THANK YOU. Intel is not Facebook or Google or Microsoft. They do not run software botnets, search engines, or social networks. They do not have political directives or dreams of changing the world. People with those objectives infiltrate other industries where they can actually influence something.
I'm not sure why people immediately jump to conclusions that things like this are the result of actions by three letter agencies. I just don't understand why people do that?
On another site, having a similar conversation about this very topic, multiple people jumped in to assert that this was done at the behest of the NSA and that the legal mechanism for doing so was a National Security Letter. No amount of linking was able to convince them that that's not even what an NSL does. Nor would they believe that an NSL contains no such mechanism to force a company to do such.
Worse, it was multiple people who believed this. It wasn't just one isolated individual. Even showing them what an NSL really is made no difference to them. I pointed out what it did have the power to do, and they countered by saying that's what they claimed but that it could secretly do more. I asked for a citation and was told it wasn't out there because it was top secret. They linked to some of the most outlandish stuff, as if Cold War spies were actually proof that the NSL could compel Intel to include the ME and to include exploits in the code just for NSA use.
It went on like that, for a good day and a half of back and forth. I finally gave up trying to help them be sane.
I don't get it. I truly don't understand. These are otherwise bright people, or so they seem. I'm well and truly flabbergasted by this behavior.
Occam’s razor. I’m a very conspiratorial person and I’ve seen nothing to suggest any nefarious activity or collusion so I’m not getting carried away on this.
This is a statement by the Intel CTO from 2016 on the ME discussions, and briefly reassured us that Intel is conscious of the security of the ME, and that they have teams dedicated to it and can push firmware updates out to cover vulnerabilities.
Intel made an official announcement in May that they have discovered an escalation of privilege vulnerability and are addressing it accordingly as you would expect. It also notes that consumer hardware and firmware is not affected by the vulnerability, demonstrating that Intel actually does release two different chips, and prioritizes privacy and security more over features on the consumer models.
Intel releases a software tool for checking if your system is one of the vulnerable units or not, they have a fix already for the firmware and confirm it is not due to physical design flaws, and are working with manufacturers to push the updates ASAP.
Overall, I don’t feel like Intel is at all intentionally sabatoging it’s customers, and genuinely considers the ME a valued feature by consumers, even though it bothers me that one is included on every product, they do differ and consumer models have fewer privileges than business models, which seems to be more of a firmware design than a hardware design, so I tend to believe that they simply don’t design extra chips without the ME and instead lock it down more on a software level. Vulnerabilities also appear to be firmware based, and the extremely vague announcement by black hat doesn’t suggest otherwise either. Intel very obviously takes the security of their devices very seriously and makes themselves available to users who need help identifying whether or not they’re vulnerable and what to do about it.
Yeah I’m really curious about that too, and I wish the guys would at least give that much detail but I guess they’d prefer to hype up the reveal at their event instead. I want to believe it requires physical access... For now I find comfort only in knowing that it’s a skylake+ vulnerability, and just continue to hope it doesn’t work down to other models as they learn more about the internal workings of the ME.
They’re all antiestablishment, independent players. The “Vox Day”, “infowars”, “dailymail”, and “Drudge Report” of the left.
It has nothing to do with the left and everything to do with anti-establishment, whether left or right.
Since April/May, infowars organic traffic from google.com dropped from just below 1 million down to just above 500k.
Breitbart.com is down almost a million since April from almost 3 million.
The other sites mentioned are pretty mainstream with the right now, in a “too big to fall” kinda way, except voxday.blogspot.com but according to semrush, every single one of them have seen declines in organic traffic since April/May.
If you look very far to the right, Daily Stormer is outright banned from Google, and Godaddy.
Likely this is not targeted at left wing websites, and they are just a convenient victim. I also believe there are other factors.
Peoples news preferences are changing a lot lately, but also I believe this change by Googles algorithm is in partnership with establishment preferred media, to promote them, rather than to target either the left or the right. There’s nothing to indicate the left is specifically targeted here.
Establishment media is promoting itself. Anti establishment media is being “censored” whether left or right. When Huffpo and Salon start getting affected, I’ll reconsider my conclusion.
Technically speaking as far as I can tell huffpo and salon aren't left, they're liberal. They don't actually support any anticapitialist policies, though they do support a number of liberal policies.
I wasn't able to find any articles on Salon's page that were anti-corporate, or pro-social programs. I'm pretty sure they're liberal my dude. Leftist thought is strictly around the economic axis and has nothing to do with "progressive".
> Leftist thought is strictly around the economic axis and has nothing to do with "progressive".
That's a narrow and ahistorical view of Leftism. It's true that modern progressivism is not the same as leftism, but the two are not unrelated (and overlap.)
Sure but at least in American politics that's really the rift in the democratic party, Liberal or Left. Meaning identity focused politics vs economic focused politics. Salon and The Hill and Mother Jones in this divide are all predominately liberal.
> Sure but at least in American politics that's really the rift in the democratic party, Liberal or Left. Meaning identity focused politics vs economic focused politics.
No, that's almost completely wrong. Being extremely generous, it could be interpreted to only slightly misstate something that was approximately true in the early 1990s, at the height of the “neoliberal consensus”. At that time, the difference between the (dominant, from Bill Clinton on) neoliberal faction of the Democratic Party and the then-dominant faction of the Republican Party was largely over issues of rights of disadvantaged identity groups (though it must be noted that this was primarily about economic rights, so it is still about the economy) whereas the difference between the progressive wing of the Democratic party and the dominant faction of the Republican Party was more over issues of economic class and structure. (Note that even then, provision of healthcare access was an exception to this, as an economic but not identity-group issue on which both major factions
of the Democratic Party differed from then dominant faction of the Republican Party.)
However, that is not because the neoliberal wing is less focussed on economics (neoliberalism, after all, is a label that applies to an economic policy orientation), and with neoliberal economics no longer dominant in the Republican Party, both Democratic factions differ from the dominant faction of the opposing party on core economic issues.
Note that I use “neoliberal” and “progressive” rather than “liberal” and “left” because “liberal" is heavily overloaded in US politics, and the center of mass of the two wings are basically center-right (neoliberal) and somewhere between center and center-left (progressive); there's essentially no substantial true Leftist faction in the Democratic Party.
As far as the outlets you list, Mother Jones is mostly associated with the progressive wing of the party, though that’s far from a perfect alignment; I'd agree that the other two, insofar as they align with either Democratic faction, tend to be more in line with the neoliberal faction.
