But according to Intel it exists to provide functionality that is desired by hardware owners.
Big "Look what you made me do" energy.
Big "Look what you made me do" energy.
We hear this all the time don't we? Claims that something is;
"Because people want it".
"Markets demand it".
But we see absolutely no evidence of them whatsoever, this mythical mass of people clamouring for features that are strangely aligned with the things big-tech suppliers and manufacturers wish ti push and get to simply assert that "people want".
We like to think of ourselves as "evidence based, rational society" We'll happily hold governments, scientific and health research to a high standard of evidence. Even Wikipedia articles demand "citation needed".
Show us those people! Back up your claims Intel.
From my experience, I actually must disable 5G. The 4G network in my area actually works well enough in all circumstances. The 5G network is all-or-nothing. I either wind up with incredible speeds or completely unusable.
I'm with Telus up here in Canada. You pay the same old rates as per the usual for 5G speeds. If however you go with their subsidiary (Koodo) using the older infrastructure, you can pay a little less for similar packages.
Check it out yourself. Mind you, I use prepaid, cause I don't want to be on a contract, so I buy my own phone and use it. Koodo even charges more for bringing your own phone, since they aren't collecting on having leased one to you.
https://www.telus.com/en/mobility/prepaid/plans?linktype=sub... https://www.koodomobile.com/en/rate-plans?INTCMP=KMNew_NavMe...
Simply put, if I want to save money while still having enough data for what I actually need data for; I can either spend about 35-40$ with Koodo for 2-4GB of data at 3 & 4G speeds; or 40-50$ for 2.5-4.5GB at 4 & 5G speeds. I round things this way by the way, because of taxes. Also, auto-top up also tends to give some extra data too. 500MB more. So generous of them (/s).
And also, this is new packages. They just updated them with the new promo on Telus with that whole 1GB extra data and 10$ one time credit. I'm gonna have to call them and get that I guess. Unless they auto gave it to me? Who knows with them. Ultimately, I only need 500MB though, since I use Spotify in offline mode, and only download music via my wifi at home; and the only other thing I tend to use is Google Maps which can also be downloaded ahead of time to save on data.
Edit: I should also note that they do actually state 4G on the Telus website, but my phone says I am getting 5G speeds. Hence why I state 5G. I could care less what they claim on their website. End user experience is truth.
Some of it, like beam steering that tracks moving devices, which is going to be challenging to make it work in real world cases, and using spectrum that makes it hard to penetrate inside cars and buildings, is a reach nobody asked for.
Some seems greed driven, like "If we can convince AWS customers they need to put computing at the network edge we (telcos) will capture some of the value AWS accumulates now."
As for your 4G network, that's what we call 5Ge now.
Is 5Ge some sort of joke? Or is that a real designation.
It’s real. My iPhone 13 says it right now. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/05/att-still-refuse...
Sprint sued for the blatant false advertising and AT&T unsurprisingly settled.
I want my phone to work in busy cell tower areas, so that is absolutely something I was demanding.
The government folk want it gone from theirs, but they want the rest of us to have it. Thus the claim "Our users want it" is true, in a tongue in cheek way.
(1) It is not something that you can (easily) disable
(2) It uses the same Network port that your LAN NIC uses instead of a separate "I won't plug that in if I don't want it" NIC.
(3) Security/Patches? This is outside the control of the BIOS manufacturer, so how do you make sure it's patched and upto date? and
(4) It wasn't an option.
I think the ME hating is kinda strident but it has a bunch of undocumented firmware and your PC still works after you remove it so... what was that firmware doing?
Both personally and as part of the management team of 150.000 computers at work, we don't use this stuff there either.
It is a great help for server lock-ups - it is able to force a full power-down of the main board and cold-boot.
The software behind iLO was also a presentation at BlackHat, so it's important to keep them patched (and I don't know anybody else that does).
https://www.blackhat.com/us-21/briefings/schedule/index.html...
It's definitely a security risk, but at a big company with a poorly managed IT department it wasn't the worst offender.
We also have Dells with iDRAC cards. But it's a nice thing with iLO that it's built-in, and it can be managed on a completely dedicated out-of-band network. Unlike the IME thing.
I understand there's a point to this in stuff like servers, but for workstations?
The devices are on an untrusted network and VPN into a LAN based on the device assignment. Things like printers are on a separate network, and there’s no cleartext on the network.
In the case of laptops, if they fall out of certain compliance baselines, they get remote wiped or bricked.
But IME is not needed for this. The certs are issued through windows / mac management systems e.g. SCCM/Intune. They are also dependent on the current security state of the machine (e.g. no EDR installed -> only access to remediation network). Is IME really used in your case?
The key difference is that you can provide a level of assurance and multi-tenant access without an OS. For example you can run a hypervisor on the PC and have a few OS instances running.