That is a different issue. The article was about an external USB device.
Also I don't understand the concern with people not trusting Intel. By using their hardware in any form you are inherently trusting them. Unless you are able to check their design and fabrication process, they could easily hide something in there to disable protections in Windows or Linux based on certain patterns of network traffic.
Say that we trust Intel completely. Does that somehow make AMT not a security concern? For the ME itself, especially if it's not connected to any networking hardware: Whatever. It seems more like a theoretical threat than a practical problem. AMT sounds like something that I don't want running on my machine, even if I trust Intel itself completely.
Perhaps others are not so trusting and do not want to legitimize surveillance and would like to hold these companies to account.
Privacy is not just some option, it is law. Surveillance and hidden surveillance of users is illegal in most countries and any technology with the capability to do so has to be disclosed with end user control.
Please stop blaming the victim for being ignorant and/or falling prey to marketing.
> most don't seem to value their privacy
Most people do value their privacy, but are either ignorant of how strongly technology can damage their privacy[1] or fee there isn't any other option or alternative.
> nothing will change
It will change when the people that do understand technology work to preserve privacy over profit and convenience, educate the general public about privacy issues, and inform them of privacy respecting alternatives.
[1] Businesses tend to encourage ignorant and/or misleading beliefs when they promise impressive features backed u[p with useless promises to "take security seriously".
I don’t think “don’t blame the victim” applies to voluntary transactions. Consumers have shown we will not sacrifice much for privacy or security. That’s a trade-off made in the market by millions of people, independently, every day.
I think a CPU that has no mini PC inside it is much easy to verify, you can try a lot of inputs and see if the output gets weird, I think this technique was used to discover some hidden switches in Intel that the government uses to work around the ME on their own systems.
Okay lets say that the ethernet MAC has some gates that detect a particular 1024-bit random bit pattern in packets and that triggers a behavior change in certain sequence of instructions common in Windows security code to bypass it. How would you discover this?
What do you mean the ethernet card triggers changes in Windows instructions? Do you mean it can scan the RAM and do some changes? I am not familiar with how recent hardware works but I would be worried if hardware could scan RAM and edit executable code bypassing the kernel and drivers, so more reasons to get open hardware and drivers.
Also I don't understand the concern with people not trusting Intel. By using their hardware in any form you are inherently trusting them. Unless you are able to check their design and fabrication process, they could easily hide something in there to disable protections in Windows or Linux based on certain patterns of network traffic.