81–90 of 93 posts
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Unfortunately, there are too few hardware developers and not enough hardware-awareness, thanks to the good abstraction nowadays. In the modern age, only few software devs cares about the underlying hardware, because it just works. The thing is, software _runs_ on hardware and any bug/backdoor etc in it undermines everything above. Did you know that the baseband chip in your smartphone runs it's own linux? Or that eve…
> the baseband chip in your smartphone runs it's own ... Microkernel In many if not most cases this kernel would be an L4 implementation. > OKL4 has been deployed on over 2 billion mobile phones ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Kernel_Labs )
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I am tempted to go back to dialup style connectivity. Meaning i disconnect the router from the net unless i absolutely need something online.
You absolutely need security updates, or your system will be out of date and extra-vulnerable as soon as you plug it in.
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Documenting it shouldn't alter its effectiveness. I can tell you how AES works and that doesn't compromise anything.
I agree with you. But Intel would have to convince skeptical Hollywood executives of that, who are more inclined to just not let PCs have new content at all, since relatively few people consume TV and movies on PCs to begin with. Personally, I think the right solution is to not have DRM for music, TV, and movies on PCs, purely for business reasons. What's happening today is that Intel is effectively shipping everyone…
Does hollywood have an leverage whatsoever on intel? If intel decided they were removing any and all DRM features hollywood would have no choice but to accept.
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> Why would Intel insist on being so secretive about their management engine? It includes DRM (Protected Audio/Video Path), for one.
Documenting it shouldn't alter its effectiveness. I can tell you how AES works and that doesn't compromise anything.
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I agree with you. But Intel would have to convince skeptical Hollywood executives of that, who are more inclined to just not let PCs have new content at all, since relatively few people consume TV and movies on PCs to begin with. Personally, I think the right solution is to not have DRM for music, TV, and movies on PCs, purely for business reasons. What's happening today is that Intel is effectively shipping everyone…
> But Intel would have to convince skeptical Hollywood executives of that Does hollywood have an leverage whatsoever on intel? If intel decided they were removing any and all DRM features hollywood would have no choice but to accept.
Hollywood holds all the cards here.
Why would Intel insist on being so secretive about their management engine? Is it some kind of competitive advantage for them? Supposedly, it's useful for management tasks in enterprise environments, but if I were CIO, I think I would ban VPro chips. Who wants ring -3 processes running on their network for which they have no information about?
There is a driver for it in the Linux kernel source tree.
Looks like it came in maybe around v3.9-rc1?
http://elixir.free-electrons.com/linux/v3.9-rc1/source/drive...
Did any Linux users question what this was at that time?
Is this driver part of the "default" Linux kernel configs?
What if the user compiles their kernel without this driver?
Would that change what could or could not be done by someone accessing the "ME" remotely?
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The author is pretty well-known https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_Garrett
That alone is not enough, though it helps. Being well-known means a more desirable account to steal, and this is code that must be run as root.
Obviously I'm not saying that this is the case here. But it might not be the best idea to run whichever github project someone links to under root.
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That alone is not enough, though it helps. Being well-known means a more desirable account to steal, and this is code that must be run as root.
Moreover there is no trivial way to verify that https://github.com/mjg59 is github accout of Matthew Garrett. So all one needs to do is to create account that looks good and most people assume that it's safe. Obviously I'm not saying that this is the case here. But it might not be the best idea to run whichever github project someone links to under root.
I tried to find some "Github" link in mjg59.dreamwidth.org pointing to github.com/mjg59, but I don't think there is any.
Definitely, you don't feel comfortable cloning and building a git repo to run it as root :P
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Documenting it shouldn't alter its effectiveness. I can tell you how AES works and that doesn't compromise anything.
It does make people less likely to want to buy the chip with the DRM though.