How Purism avoids Intel’s Active Management Technology

One of them I think was actually a zero day, you could get up on shodan and find piles of machines that would just let you upload an ISO and boot whatever you wanted on them.

It really is that bad.

I acknowledge that hardware products take years to develop, and they already have a lot on their plate.

Perhaps Intel doesn’t care about consumer whims, but clearly there’s demand from companies like Google.

I’m just generally surprised at the lack of public-facing responses from Intel’s leadership around this and other security issues facing their platform. It all reads like lawyers trying to minimize their liability.

They’re one of the most important technology platforms today. Everything besides cellphones runs on Intel.

Despite actually being a monopoly or duopoly, they don’t have to be so stodgy. I want to love them for their profound impact these past few decades, but it’s hard when it feels like they don’t listen to their customers.

> was read as abrasive; that tweet can be read as a snarky attack that belittles the efforts of the porter

I guess, because it allows for the chance that someone may not finish what they set out to do?

> to which the "so what?" response is apt – in fact, a de-escalation

"so what" is not a useful path to de-escalation. It's a way of saying "you've said your point and I don't think any of it applies, but I'm not going to explain why, nor even go to the length of explaining this to you, and instead respond with two words." It is, at it's core, dismissive, and that's not a useful way to de-escalate (even though I admit some people seem to think it is). What people don't seem to understand that that colloquial speech used with a friend is often dismissive in exactly this way, on purpose, because when you can actually assume good faith because of lots of prior interactions, it speeds up communication.

> And yet, in reality, it wasn't one.

Yeah, as I noted above, it very rarely is. The only times I think it can be used safely are when the people in question know each other well enough to know the other person is not being condescending and dismissive, and even then it's easy to be interpreted as that when the discussion is heated. In those cases, it sometimes takes people cooling off to assess the conversation more rationally and see what's actually the more likely intent in the phrase.

> (This is why you assume good faith, people!)

Good faith is useful, and necessary, but it really works best when only a little faith is needed in the first place. Since you can only assume good faith for yourself, it's also in your own self interest to make sure you limit the ways in which you speech can be misinterpreted. Often that means being a bit more formal so misunderstandings based on tone and familiarity are more rare. That's a shame, because sometimes we want to show friendship through our words, but that's much harder to do in pure text. Smiley's and emoticons can actually go a long way towards correctly communicating intent in these cases.

Sorry for the rant, I used this as a way to solidify some of my thinking on the subject. :)

Well that's just, like, your opinion.