[yjftsjthsd-h]

> That "technology" included in Realtek is absolutely bonkers -- who asked for that functionality at a consumer level? No one.

What tech are we talking about? WoL is definitely appreciated in all devices, although the "RealWoW" thing is very much diminishing returns. Otherwise, everything is just normal programmable chips and DMA-type data movement, both of which are generally desirable.

[a-dub]

nah. i'll take wifi hardware that doesn't have buggy layer 4+ features in firmware that hackers can exploit to turn my keystrokes into udp packets, thank you very much.

in fact, i think i'd prefer a computer that leaves all the layer 4+ up to the operating system as at least it has a chance of being audited.

that said, this raises an interesting point. the only way to really be sure is to sniff your own packets... but if everything moves to being encrypted that's going to get a lot harder...

[Nextgrid]

The RealWoW stuff requires host cooperation to set the proper configuration fields. The card has very basic functionality to be pre-configured to respond to certain packets, but this needs to be set by the host - it is disabled by default and in fact the Linux driver doesn't even support it.

In addition if he could achieve code execution on the card it wouldn't matter whether the card has this functionality as he could implement it himself if needed.

[a-dub]

sorry. regardless of whether or not you can change the firmware binaries to do what you want. i'm really not okay with half-assed remote management junk being baked into the nic of my personal laptop that bypasses any firewalls i can configure and is constructed from code i cannot review.

that is exactly the kind of crap that gets exploited.

[edgeform]

RealWoW.