Discussion on Purism

[fsflover]

@Insurgo

they are post broadwell and therefore are in ME >= 11, which is not fully neuteurable

What is “fully neuteurable” and who said that it was possible? Again, confusing terminology that was never introduced by Purism – probably for a reason. “Neutralizing” was never supposed to be “full”. In my understanding, Purism never tried to hide it and it was always pretty clear about its non-full nature. “Fully neutred” should be called “removed”. And yes, it’s impossible for ME>=11.

By the way, I already discussed it on this forum last year:

@fsflover

You cannot do much with 360 KB on my Librem 15, especially considering that it must power on the system and perform a few low-level tasks at the same time.

@Insurgo

I can’t believe there is still confusion about this but because terminology intricacies.

I have no idea where you took the above definition. Could you point it out for me? Not only Purism is careful about the definitions here, they explained all the details about their neuterization:

As we’ve seen on Broadwell, that meant almost 93% of the code is removed and only 7% remains (that proportion is different on Skylake, see further below).

The total ME size dropped from 2.5MB to 360KB, which means that 14.42% of the code remains, while 85.58% of the code was neutralized with me_cleaner.

the ME is disabled using the “HAP” method

and provided the code for doing this. Which other company (selling modern hardware) did it? I wish System76 or Framework were discussing this bringing attention to it. Ok, the former do something useful here but much less. Purism is bad but everyone else is worse, following the trend of silence and compliance.

Given the reasons above, I’m convinced that Librem 13v2, v3, v4 as well as Librems 15 should have “Yes” in column “Neutering”. Maybe with a comment “partially” if you will.

@Insurgo

Purism does what can be done to neuter and their articles are pretty clear on what they do and can do with state of current research and the chipsets in use.

So we agree here.

@Insurgo

So are the other vendors that care enough to disable ME.

Of which none ship modern hardware… So for me there is simply no choice. Yes, I care about performance of my machine, especially with bugs like this or this.

@Insurgo

But newer platforms cannot use the term neutering anymore.

Purism clearly explained what they mean and have a full right to use these terms. (Well, had in the past, because for Librem 14 only disablement is possible of course.) I don’t see why one has to invent alternative terms for “ME is (fully) removed”.

@Justin

unman’s comments above, basically sum up my opinion:

@unman

I explicitly said that they now look
like a reasonable company.

I also agree with you on this one.

@unman

It’s obvious that we aren’t going to agree: you are invested in
Purism

I don’t understand this argument at all; isn’t it a personal attack? I do not care and never cared about Purism. I am using their devices, because they explicitly support FSF, and I do care about freedom, and I am invested in free software. Apart from that, Purism make real progress with freedom with modern devices as much as possible,

@unman

Purism was not the first company to sell neutralized and disabled ME.

make a lot of fuss about the problems of Intel ME, educating the public about it; explicitly try to promote the importance of security in computing, officially support and promote Qubes OS. Which other company providing modern hardware is doing this? I am happy to leave Purism and forget about it whenever a better company appears. Sorry @Insurgo I love what you are doing and promise to recommend your company to interested friends, but I need a faster hardware for my tasks.