I think that subscriptions, like micropayments, are evil and ruining the industry by blatant money grabbing and extortion. That said it is easy to see why the companies inflicting this are doing it, it makes them lots of cash.

So my question to all of you who dislike this state of affairs, what are you doing about it? Have you contributed time or money to open source alternatives? Have you purchased a commercial alternative? Are you sitting on your ass bemoaning the state of affairs while enabling it?

          -Charlie

Why bother when you have Bing ads? :P

I agree. Inte; has that feature but they deny it and hide it from users, even users who they know are being exploited. I am pissed.

The hacking is already done and it is more than documented. I have been warning Intel directly about the financial implications for literally years. They denied it was a problem. Now it is too late.

Some, enough to keep me from sleeping some nights, and more than enough to keep me from having any respect for the people ostensibly working in our best interest who simply don't get the implications what they are doing.

Intel can't say their chips don't have a back door. They also haven't said their chips don't have a back door so at least they are honest.

AMD is working on greater disclosure and I am prodding them as hard as I can. Internally they seem to be doing the right things, or at least trying to.

ARM has their full code base published on Github. This doesn't prevent licensees from using something else, adding nefarious things etc, but I can almost guarantee most don't. You can always checksum the code if you want.

As an aside, AMD's PSP is based on ARM's stuff which is completely open source. I am fairly sure that the majority of AMD's code in this area is unchanged from the vanilla ARM version so you could consider AMD's partially open.

        -Charlie

There have been remote attacks capable of provisioning AMT in the wild. Intel conveniently does not acknowledged them in their NDA documents about security for some reason, can calls users with AMT turned off 'safe'. Take from that what you will about their priorities when it comes to customer's security.

I take issue with the term 'a'. :)

Like many others trying to do the right thing on Intel security, I am sorry you left. I know several others starting with the pre-AMT vPro reveal team members who got sick of beating their heads against the wall and quit in frustration. The idiots stay. This is not good for humanity.

As the one who outed the 10+ year AMT bug a few months ago, Intel's ''security' policy is a joke. No it is worse than that, it is willfully malign. They know how to do the right thing but they refuse to do so for whatever reason. I have been begging them for quite literally years not to be abjectly stupid on TXT and ME security issues but they just get worse. You are seeing the tip of the iceberg, wait for the hardware issues you can't patch to be found....

              -Charlie

Not for him though.

It must suck to have to use a competing browser on a platform you don't control and can't remove. Forced bundling like that should be illegal, Microsoft should sue!

(Note: If your browser strips HTML 7.4.3c HTML tage, thie above is meant to be sarcastic)

Oh you;ll pay, one way or another.

One good thing is that Google lists number of downloads for an app. It will be interesting to compare results on a platform where the use of a browser is not forced and it is uninstallable. Once there is a number posted, and after a few months you can subtract out the number of MS employees, you should get an idea of how many hundred people are masochists with no regard for security. I am betting less than 10K.

OK, time for the next challenge. Once GCC is done, port Doom to the GoL, it is open sourced so.... Since speed is indeed an issue, part 2 of this challenge is to compile it to an FPGA so it runs at a decent speed.
Please note there is no rush for this challenge, next week will be just fine. :)