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How to become the sole owner of your PC [pdf]

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Re: How to become the sole owner of your PC [pdf]

#11

How about firewalling whatever ports the Intel code may use? If it can't communicate with the Internet, presumably it's not likely to do any harm.

Firewalling ports for incoming connections and IP addresses for outgoing, I should say.

Re: How to become the sole owner of your PC [pdf]

#14
post #2

The PDF won't open for me on a Nexus 5, doesn't show thru githubs mobile site either. Edit: It worked when I requested the desktop version of github though.

Looking at that GitHub page brought my workstation to its knees also... It's not a weak machine either (Desktop i5 with 16GB ram).

Re: How to become the sole owner of your PC [pdf]

#16

Does anyone know of a tool or even sequence of actual commands to disable the Intel ME AMT functionality? Did I miss it in the slides? I see explanations and low-level temporary/soft-disablement references, but nothing immediately actionable.

There is no prescribed way to disable it, and it looks like the slides only provide a glimpse of the workarounds/hacks needed to do so. I imagine there's a lot we're missing from this presentation, though, because it looks like there was a demo.

Re: How to become the sole owner of your PC [pdf]

#18

While I wait patiently for more open hardware designs to become more popular / actually used (Be it SPARC, RISC-V or something else), I wonder what AMD's equivalent functionality is like in comparison to this - I strongly doubt that no equivalent exists for AMD CPUs.

From https://libreboot.org/faq/#amd

# Why is the latest AMD hardware unsupported in libreboot?

It is extremely unlikely that any post-2013 AMD hardware will ever be supported in libreboot, due to severe security and freedom issues; so severe, that the libreboot project recommends avoiding all modern AMD hardware. If you have an AMD based system affected by the problems described below, then you should get rid of it as soon as possible. The main issues are as follows:

# AMD Platform Security Processor (PSP)

This is basically AMD's own version of the Intel Management Engine. It has all of the same basic security and freedom issues, although the implementation is wildly different.

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