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Comment by MintelIE | Hacker News Reader

Intel ME can be used to monitor employees without the OS ever becoming aware of anything. The only way to detect it would be to sniff the network.

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The management at Intel itself are also highly paranoid. They have been using "bossware" for over a decade before COVID. It's just known as a paranoid company.

Although, probably a lot of large corps aren't too different.

I experienced this 20 years ago when working on a collaborative project with engineers at Intel. They searched me on leaving the building every day. And this was just an office building, not a final assembly plant where it might be reasonable to want to look for theft of production units. It was like exiting Fry's. I made a mental note then never to work for Intel.

“Only the paranoid survive” is their motto, one of their early CEO even has an autobiography in that title

Does this really happen, or would it ever? Seems like a contrived scenario for employees to have enough access and knowledge to detect and defeat a userspace or kernel-resident solution that doesn’t want to be found. Plus, if you’re going that far, you’d want to make sure it wasn’t easily detectable by analyzing network traffic.

I’m sure such a thing is out there, but I doubt it’s being used by employers to spy on workers. More like governments spying on workers with access to sensitive IP.

Yes

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Active_Management_Tech...

Plus the laptop "anti-theft" BIOSes that phone home whose name I cannot recall.

Computrace?

That'd be it. My Thinkpads let me permanently disable it.

That's what the BIOS claims anyway...

Nope. It’s all over.

Absolute Computrace starts at $29 and is resident in most every OEM BIOS manufactured in the last 20-25 years.

I kinda wish I had an intel board atm, because the more I read about ME the more I want to toy with it.

In theory, or have you heard of this being done in practice?

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