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U.S. inks bill to force geo-tracking tech for high-end gaming and AI GPUs (www.tomshardware.com)

submitted 2 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 hours ago* (last edited 8 hours ago) (1 children)

please read up on intel management engine

I'm already familiar with it. On the systems I buy and intall, if they are Intel based, ME gets disabled since I haven't found a reasonable use for it.

Oh yeah, ARM also has something similar.

Since this is more relevant to me (numerically, most of the systems that I install are Raspberry Pi based robots), I'm happy to announce that TrustZone is not supported on Pi 4 (I haven't checked about other models). I haven't tested, however - don't trust my word.

Who would you buy from in this case?

From the Raspberry Pi Foundation, who are doubtless ordering silicon from TSMC for the Pico series and ready-made CPUs for their bigger products, and various other services from other companies. If they didn't exist, I would likely fall back on RockChip based products from China.

https://www.cryptomuseum.com/covert/bugs/nsaant/firewalk/index.htm

Wow. :) Neat trick. (Would be revealed in competent hands, though. Snap an X-ray photo and find excess electronics in the socket.)

However, a radio transceiver is an extremely poor candidate for embedding on a chip. It's good for bugging boards, not chips.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

ME gets disabled

I didn't know you could disable it. I figured it was very impractical or near impossible to do. how did you do it?

Raspberry Pi Foundation

I'm not going to lie, raspberry pis are a good candidate for a desktop but they're still very underpowered compared to modern computers. That's my only critcism. But yes, i'm not sure if there's any spookware on any of the raspberry pis.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 hours ago* (last edited 5 hours ago)

how did you do it?

In the BIOS options of that specific server (nothing fancy, a generic Dell with some Xeon processor) the option to enable/disable ME was just plainly offered.

Chipset features > Intel AMT (active management technology) > disable (or something similar, my memory is a bit fuzzy). I researched the option, got worried about the outcomes if someone learned to exploit it, and made it a policy of turning it off. It was about 2 years ago.

P.S.

I'm sure there exist tools for the really security-conscious folks to verify whether ME has become disabled, but I was installing a boring warehouse system, so I didn't check.