Tommy Siegel | Bluesky

Transcript

Single panel comic

Illustration of a highway with 3 billboards for fast food chains. A bridge is visible in the background, as are power lines running along side of the service road.

Each billboard has a chain logo, with secondary text below.

Wendy’s

  • Your fifth favorite burger is now an app

McDonald’s

  • Will you give us your data for food?

Burger King

  • Guess what: No app? No food
  • pankuleczkapl@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    2·
    12 days ago

    Yeah, the mysterious Intel ME probably does similar things, but nonetheless these subsystems don’t have capabilities nearly as huge as the main OS, so they can’t store a lot of data, or do a lot of computation, or do stealth networking - (rant warning) such as embedding data in packets, that would require stealing the cryptographic keys from the main RAM, or even from other physical modules, basically so much convolution, that would be defeated by a simple update to the networking stack with changed offsets etc., I mean you would have to do crazy things to embed a universal rootkit you can never update yet is never detected doing shady stuff. This sounds more in the area of CIA capabilities, not really hardware manufacturers, but I really doubt they would risk revealing something so serious just to collect some meaningless data. TL;DR CIA backdoor probably exists, data collection backdoors are not feasible.

    • diaphragmwp@discuss.tchncs.de
      2·
      12 days ago

      Intel ME can, in fact, inject packets, for it’s intended purpose of managing laptops at enterprise level. Don’t know how exactly but it was said it’s running minix, so I guess there are drivers hardcoded for some adapters. IIRC (source: truss me bro) it could use Wi-Fi in raw mode without the OS, associate by itself and stuff.

      But uh, yeah, about the modem: it’s less that there’s some evil backdoor with global conspiracy but more that the cell towers can determine precise location at no cost (stored for a while which cops can look at) and that there’s radio fingerprinting and stuff, with a whole entire load of nothing you can do about it because of how little we know. Pretty harmless when radio is off. Not really phoning anyone with your phone anymore but yeah.

      • pankuleczkapl@lemmy.dbzer0.com
        1·
        12 days ago

        Yeah, that is inevitable, that’s indeed the price you pay for using public infrastructure. It is going to get a lot worse, Flock cameras being just the heralds of things to come. But this cannot be effectively fought at the personal level, this is just a matter of who has the political power. I am much more interested in what we, as individuals can do that the government can do nothing about. Basically we have kinda trustworthy public encryption algorithms, so preventing side channel attacks and trying to make hardware verifiably safe is IMO the principal battle to fight right now.