[userbinator]

This is another excellent example of when security-through-obscurity fails; the vPro environment docs are presumably NDA-only (or never released outside Intel), but reverse-engineers will figure things out anyway, and they're not really willing to disclose how much they know...

None of my machines have vPro; I remember someone I know calling it "the ultimate pre-installed RAT" when it first came out.

Another interesting little fact: Intel's wireless cards, at least the 3945/4965 generation, also use an ARC core to run their firmware.

[mschuster91]

Oh, the 4965 generation. I vaguely remember the days of the Linux driver development, there were discussions to open-source the binary blob firmware.

IIRC this was ultimately abandoned due to the possibility of turning the 4965 into a pretty sophisticated SDR. What a shame!

[yuhong]

Reminds me of why older Broadcom wireless chips don't have official open source drivers.