Why would you buy a macbook? You realize those have regular intel
processors and ME too right?
Lenovo is owned by the chinese, and dell business laptop (their consumer
line is garbage) is a way better choice than either.
It seems you do have (as you said) a fundamental misunderstanding of how
security actually works, and how a router/firewall operates. - thus I
don't think that anyone would be targeting you specifically with a ME
exploit.
On 11/14/2016 03:12 PM, Eric wrote:
On Monday, November 14, 2016 at 11:58:32 AM UTC-8, entr0py wrote:
Eric:
On Sunday, November 13, 2016 at 10:44:33 PM UTC-8, tai...@gmx.com
wrote:
Forgot to say: Purism is just an overpriced quanta/oem whitebox
laptop, it takes 5mil+ of startup funds to do a small run of *just
a motherboard* let alone an entire laptop computer including the
fab for a fancy aluminum case - it is quite obvious that their
components are not "hand selected" and that they just called up
some chinese OEM and asked them what they had kicking around.
I can't understand if they are scammers or just really naive,
Instead of making an OpenPower or ARM laptop and having it be 100%
libre from the start they instead do the dishonest "you'll go to
disneyworld one day poor johnny" - If google can't convince intel
to open up FSP/ME then nobody can - coreboot with FSP is just
shimboot (black box FSP - 95% of the bios work)
It bothers me quite a lot that they are on the list of approved
vendors when they are a dishonest company.
Whoa. Ok, hold on a sec. I did not buy a Purism computer, though not
for those reasons - putting a 28W TDP proc in a 15inch "workstation"
is absurd to me. as is their lack of a screen configuration. I hear
your anger at the gap between what they promise and what they
deliver; I'm more displeased on the hardware side of things (though I
do like HW kill switches. I've looked into what they promise and
understand very well that they don't actually have a very free
computer at all, especially on the bios/firmware side.
What I actually ordered (and have now cancelled), was a Dell XPS 15".
There is no vPro option in the configure menu, though it does support
VT-d and SLAT. I've read all of Joanna's papers, and understand the
concerns about Intel ME very well. However, on the Dell order, it
claimed "ME Disabled." Perhaps they simply meant that vPro/AMT/TXT
was disabled, and that was mine and Dell's fault for wishful thinking
and false naming, respectively. Please see linked photo:
https://d.pr/Q0YZ
Moral considerations aside, why not buy that Dell and pair it with a portable
router/firewall like this
(https://www.compulab.co.il/utilite-computer/web/products)? Shouldn't that
effectively block out any ME-related mischief or do I have a fundamental
misunderstanding? It doesn't seem possible otherwise to get the type of
processing power you're looking for in a laptop form-factor.
Also, the concern for me is not ME shenanigans. I'm more concerned about having
TXT for AEM and measured boot, and the consumer Dell model does not have that
(the processor and chipset don't support it). The other option aside from the
Precision 5510, would be a ThinkPad T460 or T460p, but the downside there is
performance (only SATA-3 SSD), and also the screen quality is terrible.
Much as I dislike proprietary anything, I might take a second look at the new
MacBook Pros, and run things that need higher security in a VM or in Whonix.
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