as pic above shows, they got MEAN and vindictive for no good reason
It's going to be so much fun watching people like this whining in a decade or so about how their selfish, monstrous parents wrote them out of their wills. They'll have no idea why their parents would be such meanies.
Similarly, you're saying that a Thinkpad with Linux tossed onto it is just as compromised as a Thinkpad with Windows, implying it's hardware.
It
is hardware and it
is just as compromised. AMD calls their implementation
"Dash" and Intel calls theirs
"Intel Management Engine". Both mechanisms are little embedded systems that run their own OS (closed source, of course) and have unfettered access to system hardware. They can do as they please. Remember that wifi, bluetooth and cellular radio firmwares are
all closed-source and regulated by the government; to gain certification for public sale such devices must be approved by the FCC (at a minimum) and there's nothing saying that agency (or any other) can't demand you bolt on a binary blob before they'll approve your radio firmware.
Well if it's hardware then how does it function, how do they activate the backdoor without the hardware occasionally phoning home (independent of the OS mind you) and going undetected?
With cellular radios, it's trivial. You have no way of monitoring all the traffic coming in and out of your link on the cellular network -- remember, these chipsets all operate with closed source firmware. They can send and receive packets without telling the primary OS. Also, bear in mind the NSA long ago admitted
they can remotely activate and monitor your phone's microphone and camera and that hasn't changed since. The telecoms, manufacturers and the government all collaborate on making this work, and intentionally implement the functionality to be invisible to end users.
For Bluetooth and wifi, it's tougher but not impossible. Something has to get in range to send a "naughty" instruction, but once it has, there's nothing stopping the receiving controller from briefly hijacking the network link to communicate as it wants. Sure, that's detectable (and blockable if you're aware of it in advance) but if it's a short enough message or response, you won't know what was sent or received. Remember the "management processor" on all of these systems have direct access to the hardware, so unless your (network) firewall catches it, you'll never know. ISPs certainly won't disclose it (they
openly cooperate with the NSA to spy on all communications).
You're right that this sounds fantastical and incredibly unlikely, but they're actively doing it. There really isn't any consumer-level (or honestly even enterprise-level) computing hardware today that doesn't have some kind of "management hardware" built into it that has absurd access and can't be deactivated.
he deserves it. TOTAL VISA/MASTERCARD ANNIHILATION
