Intel x86s hide another CPU that can take over your machine

> Recent Intel x86 processors implement a secret, powerful control mechanism...

Recent is overflowingly unhelpful, considering AMT (a part of IME) popped up in ICH7 back in mid-2005 [0]. It is unfortunate that Doctorow is associated with this rubbish journalism.

For what its worth, anything that has DMA can takeover a CPU that is reading instructions from RAM. AMT/IME are just explicitly intended to do that.

For those concerned, and probably rightly so, about AMT/IME, the simplest solution is to use a non-Intel NIC [1]

[0] = https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I/O_Controller_Hub#ICH7

[1] = https://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/intel-vpro-technol... ["Intel Active Management Technology communicates only through the onboard network interface of Intel vPro technology. Additional wired network interface cards are not supported and are ignored by Intel AMT."]

many computers these days have lojack. which can do any of this stuff without a dedicated cpu. i have a dell that somehow magically had lojack turned on and you could call lojack and they could not turn it off. so... we're already owned. everything is owned. most of your time is owned. most of your money is owned. and so on. and that's how it is and will be for the foreseeable future.