In @John Sullivan's talk on free hardware at SeaGL, I was alarmed to hear him say that current thinkpads beyond the X60 are non-endorsable because of hardware called "Intel AMT" that allows for remote shutdown/hard drive wipe/etc of laptops, even when the device is merely plugged in and powered off. That seemed crazy... how had I not known about this? I knew about UEFI stuff, but heck... apparently it even has a webadmin available even when the computer is sleeping. The FSF covered this but I had been unaware.

I stepped into my BIOS to see if I could disable it... I found Intel Anti-Theft Technology in the BIOS, with the options (enabled, disabled, permanently disabled), as well as "computrace" (which said something about sending info to a third party) with the options (enabled, disabled, permanently disabled). Both of these were on.

The phrase "computrace", and there being a third party collecting it, had me particularly alarmed, so I did what I always do and put the term into Wikipedia, which automatically redirected for some reason to LoJack with a now non-existant for-laptops section. Interesting phrase there:

The LoJack Stolen Vehicle Recovery System is an aftermarket vehicle tracking system that allows vehicles to be tracked by police, with the aim of recovering them in case of theft.

Well, that's not alarming or anything, right?

Sure enough, Computrace and LoJack point to the same company.

I disabled both of these things in my BIOS, but is it really disabled? I feel like I can't trust that that's true.

Sure, like everything, you could say "this technology could be useful if it were in users' hands", and that's true. But the way that this is set up right now is not at all in user's hands, and it seems that the default is to set up laptops for remote tracking / rootability.

Feeling totally helpless, I dumped 25 bucks to the FSF because at least they are covering the issue.

Go check your BIOS. And hey, uh... are any of those X60 machines with Coreboot left?