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: 1) by purple_cobra on Sunday January 15 2017, @10:44PM
Something like this http://www.cpcwiki.eu/index.php/Multiface_II [cpcwiki.eu]? That's for an Amstrad CPC but the original was for the Sinclair Spectrum.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Monday January 16 2017, @01:01AM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves