With recent chipsets, Intel offers a mechanism called Active Management Technology (Intel AMT, part of the “vPro”* featureset, specifically the Intel Management Engine) which, Intel says,“allows IT or managed service providers to better discover, repair, and protect their networked computing assets”. This means somebody can control devices remotely, even when powered off—what is officially called out-of-band system access.

The ethics of Facebook’s micro-targeted advertising was thrust into the spotlight this week by a report out of Australia. The article, based on a leaked presentation, said that Facebook was able to identify teenagers at their most vulnerable, including when they feel “insecure”, “worthless”, “defeated” and “stressed”.

Facebook claimed the report was misleading, assuring the public that the company does not “offer tools to target people based on their emotional state”. If the intention of Facebook’s public relations spin is to give the impression that such targeting is not even possible on their platform, I’m here to tell you I believe they’re lying through their teeth.

me_cleaner is a tool to remove as much code as possible from an Intel ME/TXE/SPS image.

Completely and permanently (unless you re-install it) disable Intel Active Management Technology, Intel Small Business Technology, and Intel Standard Manageability on Windows. These are components of the Intel Management Engine firmware.

OpenSnitch is a GNU/Linux port of the Little Snitch application firewall.

If you did not know, built into all modern Intel-based platforms is a small, low-power computer subsystem called the Intel Management Engine (ME). It performs various tasks while the system is in sleep mode, during the boot process, and also when your system is running.

The National Security Agency vacuumed up more than 151 million records about Americans’ phone calls last year via a new system that Congress created to end the agency’s once-secret program that collected domestic calling records in bulk, a report disclosed Tuesday.

Although the number is large on its face, it nonetheless represents a massive reduction from the amount of information the agency gathered previously. Under the old system, it collected potentially “billions of records per day,” according to a 2014 study.