Sorry if my english commmunication skill are not that sharp. I am implying that I find this curious, this is it. Whatever the reason, I don’t know. You might be right. It may be a communication problem… But in a company that employs what? 25 people? That might be considered curious too. I mean, come on. The neutralized ME is one of their big feature. It was advertised as neutralized. It seem to me, from a customer perspective, that so many people miss the opportunity here to connect the dots. Is there no last check up before shipping a product?
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Purism has 41 employees or contractors according to its web page, but the important point is that DeVillier works alone and remotely. I have worked in a similar situation with a tech company about twice the size of Purism, and I often didn’t communicate the technical details of my work to anyone at the company. As I recall, DeVillier had several technical problems with Coreboot when the Mini was launched, so his conversations with the management at Purism were probably focused on fixing those issues.
You wonder how Kyle Rankin didn’t know, but it doesn’t surprise me, because the Wikipedia article on the Intel Management Engine and the me_cleaner documentation don’t mention this change. I did a Google search for “Intel changes Management Engine 8th generation” and many other variations with “Whiskey Lake”, “Coffee Lake”, “disable” and “neutralize” and I couldn’t find a single article talking about this change in the ME.
You would have to be pretty deep in the technical weeds to know about Intel changing the Management Engine to no longer allow the code to be replaced with zeros, because this hasn’t been publicized on any of the tech news sites (at least I haven’t been able to find any articles about it with a Google search). I’m the type of person who reads the release notes every time there is a new Coreboot version, and I didn’t know about it, so it doesn’t surprise me that Purism’s management didn’t know.
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Fair enough. Thank you for clarifying this.
intel should be required by LAW to provide public statements when something this huge gets changed …
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If I were making the LAW, Intel would be required by LAW just not to do it.
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the US is a capitalist democracy (at least on paper), so what you just said, will, sadly, NOT fly …
at least make the darn thing KNOWN, so people have, at LEAST, a chance to vote with their Eddies …
Kyle explained it very nicely in his last Purism blog article :