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from the where-there-is-a-will,-there-is-a-way dept.
In some shiny good news to us of the tinfoil hat crew, Phoronix is reporting:
Many free software advocates have been concerned by Intel's binary-only Management Engine (ME) built into the motherboards on newer generations of Intel motherboards. The good news is there is now a working, third-party approach for disabling the ME and reducing the risk of its binary blobs.
Via an open-source, third-party tool called me_cleaner it's possible to partially deblob Intel's ME firmware images by removing any unnecessary partitions from the firmware, reducing its ability to interface with the system. The me_cleaner works not only with free software firmware images like Coreboot/Libreboot but can also work with factory-blobbed images. I was able to confirm with a Coreboot developer that this program can disable the ME on older boards or devices with BootGuard and disable Secure Boot. This is all done with a Python script.
Those unfamiliar with the implications on Intel's ME for those wanting a fully-open system can read about it on Libreboot.org.
Looks like I may not have to go ARM on my next desktop build after all.
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Monday January 16 2017, @01:47AM
Just trolling? Intel have released open-source drivers for their Active Management Technology (which is part of the IME) but the AMT and IME are, if I'm not mistaken, totally closed-source.
https://sourceforge.net/projects/openamt/ [sourceforge.net]
Open source proponents share some beliefs with the GNU folks. For instance, they advocate that software should be freely redistributable and that programmers should be allowed to make derivative works.
https://opensource.org/docs/osd [opensource.org]
They differ about making proprietary software from free code. There is a GNU licence which permits that, but its use is discouraged.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGPL [wikipedia.org]