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Huawei products have been banned in a number of countries without any evidence, while US manufacturers like CISCO [0] have a pretty rich and regular history of

Huawei products have been banned in a number of countries without any evidence, while US manufacturers like CISCO [0] have a pretty rich and regular history of weird backdoors in their products and actively harassing security researchers to suppress the reveal of that information [1]. Now consider the fact how one of the top search results for "Intel me NSA" is this article [2] telling people how they can totally disable that nasty ME thanks to the apparently very well meaning NSA. I don't claim to be nearly well versed enough to understand if that NSA advise is actually useful, but I'm sure as hell skeptical enough when a burglar wants to tell me how to best secure my home from break-ins. [0] https://www.tomshardware.com/news/cisco-backdoor-hardcoded-accounts-software,37480.html https://www.tomshardware.com/news/cisco-backdoor-hardcoded-a... [1] https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2005/07/cisco_harasses.html https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2005/07/cisco_harasse... [2] https://www.csoonline.com/article/3220476/researchers-say-now-you-too-can-disable-intel-me-backdoor-thanks-to-the-nsa.html https://www.csoonline.com/article/3220476/researchers-say-no...

BlueTemplar 6y ago
> telling people how they can totally disable that nasty ME thanks to the apparently very well meaning NSA. > I don't claim to be nearly well versed enough to understand if that NSA advise is actually useful Why do you think that it's thanks to the NSA, and not despite what the NSA wanted ? What NSA advice ? Also, Dell supposedly can sell you IME-disabled (?) (thanks to this?) Intel CPU computers if you're a large enough organization. Of course it could be that it's actually a fake way to disable IME – can we really know without having the firmware source and checking the hardware, which is likely to be a monumental task considering the level of miniaturization these days ..?

BlueTemplar 6y ago

> telling people how they can totally disable that nasty ME thanks to the apparently very well meaning NSA. > I don't claim to be nearly well versed enough to understand if that NSA advise is actually useful Why do you think that it's thanks to the NSA, and not despite what the NSA wanted ? What NSA advice ? Also, Dell supposedly can sell you IME-disabled (?) (thanks to this?) Intel CPU computers if you're a large enough organization. Of course it could be that it's actually a fake way to disable IME – can we really know without having the firmware source and checking the hardware, which is likely to be a monumental task considering the level of miniaturization these days ..?