Disable Intel ME thanks to the NSA

Corporations lie to you, they lie to you every single day, period.

It's all in the language they use.

What's more important, is that no one really cares until you take it to court, and even then.

Over the years, Intel's "Management Engine" has been discussed to death, about it's "backdoor" capability to be exploited by others.

Intel refuted those backdoor accusations, saying, “Intel does not put backdoors in its products nor do our products give Intel control or access to computing systems without the explicit permission of the end user. In short, Intel does not participate in efforts to decrease security in technology.”

So, let's put emphasis on the word "backdoor", where we can use the words, feature or portal or let's even thrown in a few TLAs (Three Letter Acronyms) like AMT (Advanced Management Tool) or an an IMF (Integrated Management Feature).

quie simply put, Intel got caught out in with their propriatary architecture and still continued to provide false information (i.e. lie).

Intel is a term used by government 'defence' (or more accurately offence) personnel to that described intelligence gathering.

What most important with this whole fiasco is that a government 'intel' organisation requires their computer to have the ME (Management Engine) disabled.

Therefore the government does not want the government to spy on itself, which makes perfecrt sence.

See the following:

As Positive Technologies researchers Mark Ermolov and Maxim Goryachy poked into the firmware, they discovered an undocumented HAP field. HAP, which stands for the High Assurance Platform (pdf) program, was developed by the NSA. The framework was for the “development of the ‘next generation’ of secure computing platforms.”

The researchers discovered an undocumented field called “reserve-hap” and that HAP could be set to “1” for true. Apparently, the NSA wanted to ensure the agency could close off any possible security risk by disabling Intel ME. The researchers wrote, “We believe that this mechanism is designed to meet a typical requirement of government agencies, which want to reduce the possibility of side-channel leaks.”

When told about the research, Intel told Positive Technologies:

In response to requests from customers with specialized requirements, we sometimes explore the modification or disabling of certain features. In this case, the modifications were made at the request of equipment manufacturers in support of their customer’s evaluation of the U.S. government’s “High Assurance Platform” program. These modifications underwent a limited validation cycle and are not an officially supported configuration.

If you want to disable Intel ME, you should first read the in-depth technical explanation about the researchers finding “an undocumented PCH strap that can be used to switch on a special mode disabling the main Intel ME functionality at an early stage.” Positive Technologies also made its Intel ME 11.x firmware image unpacker utility available on GitHub. Use at your own risk; the methods to disable Intel ME were described as “risky and may damage or destroy your computer.”

Source: CSO Australia.

These actions of spying on the general population is deliberate by design part of the Nanny State agenda.

Optus data breach logged with OAIC after public revelation, with falsified figures?

One of the prerequisites is that corporations conducting business in Australia must inform the OAIC (Office of the Australian Information Commissioner) once a data breach has occurred.

Some CEO's chose not to inform the OAIC, where this information will be made public, in order not to lose customer's i.e. profits as a result of poor security pracitices of their corporation's I.T. infrastructure.

Some CEO's choose to wait for a ransom notice in order to pay it, hoping the problem will go away, where the outside world will be none the wiser.

These practices fall under the unconsionable conduct, which is against the law.

But at the end of the day no one (i.e. corpoation's CEO's) cares until it's taken to court.

Optus' data breach was reported by news.com.au after 2pm on Thurdsay 22/09/2022:

The Office of the Information Commissioner published Optus' data breach at approx 10pm on 22/09/2022.

When did the data breach factually occur?

When did Optus decide to infom the OAIC?

Optus has not conducted business 'honourably' in Australia, where it has been fined on occassions for false advertising.

"Profit's before People", right?

In any event, when the story broke out Optus claimed that 9 million people were affected, as seen in the  screen shot below:

Then the story was modified approximately 3 hours later

where the claim is that 7 million people:

Another Optus 'false advertising' claim?

One of the greatest problems Australians face with regards to the privacy and security of their data when dealing with corporations is that in order to save on costs, the corporations 'outsource' their I.T. services where the administration is sub par, lacking in the required skill-set to keep the data on the servers and the bad guys out.

As the saying goes: "If you pay peanuts, you get monkeys", behind the keyboards.

Once the data is out of your control you cannot catergoriaclly state that there are no victims, where the authorities or the corpoations involved, may not even know or even report to the victims or even public for quite some time of the magnitude the criminal actions of identity theft has occured from that particular data breach.

Windows 10 v Linux memory usage and privacy concerns

A personal computer installed with a current version of Windows 10, together with all the associated drivers for the personal computer to operate normally, i.e. video, audio, network, chipset etc consumes a certain amount of RAM, as indicated in the screenshot below:

The amount of RAM used by the Windows operating system is 3.2GB.

A current version of a Linux distribution that is installed on the same hardware, where all the functionality of the installed hardware is functional to the same level of the Windows equivalent yields completely differrent results, as shown in the screen capture below:

The baseline for the Linux installation is 1.4GB or 200MB less than half of what Windows requires!

What's more important is that security and privacy are at a totally differrent level to that of Microsoft's embedded spyware within its operating system.

The best way to stop Microsoft from spying on you via its Windows operating system is quite simply not to use it.

If privacy is a concern to you then products from Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, Microsoft and others like ByteDance (TikTok) and government health realted apps, which are not 'mandatory' should be avoided.

See more information:

within: https://clario.co/blog/which-company-uses-most-data/

Windows 10 Processes Threads Handles too high!

Microsoft's Window 10 operating system from the 'factory' or OOBE (Out Of Box Experience) is plain and simple spyware which stifle's your computer's performance.

One can mitigate Microsoft's data hoovering, but ultimtely in order to stop Windows from keylogging your keyboard moves and other things one does on a PC is to not use it, period.

Depending on your hardware a 'normal' Windows 10 installation, after the operating system 'settling down' after ~10minutes may have ~120 processes, 1150 threads and 40,000 handles which is a lot of work for something that is not doing anything beneficial for the user.

While there is no silver bullet to Microsoft's telemetry, while you're using its products. there are a few good utilities that get rid of bloatware and minimise the data collection.

Some products that can be used are DISM++, W10Privacy, O&OS10, WPD in conjunction with a good hosts file (anything from 300kB - 4500kB) which lists Microsoft's telemetry servers and other nasty data gathering sources.

From a fresh installation of Windows together with the implementation of the listed and unlisted tools one should be able to cut the Processes, Threads and Handles by half where during that process one can install a distribution of Linux, learn the basics and not have to deal with Microsoft's data hoovering from the 'factory'. 

Windows 8.1 has less bloat and [maybe less embedded] spyware, where a lockdown of the operating system should yield the results of Processes, Thread and Handles to be in the magnitude of 33, 460, 10630 respectively.