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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]

#71
post #54
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really??

Yeah, really. It's relatively well known among free software enthusiasts. The trouble is, what do you do about it?

Buy a Libreboot T400? It comes without Intel ME and is FSF-certified: https://minifree.org/product/libreboot-t400/

It is pretty expensive for the amount of performance you get, but you are getting a fully documented, auditable and free product. It comes with instructions on how to update/build/flash/modify your firmware. You're also supporting the Libreboot project.

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

#72
post #64

30 years ago you could buy an IBM PC/AT and it would come with schematics, detailed programming information, and the complete source code listing for the BIOS[1]. There wasn't really anything "hidden", and you really felt like "the sole owner of your PC". The PC became the dominant platform because of this. Now, because of corporate interests[2][3], much of it is officially under a thick layer of red-tape NDAs, and w…

> they really intended it to be a backdoor-ish sort of thing Occam's razor says they really just sell a ton of CPUs to huge datacenters and wanted to solve the problem of having to have some tech go out and physically reset a machine when it misbehaves. If you've ever accidentally powered down a machine that's sitting in some lights-out facility in Northern Alabraska, this kind of technology is a godsend. Now I'm not…

No, Occam razor says that if all you you want to do is LOM, you put an embedded computer running Linux and ssh, connected only to to power and to the console, and nothing else, not a SPARC (?!?) core running proprietary code that does way, way more than just implement support for LOM, and which has access to all memory and CPU state.

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

#73
post #45

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.

That only works for very simple surveillance. It has complete control over your hardware, and it can encode information that it wants to get off of the system in a variety of different ways. If you want to firewall ports or IP addresses on the machine itself, obviously that doesn't do anything, so what you'd need to do is do it on your router (that you hope doesn't have a similar backdoor that cooperates with ME), fi…

And it cooperates with Intel NICs - and when the ME is half-disabled, the NIC starts showing erratic behaviour.

I’m back to using a realtek NIC from 2006 now.

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

#74
post #71
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, really. It's relatively well known among free software enthusiasts. The trouble is, what do you do about it?

Buy a Libreboot T400? It comes without Intel ME and is FSF-certified: https://minifree.org/product/libreboot-t400/ It is pretty expensive for the amount of performance you get, but you are getting a fully documented, auditable and free product. It comes with instructions on how to update/build/flash/modify your firmware. You're also supporting the Libreboot project.

Wow, thanks for introducing me to this. Been wanting a new laptop for coding and writing and I would be 100% behind something of that nature.

Have you had the chance of using it?

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

#75
post #72
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they really intended it to be a backdoor-ish sort of thing Occam's razor says they really just sell a ton of CPUs to huge datacenters and wanted to solve the problem of having to have some tech go out and physically reset a machine when it misbehaves. If you've ever accidentally powered down a machine that's sitting in some lights-out facility in Northern Alabraska, this kind of technology is a godsend. Now I'm not…

No, Occam razor says that if all you you want to do is LOM, you put an embedded computer running Linux and ssh, connected only to to power and to the console, and nothing else, not a SPARC (?!?) core running proprietary code that does way, way more than just implement support for LOM, and which has access to all memory and CPU state.

It's not a SPARC, it's an ARC. It's a very different processor.

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

#76
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is like cell phone radios with DMA access. Anything they want, in practice. If you are buying any computer commercially it always has backdoored hardware with a wholly proprietary coprocessor with networking and memory access.

Can you please share links of evidence of this? Thank you

http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/architecture-and-tech... I believe.

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

#77
post #71
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, really. It's relatively well known among free software enthusiasts. The trouble is, what do you do about it?

Buy a Libreboot T400? It comes without Intel ME and is FSF-certified: https://minifree.org/product/libreboot-t400/ It is pretty expensive for the amount of performance you get, but you are getting a fully documented, auditable and free product. It comes with instructions on how to update/build/flash/modify your firmware. You're also supporting the Libreboot project.

This project needs more publicity.

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

#78
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, Occam razor says that if all you you want to do is LOM, you put an embedded computer running Linux and ssh, connected only to to power and to the console, and nothing else, not a SPARC (?!?) core running proprietary code that does way, way more than just implement support for LOM, and which has access to all memory and CPU state.

It's not a SPARC, it's an ARC. It's a very different processor.

The earlier ME versions used an ARC. The later ones use a SPARC.

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

#79
post #63

There's always the non x86 path. I have recently purchased a pi-top which is basically a 3d-printed laptop case + laptop battery + keyboard + display + raspberry pi 3. The keyboard could be better and I'll swap out the pi for a beagle bone black (pi comes with a binary blob) but it's a surprisingly useful package. I only bought it to experiment a bit with ARM assembly on the go but it's actually powerful enough for a…

ARM isn't a lot better. It helps that the (relatively simple) boards have the schematics available, but most platforms require binary blobs and there are few of them that don't have a bunch of useful information tucked away behind a gazillion NDAs. The various warts in the implementation (e.g. no BIOS, so there's quite some effort going just into making something boot on a new ARM board) and the non-standard, or just…

I have admittedly not investigated it very deeply but the Beagle Bone Black seems good enough with compromises. AFAIK it will boot without a blob but contains one for the GPU (PowerVR). The device will run non-OpenGL stuff fine and I believe there is some progress on reverse engineering an open driver. There's armv7 (am335x) from OpenBSD which is my base indicator that it's at least somehow usable without any blobs.

I'll yield to more informed people but searching a reasonably useful and completely open (I guess I can live without HDL for everything but it would be nice) machine has been a quest I go on every now and then. ARM seems to be the best (and most affordable) bet. I'll gladly take other suggestions as the whole ARM licensing model doesn't really sit well with me.

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

#80
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ARM isn't a lot better. It helps that the (relatively simple) boards have the schematics available, but most platforms require binary blobs and there are few of them that don't have a bunch of useful information tucked away behind a gazillion NDAs. The various warts in the implementation (e.g. no BIOS, so there's quite some effort going just into making something boot on a new ARM board) and the non-standard, or just…

I have admittedly not investigated it very deeply but the Beagle Bone Black seems good enough with compromises. AFAIK it will boot without a blob but contains one for the GPU (PowerVR). The device will run non-OpenGL stuff fine and I believe there is some progress on reverse engineering an open driver. There's armv7 (am335x) from OpenBSD which is my base indicator that it's at least somehow usable without any blobs.…

I go on that quest every once in a while, too, but without too much luck.

I haven't ran OpenBSD on the BeagleBone Black, but I imagine it has no graphical output of any kind. I see the X packages but the only on-board devices that are listed as supported are:

    BeagleBone, BeagleBone Black
	Supported on-board devices:
	  standard serial port (com)
	  watchdog controller (omdog)
	  ethernet controller (cpsw)
	  GPIO controller (omgpio)
so it boots but it seems a little unlikely that you can do much post-1980s work on it.

I run into various ARM platforms at $work. The platform, as a whole, is probably a step backwards from e.g. PowerPC; it's very relevant today because its power consumption is very hard to beat, and between mobile phones, tablets, IoT and in-car infotainment, this is an important topic. But unless you need something that's super low power, the only thing ARM CPUs have to show for themselves is that they aren't x86. This is more than made up for by the headaches involved into getting stuff that runs on a company's Cortex A7 to run on another company's Cortex A7.

This isn't to say that it's a bad thing. Pre-64-bit ARMs were designed (with the exception of some really old stuff in the 80s) as a platform for appliances, not for computers. They're excellent for designing phones and tablets and smart TVs and whatnot. It's trying to bolt a general-purpose environment on top of them that gives people headaches.

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