Well, probably today is no secret for someone that I'm not native on English and I apologize in advance if my words are improper.

BUT, how you will label yourself the feelings of someone who obsessively repeat "OMG! They steal my data!" and claims that the hardware vendors do this intentionally?


Well, in fact IME pop-upped its head in 2008 for what it's claimed. For example, the Wikipedia says:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Management_Engine


Meanwhile, the Core 2 Duo was launched 2006

in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Core_2

So, if you get hardware with early Core 2 Duo, like Conroe, Allendale, Wolfdale, Merom or Penryn, it's a quite a safe bet that you will have no IME within.

This means you can have a box with an Intel Core2 Duo E6400 with no IME. Or a laptop with Intel Core2 Duo P8600 with no IME.

In other hand, at least at beginning, the IME was a not so cheap feature invented for corporate. Avoiding the corporate hardware of that time, and you will get no IME almost certainly.

The even more nice part is that the Core2 Duo production ended in 2012, and the rise of IME was with the launch of Intel Core i3 (Nehalem) while being still a costly corporate solution.

So, yeah! It's still a quite safe bet the hardware of Core 2 Duo era.

And in the end, nobody forces people to buy Intel hardware if they do not want also IME at package.

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Legacy BIOS on my 3 computers.
Yeah. Shaking like a leaf. A nervous wreck. Thinking about IME would make my hair stand on end, if I had any.
What? You think they do it accidentally?

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Like i said before both the hardware (intel AND amd) have back doors and
are most probably rooted. And any kind of microsoft modern type os is also
not secure. You do what you can with what you can get as far as hardware goes
ibm has some motherboards but those guys are kinda a bit out of the game
and their motherboards are overpriced for what you get and then there is sifive
whom i believe nvidia tried to buy out and they COULD eventually make something
that could contend with x86 wintel but they are still just getting their feet
wet in the motherboard arena so we will have to wait and see. So maybe you have
more of a chance if you at least use linux in the security area but i wouldn't
lean to heavily on poor Linus not that he didn't tell the intelligence community
NO loud enough about putting a back door into the kernel. without proper hardware and
software You will never have adequate security. You should have BOTH ok. And Don't
get me started on Apple, yeah their arm based motherboards are cutting edge but they
are just about as bad as microsoft or any other corporation.

Hi LuckyCyborg,

You have misunderstood the sentence which you have quoted from Wikipedia.
What the author of that sentence is conveying is: after 2008 almost all of Intel's processor chipsets have the Intel ME.

What the author of that sentence did not say is: anything about chipsets made before 2009.

A few years ago when I looking for a used computer to buy I did some reading about chipsets and processors and such stuff. It is my understanding that from 2005 to the end of 2008 --> at least some Intel-based computers had some (or all) of the Intel ME-AMT-vPro system. If you have specific information which contradicts this, then I would be pleased to read it.

You are more than welcome to steer the conversation to a more Slackware-specific topic.

e.g. The mechanisms by which a malicious application running in Slackware might be able to modify the firmware and achieve persistence.

Everyone here knows that this is possible, but to what extent is such an attack possible on a host running slackware, versus Ubuntu/Windows? Assuming that any backdoors in the hardware are non-malicious in nature. Supply chain manipulation is a very different discussion.

Intel IME is interesting from a Tech Support/QA perspective because it exists to add a number of features that solve real-world problems. That said, every single one of these features opens an attack vector that risks exploitation. Even IF there is a conspiracy by governments to spy on their citizens, the engineers who created these features did so for reasons that are purely economic in nature.

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