Hacker News Reader

Comment by m1el | Hacker News Reader

I would be glad if this made Intel reconsider their stance on enforcing untrustable CPU features onto users.

CPUs aren't cheap! Just give your customers full control over the product!

It's almost as if there's some mysterious third factor at play, above and beyond giving your customers what they want, and above making a profit.

What could it be? This mysterious additional factor.. What could make the US company with the biggest CPU market share in the world possibly want to put an omnipresent overlord control chip onboard every processor it ships? It's almost like there's some kind of outside force at play, but that's a crazy idea. There's No Simple Answer here, for sure.

What indeed, such a mystery! It's a mystery, I tells ya!

You're not Intel's customer. Dell, Lenovo, Amazon et al. are. And they want management systems, because the large companies who buy from those guys also want management systems. This isn't some super conspiracy, (even if it's something the three letter organizations try to take advantage of it) this is pure business. Pwning a computer across the internet that your dumbass sales manager left on a train is a feature.

The 'best' part about it is that they don't even have to leave it on a train. This is progress!

You are intel's customer when those retail stores try to sell a computer to yourself. They usually include the cpu details and can help a customer make a decision. That's why the intel inside campaign was so successful.

Keyword being "was". Unfortunately most PC (and Mac, to an even greater extent) buyers today probably barely know who makes the CPU in what they're buying.

Also the choice is, and always was, basically between Intel and AMD. That's literally two options a customer has. When both companies implement a management engine across their CPUs, you don't have any choice in the matter.

I've had a handful of computers with CPUs made by VIA, so there's at least a small third option.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VIA_Technologies

>And they want management systems

The funny thing is that they actually don't. Never heard of system administrator who prefers to use intel ME. Some people told me that there are better tools to manage computers in the datacenter for example and ime just not worth it.

This is just an anecdata, but if anyone has any stories of using Intel AMT on a large scale (or actually on any scale even), i would really love to hear them.

I don't think system administrators are the customers, they are just the employees who keep the systems running. The customers are the upper management who has final approval on the purchases. The problem is likely that somewhere between the system administrators and the chain of management up to the top, one of the levels don't have enough political clout or was not persuasive enough to convince upper management to take a different direction.

This.

I had this situation in my career. Someone somewhere in the management chain decided that all computers need a full remote management tool installed behind employees' backs, and our friendly sysadmins didn't have any say in that; their job is to tell us to not have stuff that the remote management scripts identify as unwanted.

In another place that I had to deal with for a while, someone had the bright idea to outsource IT to an external company. This meant all the computers software engineers used were a) locked up as much as they could be, b) alterations to some OS configuration (or hardware) required going through a third party service provider.

I kind of understand the need for locking things up for regular computer users. I guess it also somehow adds up in the sheets to the upper beancounters. I also believe their math is totally bogus, because it doesn't count in the total destruction of productivity it causes for engineers of all kind.

Yeah. New project at my work is to get everyone onto a stripped down Windows 10 dumb terminal with IE and MS Office installed, no admin rights, no extra software.

I flat out refused to upgrade. I'm a software engineer. You want me catting, grepping and manipulating files on OneCloud ? really?

You want my VMs (also not allowed by default) to be stored in one cloud?

Like... this was clearly not well thought out

Think like a lawyer for a minute, consider the kind of work you need to do, and the maximum IOPS, CPU time, memory and diskspace this will all need.

Now go spec out however many AWS instances of the required type(s).

Now CC all-but-the-CTO on an email to accounting in reference to the new upgrade, asking for approval for this resource request.

This will likely result in all kinds of interesting noises and prompt a confused meeting.

"Why do you need all this?!"

"The new machine won't be able to provide these facilities locally."

"Can... can you continue to use your old machine?"

"For a while, sure."

"Well... what's changed? Why can't the new machine work?"

"The new machine won't have local admin, so I won't be able to install arbitrary software."

Insert sounds of manglement choking here. (Why do I feel I'm on TFTS...?)

I've been a system administrator at several large and small companies, including a major cloud host. HN is the only place I've ever heard the Intel ME discussed in my professional career. I would actually like to have access to some of those features to help manage workstations.

In a world where the clipper chip, snowden leaks, NSAKey, room 641a, NSA/RSA deal, and national security letters didn't exist, I'd be in the realms of crazy conspiracy theorist and you'd sound like the rational voice of evidence-based reason.

But that's not the world we live in. What I list above are not conspiracy theories, they are proven, factual happenings. There is a clear evidential basis to infer the NSA's intent and capabilities in this area.

There are obviously security/privacy snafus that companies make all the time that have nothing to do with nation-state influence and spying. Superfish, for example, was more-likely-than-not a really bad judgement call on the tradeoff between analytics and customer privacy.

>this is pure business.

If that were true then the ability to disable ME, which clearly exists, would be made available to parties other than the NSA.

Nah, it's still conspiracy theories. At best conspiracy conjecture.

Unlike "... proven, factual happenings", your idea isn't backed by any evidence - at least not any that appear in your post.

What kind of evidence would you imagine one would find, if that were happening?

Your point doesn't push the burden of proof unto those that disagree (see Russel's teapot[0]), nor make it OK to skip evidence altogether.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell%27s_teapot

Things change once we've found the rest of a tea set in various orbits. There may not be strong direct evidence but it's no longer a silly conjecture, it's the kind of thing that we find.

So those other examples mean you do have the burden of justifying your 'conspiracy' label.

Not really; it isn't actually proven until you have proof.

As FooHentai originally said, "There is a clear evidential basis to infer the NSA's intent and capabilities in this area" - but it tells us nothing about this particular case, which remains speculation. One could say the odds have changed, but we still don't know anything about the real state of things.

The "'conspiracy'-label" is applicable regardless, whether we're talking about fact or fiction.

If you find that someone broke into your house and stole your Xbox, and there's a guy down the street who you already know has a long criminal record of home burglaries, is it unreasonable to suspect that guy to be a likely culprit?

Likewise, if there's a backdoor in every new PC's CPU, and there's a three-letter agency presiding over that CPU vendor's jurisdiction that has a long track record of backdooring things, is it unreasonable to suspect that maybe - just maybe - that TLA is responsible?

Now of course the ex-con or the TLA can be totally innocent here, but if I were a detective, they'd be the first ones from whom I'd be asking for alibis.

I don't think your analogy holds up;

The hypotheticals aren't comparable, nor is the prior available information - and even though the Intel AMT/ME situation is egregious, explaining it simply as "a backdoor" is an oversimplification.

I'd agree that probabilities with regard to what is reasonable to assume (the operative word here) shift as a consequence of circumstantial information, but you can't really draw any conclusions based on that - hence the burden of proof, i.e. the presumption of innocence in your analogy.

As indrax partly pointed out, Russel's teapot exists in a void where rational entities with no hidden desires are discussing a single fact with perfect knowledge, and no other related facts exist. Reality is filled with humans whose behavior follows trends, and the entirety of science is based on the concept that past evidence applies to the future despite having no evidence it will, because we allow induction since deduction is based on axioms of which we have none.

So what is the inductive reasoning behind the alleged conspiracy in question, then?

That it must have happened since the NSA has the intent and capabilities? Does this mean that any digital conspiracy you can dream up involving the NSA is probable?

"Does this mean that any digital conspiracy you can dream up involving the NSA is probable?"

Um, yes?

>Does this mean that any digital conspiracy you can dream up involving the NSA is probable?

No. If I dreamed up that the NSA was using frequencies in CPUs to control our behaviors and increase our orange juice consumption, there are still reasons to not treat that one as having any reasonable probability of being true, compared to the notion that the NSA is working to get back-doors into software. Reasons for this difference in probability are based on feasibility, implications if true, how specific the claim is, and if it is in line with past behaviors.

My point is, to follow your example re: orange juice consumption, that the reasons not to treat it as having any reasonable probability is secondary to the fact that there is no supporting evidence (burden of proof, etc.)

As I replied in another subthread, I'd agree that probabilities with regard to what is reasonable to assume (the operative word here) shift as a consequence of circumstantial information, but you can't really draw any conclusions based on that.

... or you know - both are true - Enterprises want remote management - and provide the business case - and TLAs would like it too

Which will be fun when the next data breach happens because of it

Never Sherlocking A Culpable, Integrated And Feasible Balanced Induction as to what that force may be!

Exactly :D

It's not only that. There is also that other US company that is the biggest competitor of this one, that will add every feature people want to their cheapest CPUs, will undercut its rivals profit rate, will negotiate customizations with larger clients, and yet refuses to compete on living those undesired features out of some CPU model.

No Simple Answer at all.

Actually they are cheap - the reason why a significant amount of on chip resources can be assembled into the IME on all of Intel's chipsets is because IC process technology has advanced by many orders of magnitude. The Pentium 4 represented the edge of consumer grade CPUs 10 years ago, and it was around that time we reached practical limits on frequency. As hardware manufacturing shifted towards more cores and caches, SoC ICs became the standard. Slapping a cheap, low power system of CPU and memory on every chipset is easy, cheap and natural.

With extra hardware being cheap and easy, Intel put 2 and 2 together and tried to monetize this by offering businesses extra capabilities as a standard. Obviously this introduces new attack vectors, and the opaque nature of this new "standard" feature attracts attention from all sides.

Indeed. Moore's law is an observation on the transistor size on a die, how they halved in size every x months. This allows one to do either more complex chips (more features etc), cheaper chips (more chips pr die means a higher yeild of functioning chips) or faster chips (lower voltage, less heat, higher clock).

But the clock increase have stopped, and Intel is loath to lower chip prices without some serious competition forcing them, so they keep coming up with new features to justify the price as they shrink the transistors.

You don't hide features you implemented in order to sell your product to customers.

Why not? It's worked so far >_>

They're "packaged" "solutions"!

That's Intel's whole chip business model. Make a high end part and selectively disable features to form cheaper SKUs. It's also part of the chip binning process, allowing you to sell near-100% of what you make. Nvidia and AMD do this too.

"Just give your customers full control over the product!"

Check out the Talos II, the first owner-controllable workstation in quite a while. https://raptorcs.com/

What do you mean by that?

https://raptorcs.com/content/TL2WK2/intro.html

not even a price yet.

There’s pricing when you click preorder. It’s like $6500.

It's $4000 for the desktop system and $4700 for the workstation.

I'm not really sure where you got the $6500 figure.

Ordered alone, the motherboard+CPU is about $2300.

Hasn’t this been in preorder for years?

Talos II was announced this year. They did have an earlier project (Talos I) which did not reach funding goals due to how expensive it was. Talos II is a smaller scale system (with a bigger CPU) probably made in the hopes that it'll be more palatable in terms of price and usability.

"Just give your customers full control over the product!"

Ownership is so 20th century.

Everything that is old is new again.

AT&T used to claim anyone who attached an unapproved telephone was a criminal: http://bpastudio.csudh.edu/fac/lpress/471/hout/telecomHistor...

"Freed" slaves in the US used to only get to rent land on which to live: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharecropping#United_States

Being in control of your own destiny isn't actually that common, historically.

We all rent the land on which we live. Try not paying your property taxes. In most states.

But you can also can rent land on which to farm, to build a factory, or a skyscraper, without living on that land.

...except for Nevada when for a few years they briefly allowed people to get allodial title.

thats almost a worldwide exception

I hear Mexico allows you to actually own land.

I don't know if this counts or not, but in the UK there are the concepts of freehold and leasehold. Leasehold requires payment of rent on land (to a landlord), but freehold does not. I believe that technically all land is owned by the crown, but I don't think they tax based on land ownership.

...that expired upon death and could not be passed to heirs.

Still pretty cool.

to me this looks fair: land does not reproduce, but people do. Give people the right to own a non infinite resource forever and pretty soon you get to the point where 1% of them will own 99% of that resource, which is exactly what is happening now in many contexts.

In CA they just put a lien on your house. And all that means is you can't sell without clearing the lien (by paying back). I didn't pay property taxes for 2 years once.

That will happen in most states, but if you don't pay long enough they will usually come after you. It may take several years.

With land, it at least makes sense, because there's a very limited supply of it. So one could reasonably argue that it's just too valuable for society to fully surrender all control of even a part of it on a permanent basis.

I read the linked wikipedia article, but there was nothing in it that I found to support your assertion the freed slaves were not allowed to own land?

That was the most depressing comment I've ever seen here.

And yet it is at the very core of most of the issues in our industry.

The cloud. Shitty SaaS companies. DRM. Right to Repair. The War on General-Purpose Computing. Software freedom. All of that is about who is the owner of a computing device.

That's exactly why it's so depressing. As the cost of living should be going down, everyone is trying to extract rents and take away the individuals freedom.

Ahahahahahahahaahahahhahaahh huhuhu

-Intel probably

Please don't do this here.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com