It’s not known to be a backdoor, but it’s a juicy attack surface that customers are largely ignorant of and provides little consumer benefit. If I were an NSA employee and my boss handed me a blank check to develop a preboot exploit for Intel PCs, I’d start with IME.
20 years ago the pocketable digital cameras that took over the consumer market didn’t have hot shoes. 30 years ago the compact point and shoot viewfinders that were the weapon of choice for vacationing didn’t have hot shoes. Today neither are relevant and are all outclassed by smartphones, and there is hardly a consumer camera market.
You don’t have to spend five figures for that exposure, but it’s going to be an intentional hobby.
The intersection of people who aren’t five figures into photography and know what a hot shoe is, and people who recognize a wall mount phone trend old.
Oh, like back in the Before Times when everything was statically linked?
Waughmp waughmp
Apple historically can’t or won’t bring mixed signal design in-house. It could be related to patents, standards compliance, or the much more complicated silicon design, DV, and test for analog vs digital. It’s not just the modem either. The bulk of Cirrus Logic’s business nowadays is making audio, haptics, and focus servo chips for Apple, and if Apple ever went vertical with those components Cirrus would collapse overnight. Yet Apple has been buying custom audio chips from them for over 30 years, so obviously this isn’t a new trend.
Thinkpad intensifies
Ffs. 16, 8, 4, 2, 1.
$ :|wc -c 0 $ touch /tmp/f; :>>/tmp/f; wc -c /tmp/f 0 /tmp/f