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Why would they care? The folks asking for this are a tiny (tiny) minority of the market.

It's a huge potential win for cloud and government contracts. Amazon, Google, Microsoft and the US Government probably aren't too keen on having ring -3 code running in their datacenters waiting to be exploited somehow.

> Microsoft and the US Government probably aren't too keen on having ring -3 code running in their datacenters waiting to be exploited somehow.

Which is why they have a special configuration for that, sold to them by Intel.

Source?

coreboot was initially developed at LANL, a US Government laboratory. It's worth considering why that might be.

Search for Intel HAP (High Assurance Program). It's a magic killswitch that disables the ME, provided officially only to three-letter agencies and such, of course.

As for coreboot, keep in mind that it was originally developed long before the ME was a thing. IIRC the original motivation was that BIOS sucks. Which it does, sure, but that's orthogonal to the ME.

GP is referring to Intel's High Assurance Program (http://blog.ptsecurity.com/2017/08/disabling-intel-me.html) which offered the possibility to disable ME.

Google is asking for that (or at least trying to remove Intel ME from their servers in the labs) AFAIK.

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