Yes, AMT is for remote management. Management Engine, the platform on which AMT is an application, hosts other applications, including at least one for DRM.
12,788 karma · joined April 2, 2014
I think that's what was intended by the article:
Once the paper products were removed, the passenger had to put them in a separate bin to be scanned separately.
Perhaps I misunderstand the question, but AMT is not dependent on the system's OS, by design. AMT runs on Intel Management Engine, a platform on the computer with its own CPU, memory, OS, bus, caches, etc. ... and applications, including AMT. AMT is designed to be used when there is no functioning OS.
Think of it this way: You paid for one computer, but you got two!
Ignoring the illegality of interfering with law enforcement, this is bad customer service. Not only would I resent the invasion of privacy, but that algorithm is going to have a meaningful number of false-positives. It's a crappy way to deal with customers - if you think there's a problem, tell them you are denying service.
It's hard to imagine another business doing this. Does a restaurant just not bring food? An online store just not send the clothes? I know you are thinking about shadowbanning, which I also think is crappy, but at least it's much less consequential.
These kinds of things have been going on for years, and yet the U.S. government, for one, just reduced privacy protections for consumers.
Will that prevent ultrasonic beacons? I assumed the speakers were the same on smart and 'dumb' TVs.
One reason to regulate markets is to preserve a competitive environment where this is possible. Big, dominant players in a market want less competition, not more, and left on their own they find ways to prevent it.
Look at how Microsoft used the Windows monopoly, for example, to eliminate competition in office suites and web browsers. They made it technically difficult for customers to use other products, they pressured vendors into selling Microsoft's products over others', they used their OS monopoly to give them a technical advantage in applications that ran on it, they distorted open standards to lock in their products ('embrace, extend, extinguish'), etc. It took a government lawsuit to open the web browser market and even that was too late for the competition, who were out of business. (The office suite market never again had competition until maybe the online suites now, and I don't know how much market share they have.)
> competition in telecom would likely enforce net neutrality on its own
I don't see why that particular outcome would be likely. Plenty of industries do things, sans regulation, that are bad for consumers and that consumers don't like. Look at the fraud in the financial industry, for example, or the privacy problems in IT products, or all the nightmares of the health insurance industry.
It was literally world-wide before that, but if you mean that it boomed: Yes, commercial businesses helped a lot, and so did others:
Free, open source software such as the World Wide Web, the entire protocol stack (IP, TCP/UDP, DNS, etc.), SMTP, POP, IRC, *nix/BSD, Mosaic ... let's give credit where it's due!
The personal computer revolution and all that went into it. Normal people were just getting their first computers in the 1990s. No point in Internet access without a client machine.
Telecommunications innovations such as PPP, modems, etc, which allowed data connections over phone lines.
Also, not all the commercial business was 'free market capitalism'; one big one that helped the Internet starting in 1995 was a predatory monopoly.
What about the LEO systems such as Iridium, etc. (I forget which is owned by whom and what their statuses are)?
https://github.com/corna/me_cleaner
https://hardenedlinux.github.io/firmware/2016/11/17/neutrali...
To be 100% clear, I haven't tried either.
* "people who liked Jay Z were more likely to like Obama"
* "Hispanics between the ages of 18 and 25 probably do engage with ads singing the charms and advantages of military service."
(I'm skipping the other example because it's an issue of economic exploitation, not ethnicity.)
> I just wish ... I could completely disable ME
You might find this useful:
Sure they prefer it. I prefer a soup-to-nuts high-assurance personal laptop, or a private 747, but I'm not willing to pay for them. I know my laptop can be exploited. My point is that it's an economic question, not one of technical specifications.
> Intel knows their dominant position with lockin to x86 code lets them ignore customers' preferences if they deliver something useful. It's an oligopoly effect.
To a degree. Customer could use their TPMs for many of the same functions as ME, or get third party devices for out-of-band remote control like AMT. Intel just needs to make it good enough, but that's the 'intentional', so to speak, design of marketplaces.
I would love it if AMD took the opportunity, and security became a competitive arms race between them.
Personally, I think any ideology is dangerous. The "free market" should be a tool - good at some things, bad at others - and not an ideological dogma. I don't think it works well when enterprises cannot fail, a necessary part of the free market; so public safety, health care, basic utilities (e.g. water), etc. aren't good problems on which to apply the free market tool. It's also not useful for goods that shouldn't be distributed based on ability to pay, such as basic infrastructure (roads, phone, Internet), education, basic nutrition or health care.
But it is an excellent tool for many purposes, and has a moral basis - it provides for the liberty of the business owners to do what they want with their property. I didn't agree when it was a dogma, and I don't agree that it's unimportant. It's essential.
> Globalisation was just another means to promote economic interests. It was nothing to do with some free market ideal
I strongly disagree. Free trade is a fundamental of free market economics, in theory and reality. It's just interference in the free market, this time at an international border instead of inside it (consider: would it be different if it happened at U.S. state borders? Urban borders?). If I'm making cars and must pay more for worse steel, simply because the worse steel plant is in one location and the better one in another, that wastes economic resources: It wastes the car manufacturer's money, which could go to something more useful such as more jobs, better cars, or payments to shareholders; it wastes the car buyer's money, which could have purchased a better car (i.e., with better steel); it wastes much of the resources put into the inferior steel plant, which could go to more productive uses (look up comparative advantage); and it deprives a productive enterprise, the better steel plant, of resources that it fairly won on merit in the marketplace. The fact is that the better steel plant uses the money more efficiently, freeing up for better uses the extra money that would be consumed making bad steel and funding the people who built the better mousetrap. You probably want your mousetrap to succeed on its merits, not on whether the President happens to like you.
But there is a serious issue with the free market's (including free trade's) impact on labor. My way of looking at it is that capital can move much more quickly than labor: A factory can move much more quickly than its workers can (either to the new factory or to equivalent jobs). The economy is there to serve people, so that should be addressed.
> The US government, and most governments around the world, have been heavily interventionist since at least WWII. This was born of necessity - the Great Depression was largely the outcome of capitalism left unchecked. After WWII the U.S. economy was in tatters. Truman and Eisenhower both took very aggressive interventionist policies to keep the economy afloat.
While I agree with much of your point, parts of that history are time-shifted. The Great Depression began in 1929 and FDR took office in 1933. That's (roughly) when the heavy intervention began, and it took place until the end of WWII (1945) - though much of the intervention during WWII was for a different reason, to use the nation's economic resources for war materials. Post-WWII (though maybe not the next day) the U.S. economy was robust. The 1950s, including under Eisenhower, were possibly the greatest economic boom in U.S. history, and it continued until roughly the 1970s. Heavy regulation, intervention and taxes - though not at the scale of the Great Depression - which continued until the early 1980s, was not due to economic necessity, but possibly due to a belief in democratic government.
I agree; it should not be taken to an extreme and I didn't mean it in an ideological sense. But there is value to 'free' market competition; it's a useful tool and also provides freedom, in the sense of liberty, a core value of our society. Government intimidation of businesses is almost always a bad solution to the problems; law and regulation are democratic and much more just. Infosys isn't the first - remember the businesses whom Trump claims to have intimidated about their factory locations.
> It'll create market inefficiency, which will allow other promising companies to compete, which can potentially raise the quality of the end-result.
Fundamentally, that's not the result of inefficiency. It's called "inefficient" because it costs more for worse outcomes. It's a very predictable, well-tested outcome.
Are you sure they don't? In the past, many Windows edition upgrades (e.g., Home to Pro) were just a matter of enabling features that were already installed.
Most importantly, it sets very dangerous precedents of U.S. federal government interference in the free market and in business decisions, and of economic nationalism worldwide:
* Today you might like who the federal government is picking on and threatening; tomorrow you might not. Do we want politicians making decisions for businesses and controlling the free market? We can count on the politicians making political, not economic decisions. It's like the worst of over-regulation, but with no legal framework or process to restrain it.
* Americans like it when jobs come to the U.S., but the U.S. long has been the standard-bearer of international free trade. If the U.S. stops promoting it, others likely will backslide quickly. Why shouldn't India demand the same of U.S. companies? (If your argument is fairness and how bad Infosys is, then you looking at factors that don't determine international trade practices.) When they demand that U.S. jobs move to their countries, will there even be a net gain in jobs?
All that will result is moving jobs back and forth not to increase productivity and find market efficiencies, but for political reasons. It will create market inefficiencies, which could (for example) raise costs for Infosys customers (including U.S. customers), reduce Infosys' overall employment, reduce profit for Infosys shareholders, and reduce overall productivity for the economies involved.
It's surprising how quickly the terms "free market" and "free trade" have disappeared from HN.
OTOH, there is a good argument that vendors know the risks much better than their customers can, and that they have a responsibility to protect their customers from dangerous options. But even that depends on the cost; everything can be made safer for greater expense. I wonder if this qualifies.
Personally, I hesitate more than most because of the technical reasons you cite, but even turning on a computer is a risk. Probably this isn't the greatest risk to a business' IT.
Everyone who sells systems knowingly sells exploitable ones, unless the sellers are naive. Every system you and I deliver to our customers/users is exploitable.
ME is an independent platform that runs parallel with the main CPU. ME has it's own CPU, memory, bus, etc. The general purpose is to provide an isolated subsystem on which to run security and management applications.
AMT's out-of-band remote access allows support to access the computer when the OS isn't or can't be loaded.
From the IT and security perspectives, these features are very valuable.
EDIT: If you want more info:
* By far the best place to learn about ME and AMT that I found, though it's a few years old:
Platform Embedded Security Technology Revealed: Safeguarding the Future of Computing with Intel Embedded Security and Management Engine by Xiaoyu Ruan (security researcher with the Platform Engineering Group at Intel). Apress (2014)
* Intel x86 considered harmful by Joanna Rutkowska, founder of Qubes (2015)
http://invisiblethings.org/papers/2015/x86_harmful.pdf
* How to Become the Sole Owner of Your PC by Maxim Goryachy, Mark Ermolov, Positive Technologies [haven't read this one in awhile]
https://github.com/ptresearch/me-disablement/blob/master/How...
* How Purism avoids Intel’s Active Management Technology by Purism
I wonder if that's true. Intel has many smart security professionals working for it, and probably they expected there would be exploits; they exist on every system. I'm reading a book about Intel Management Engine (the independent subsystem on which includes AMT runs) by an Intel engineer[0], and they are clear that their model mitigates risk but nowhere do they say that it's invulnerable. In fact, they include responses to exploits in their discussion of their security process.
It's as secure as I thought it was; of course there are some vulnerabilities. The real issue to me is how effectively they mitigate it.
[0] Highly recommended to learn about ME and AMT: Platform Embedded Security Technology Revealed: Safeguarding the Future of Computing with Intel Embedded Security and Management Engine by Xiaoyu Ruan, published by Apress (2014)