/techbunker/ - Technology (Bunker)

We're all (unfortunately) well-aware of the degradation in design and quality. Might be for the best, given that it's impossible to audit the internals for hardware backdoors.

Thankfully the old machines are built like tanks and can run basically forever when cared for. Biggest problem is that those of us into that sort of thing tend to hoard them.

Maybe someday it'll be easier and feasible to build custom laptops and we can make clones of the old designs but use our own parts.

>>993

What he said.

Although personally I bit the bullet and usually use a *20 series. You can go as late as *30 and retain the old keyboards, ThinkLight, etc.

It's possible to mitigate a lot of the other stuff via a BIOS flash, which is strongly encouraged.

But you do technically need to worry about IME. Still, I'd rather the NSA have my backdoor than China. I feel confident that their backdoor isn't nearly as useful as it would be if I were some pleb running Windows with unencrypted files, but who knows. If you're that paranoid about it then you definitely want to go older. Pre-IME Intel chips. Perhaps last-generation IBM or first-generation Lenovo, when China's ability to modify advanced designs was basically non-existent and the best they could do was clone for cheap.

Reminder that it's still your responsibility to minimize attack surface, and a lot of these rootkit-tier backdoors still need to inject code into the OS to be effective due to design limitations.

This means install Gentoo and go full-minimal if possible. Or Arch if that's your thing. The less standard your computing environment the harder it is to inject code.

IME can also theoretically be disabled or severely neutered.

https://hackaday.com/2016/11/28/neutralizing-intels-management-engine/

If the IME can't have network access, and the BIOS is libre and doesn't support CompuTrace, then you've effectively killed the best backdoors.

>>1038

Numbers look less-terrible for Gen3 and earlier i7s.

>tfw my W520 and 3770k are less affected than all later releases

Honestly this is just a good reminder that if you want an uncucked experience you're probably better off looking at older devices. A Q6600 is a reliable workhorse and was a great value for its time.

I'm starting to move to a model where I use older, more secure hardware paired with newer, minimal operating systems to minimize attack space of my local files and documents. Meanwhile, if I need power, I keep the poz'd hardware separate and have it run the more intensive tasks. Makes it harder for communication to be spied-on but you can still do all your development, media encoding, archival storage, and even gaming via a box that retains no data and only allocates resources.

Cloud computing isn't a terrible idea if you own your own cloud. You still can't trust the new high-end hardware, but you can just let it be insecure and take full advantage of the hardware while your personal information sits locked on older hardware with fewer backdoors.