[Revisor]

Today I found out I inadvertently bought an Asus motherboard with a service called "Intel Management Engine Interface" (mei) which "enables remote accessing to the PC including the management, monitoring and maintenance irrespective of the operating system state and PC power state as well".

http://intelmanagementengine.com/intel-technologies/all-abou...

It sounds to me like an official backdoor and I only found out about it because it conflicted with suspend to RAM. I removed the kernel modules for this service but couldn't find a way to disable it in BIOS.

Surprisingly - the product page doesn't contain any information about the presence of MEI whatsoever.

Needless to say, I'm not very happy about it.

[mschuster91]

Oh, this is quite cool when you're in a corporate environment. It originated from servers (iRMC and others) and is now a cheap alternative to additional hardware monitoring cards.

[Revisor]

I understand that it's pretty nifty in corporate environments. At the same time, however, it sounds an awful lot like a backdoor that works even with the PC turned off.