (#29143020)
It all depends on the one question: What IS your use case?

Mine is as an tutor on an evening college, casual writer and some dabbling into some embedded projects. For THIS use case my (very retro) Atari 520 ST with 4 MB Ram is totally working. Is it nuts? Yup, but i can be sure that no state trojan is monitoring my totally boring behaviour.

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Re:What is AT&T doing at 1111340002? by pphysch on Sunday November 07, 2021 @10:07PM (#29145813)
Take this behavior too far and you might just sign up for more monitoring.

"Why does citizen #2743652 have internet/electricity service with no registered devices or online profiles?" *Does deep background check*

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Re:What is AT&T doing at 1111340002? by RalfWausE on Monday November 08, 2021 @12:57AM (#29146449)
Nah, no problem: Just use some cheap tablet for a bit casual time in the "commercinet" (e.g. YouTube)... ;-)
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Re:What is AT&T doing at 1111340002? by coldacid on Sunday November 07, 2021 @10:35AM (#29140276)
This is the avenue I've started taking, myself.
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Re:What is AT&T doing at 1111340002? by raverbashing on Sunday November 07, 2021 @01:56AM (#29137167)
The IME is just a "smarter than needed" addition, so it's probably not too hard to take it out

But every PC has a SMC which deals with things like power-on, WOL, etc

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Re:What is AT&T doing at 1111340002? by _kbh_ on Sunday November 07, 2021 @09:01AM (#29139494)
You can remove “modules” of the management engine but it’s responsible for booting the x86 cores so you cannot entirely turn it off.
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