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Leftism is the idea that government can be used to solve practically any problem. Are there people who are hungry and can't get food? Create a government food stamp program. Are there people who can't afford housing? Create a government Housing and Urban Development department to build a government housing project. The list goes on and on, from electricity, phones, communications, medical care, schools, jobs, transportation, and almost anything else of which you can think. Most always, Leftism does not involve any free market solution. Instead, the preferred method is to tax those who are working, and then redistribute it to Leftists' constituents, thus weakening any opposition to the left, and creating a voting base dependent on politicians for.... everything!

Neither Sweden, nor Germany became prosperous prior to instituting a Leftist agenda. As a reminder, East Germany collapsed, while capitalist West Germany was the prosperous nation.

Almost all Leftists are Klepotocrats. Very few have ideas other than "tax and spend". Of the few which are not, most of them focus instead on regulation because they realize that they have reached the upper limits of taxation without collapsing their economies. However, at its core is still the idea of a government solution, for which high taxes are a prerequisite.

This idea that businesses are just collapsing under the burden of taxes and regulation is a ridiculous fiction. Businesses wield stupendous power here in the US - we have an extreme, obscene concentration of wealth.. What we have NOW is a kleptocracy, fully supported by both parties.

We, the electorate, have very real power to address this issue, and many others - issues that, despite appearances, the nation is pretty much unified in its opinion on.

To counteract this, we see propaganda... the stuff your spouting here in your comments, to 1. destroy faith in government, and 2. turn voters on each other.

The entire concept has long been disproven.
First off, a vacuum tunnel miles long is impossible. Vacuum chambers cannot have flexible seals that are moving around, expanding and contracting, which is what anything over a few hundred feet has to do.
Secondly, sucking all the air out of the tunnel, and the powering it with a propeller makes no sense at all.
And most damning, the fail state is everyone gets vaporized and a large section of the city probably gets exploded as well. Their is just far too much potential energy in a vacuum of that size.

> That's what the author said, but I don't think there's much truth to it.

Not much truth to what? What do you base this "consideration" on?

> Yes, a lot of us are socialized to want competition, but is it really what we want

Yes, it is. It's a biological trait baked into every mammal (at the very least).

The fact you opted out at 30 is also something Peterson talks about (this applies to humanity at large, but focuses on females) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

IMPORTANT MESSAGE

from the

FAKE TRUMP

Soon the U.S. will be a region of Russia.

I know you will be happy to hear that.

  Singing Trump

See The Singing
Trump, with 4 men dressed as Secret Service Agents, on America's Got Talent. The
Singing Trump says who he loves.

In the 2nd song of that performance, see the laughing when he says, "Am I
original?"

He's just pulling an Arthur Carson, station manager at WKRP in Cincinnati who thought turkeys could fly.

Then write in a candidate rather than vote for 1 of 2 horrible candidates.

Go ahead, throw your vote away!

Nice idea in theory, but as we saw in 2016, horrible in practice (at least for those on the left side of things) as Jill Stein took more votes than the margin Clinton lost by in MI, PA & WI.

* The tube would be the largest vacuum chamber in the world.

And? So it would set a record. So what? On its own, that fact is meaningless.

* Any maintenance whatsoever in the tube requires depressurization and shutting down the line.

Overstated. Some types of maintenance would require depressurization and shutting down the line. Others would not. In particular, none of the required maintenance on the vehicles that traverse the tube requires depressurizing anything but the airlock already in hourly usage anyway. You take them out of the tube, perform maintenance, and put them back. For tube maintenance, you shut down. Consider it a snow day at an airport in the northeast, or a heat wave at an airport in Phoenix, except predictable and scheduled. No big deal. (And incidentally, completely impervious to snow.)

* Vacuum seals must work repeatedly and reliably for passenger loading and unloading.

Yes. And? Is this impossible? I doubt it. Does it require some engineering work? Yes. That work can be done.

* If a vehicle dies out in the field, it's unclear how they plan to evacuate passengers from either the vehicle or the sealed, elevated steel tube.

Unclear, but any idiot can imagine adding access ports to the tube at intervals, including removable sections large enough to allow removal of a failed vehicle. It's amazing what you can do with hydraulics.

* The tube has to deal with steel expansion in the daytime. The total expected variance (for the 370-mile California route) is three football fields, so you need lots of expansion joints (unless your loading platforms and pylons are going to be incredibly mobile), all of which must also be vacuum sealed. Also keep in mind the sun hits only the top of the tube so the expansion won't be uniform.

So it will have expansion joints. A two and a half foot expansion joint every mile would do it. Since it's not a very hard vacuum, designing an adequate expansion joint is entirely possible. I would build them much less than every mile and make them quite large, and double up the design as being both an expansion joint and the aforementioned rescue access. As for uniformity of expansion, steel is a very very good thermal conductor. The difference in expansion is negligible.

* A breach in the system is likely to be catastrophic, with a torrent of air rushing in and propelling the first vehicle it hits at great speed into the next one, since there's no air cushion between the vehicles.

Ridiculous. Railroads have had rail integrity sensing for decades now. The system requires both integrity sensors and pressure sensors along its entire length anyway. It's not like there's one giant vacuum pump at the end, with only one sensor. These are both safety and operational features. A breach in the system is a nonevent. It can be detected in a matter of seconds, and the information broadcast to all capsules in danger (a steel tube is basically a wave guide, making communication dirt simple), which can automatically engage emergency braking systems, which mainly means retracting the air skid pylons and letting the capsule drop onto its wheels. The wheel bearings will be ruined and have to be replaced, but the capsule will stop safely.

* Anyone with a rifle along the impossible-to-guard 370-mile tube can cause one of those failures by penetrating the inch-thick steel.

Uhm, no. Just no. Inch-thick steel is effectively armor. Very very good armor. You can legally buy armor-penetrating large caliber rifle ammunition in the United States (because 'Murica! Fuck yeah!) and while it does put a divot into inch thick steel, it does not penetrate. At all. Plenty of video on Youtube demonstrating. That lunatic in Texas tried it with all manne

Negative. We're talking about the Delta Quadrant here. And that raspy chain smoker voice surgery that 24th century female starship captains get to sound more masculine. (How else would you explain the voice!?)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?... - At 4:06 you can see him pointing to some engineering plans of the dam. His commentary in the show doesn't reflect it, but he told me personally that when he was approached his first response was that it was impossible under current civil code. The producer said he better come up with something because otherwise there wouldn't be a show.

Here's the vid, so everyone knows what we're talking about:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... He's made others since, but that's the first and most comprehensive. TL:DW technical challenges:

* The tube would be the largest vacuum chamber in the world.
* Any maintenance whatsoever in the tube requires depressurization and shutting down the line.
* Vacuum seals must work repeatedly and reliably for passenger loading and unloading.
* If a vehicle dies out in the field, it's unclear how they plan to evacuate passengers from either the vehicle or the sealed, elevated steel tube.
* The tube has to deal with steel expansion in the daytime. The total expected variance (for the 370-mile California route) is three football fields, so you need lots of expansion joints (unless your loading platforms and pylons are going to be incredibly mobile), all of which must also be vacuum sealed. Also keep in mind the sun hits only the top of the tube so the expansion won't be uniform.
* A breach in the system is likely to be catastrophic, with a torrent of air rushing in and propelling the first vehicle it hits at great speed into the next one, since there's no air cushion between the vehicles.
* Anyone with a rifle along the impossible-to-guard 370-mile tube can cause one of those failures by penetrating the inch-thick steel.

If these crushing technical challenges have been addressed, please do give us a link, because so far it looks a lot like solar roadways or Onlive.

Looks like individual googlers have separately decided to draft company mission statements.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

> If you only experience games, are they not your reality? Is reality not real?

What is "real"? How do you define "real"?

If it costs them less to file the claim than the claim than they will get back on the average, they'll do it.

Reminds me of the "Happy Birthday" song scam Warner/Chappell Music pulled on so many artists who included that song in their work, collecting royalties from them based on a fraudulent copyright ownership claim that was later deemed invalid in court (the music and lyrics of "Good Morning and Happy Birthday" were published without a copyright notice which was required at the time so the song was already in the public domain). Jennifer Nelson sued based on her research showing the copyright claim was invalid. She paid $1500 in royalties and wanted her money back and monies returned to those who paid. Warner/Chappell had been earning $2M/year on licensing this song and ended up agreeing to pay back $14M to licensees since 2009 (which was quite generous to Warner/Chappell since Warner/Chappell had been collecting royalties well before 2009. She won and liberated the Happy Birthday song that Warner/Chappell Music never should have been able to collect any money from in the first place.

This is a good example of why people shouldn't be so quick to take a corporation's word for what they own and what the public owes them. Also another example why a 'business first' orientation to looking at situations (as is commonplace and entirely unquestioned on /. as well as the corporate media /. repeats and points to) is costly and dangerous to one's civil liberties.

CmdrCody and I are both winers.

What was wrong with the PET? I enjoyed many hours of typing BYTE magazine games like HIDE THE WUMPUS and QUEEN. It even had a decent alt-character set for games like Space Invaders...

Many of our most important shared concepts for mathematics, astronomy, and philosophy came from the open and free encouragement from Islamic cultures in their golden age.

See Neil deGrasse Tyson discuss it's glory and its unfortunate downfall

Just like with Christianity, rampant greed in the name of 'protecting' the religion ends up carving smaller and smaller slices of belief - making for a smaller and smaller god each time it happens, each time a mind is closed off to the outside.

This is how even the most dominant religions die, by 'protecting' them to death.

Ryan Fenton

What's this if not Williams, then?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Fair use, probably, but why is anybody with three brains cells to rub together surprised an algorithm matched on this?

Problem is this wasn't an algorithm match. It was a manual takedown that didn't even identify the clip you've tagged. The three second audio you mentioned there is the Ending Theme.

...in the case of "Star Wars Minus Williams," someone at Warner/Chappell took the rare step of manually filing a claim against the Auralnauts video. Warner/Chappell has been notably enthusiastic in manually flagging multiple Auralnauts videos, according to Koonce....

...the Warner/Chappell claim incorrectly identified the "Star Wars Main Title" track as being present in the Auralnauts video.

What's this if not Williams, then?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Fair use, probably, but why is anybody with three brains cells to rub together surprised an algorithm matched on this?

If you don't understand the complex case and the judge gives a strong hint what the verdict should be you can just go with that.

No, that's a lot of shit. In just about every trial the judge will start by lying to the jury. They tell them that if the facts are such and such, they must deliver such and such a verdict. But that's a blatant lie to their faces. A jury can produce any verdict they like, and they are explicitly protected against punishment for delivering it.

Repeat after me: FUCK NO I WON'T DO WHAT YOU TELL ME, MOTHERFUCKERS.

Judges do sometimes make it very clear what they think the jury should decide,

And that's not their goddamned job. Thumb on the wheel of justice.

Yeah, perhaps it's just a complete coincidence that all those places had such bad luck while proclaiming socialism.

What's bad luck? You should examine results, not luck, and that's a tougher question to examine. You have to consider the gap between policy, practice, and outcome. Sometimes all three may not even be related at all.

Furthermore, nope, not all of them made such proclamations. In fact, they declared a lot of different things. Whatever worked to get the crowds cheering. But then, who promises anything else? Even when they point out the grumbling, however justified, they use it to get a crowd to cheer for them out of resentment.

Making an enemy is often effective.

Even then, why not do the things associated with good luck rather than the things associated with misfortune?

Oh, so you claim you want to be superstitious now? That seems imprudent. I suggest not believing in the Curse of Tecumseh.

Idiocracy explains it best. It's a negative selection bias against people who are proactive and think.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Here's a REAL song for the benefit of society. I wonder if the Cult of Scientlology owns the rights to it.
 
spoiler warning: L. Ron Hubbard keeps pressing the keyboard to make horse sounds in a disturbing fashion.

I continue to receive fake claims on a video where the music is something I made in garage band. https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

It's sounds so awful that it's really a joke that someone would claim it. Sometimes multiple people/companies have claims of the same passage in the "music".
I once tried to find the music they claimed that I had "copied" and it sounded like someone had made a record of all the loops in Garageband to get as many hits as possible. It didn't even remotely sound like music.

I can understand why they have the ContentID system, but people who try to game the system, are given way to much power. I guess I should dispute it, even though it is a shitty video I made because I was bored, but is it worth getting another fake copyright strike?

There's a great video on addiction by Youtube user Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell, that offers up the following: "The opposite of addiction is not sobriety. The opposite of addiction is connection." It's almost too simple to be correct, but it makes sense.

Kind of off topic, but this is what hollywood/scientlology/whatever gets you. An episode of DS with nothing but YouTube comments at the bottom. Gross and disheartening.

"rewire the neurons in your brain" = learning. We all do it all the time. Re: "Are Interactive Computing Devices Addictive?" -- Social media services; Facebook, Twitter, etc.; are designed to be as addictive as possible. They make their money out of having lots of eyes on their web pages so they hire gaming (read: gambling) consultants to "game-ify" their services, and like the gaming industry, they do it regardless of any negative effects this may have in people's lives. The biggest difference is that the gaming industry is strictly regulated, social media is not. Cory Doctorow gave a presentation about how this works at TEDxObserver a few years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... I hope this helps :)

Now your final position is VP9s relevance rests on your individual use of it. How much more niche can you get? I accept your capitulation. You can pour it up and relax now.

You really are desperate now, aren't you? It's quite sad. Maybe dance your worries away.

Have a VP9 milkshake and relax, kid. You're not lactose intolerant, are you?

Maybe you mean I'm bulletproof. But be careful viewing that video! It streams in VP9. You might get to like it.

but somehow VP9 has wide adoption?

Yes. Browsers than support VP9 make up 80% of the market. Consider Despacito and, yes, consider it slowly. Like all YouTube video, it's streamed in VP9 when the browser supports it. That's 2.4 billion views in VP9, 600 million in H.264.

Facts bounce off you like Teflon

I think you're confusing teflon with rubber or possibly a trampoline. Don't worry, kid. One day you'll get there. Stay strong!

Apparently Bill Murray was right all along. https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Reality is, there is a real security issue ie https://www.youtube.com/watch?... (that buffoon was lucky that the Russia government was happy to treat him like an Inspector Clouseau clone, laugh at him and just toss him out). Each and every time you bring in a foreign H1B you increase the chance of employing a foreign agent, a real solid chance, just ask the NSA and CIA where they recruit, as for them, so for other countries. The home country always gets first look and first chance to recruit and the recruit stands to gain double wages and those wages can be pretty high apparently and come back home a hero, with a high level job. It is a very bad idea, especially when US agencies contract out so much to keep the political appointees, lobbyists and campaign contributors happy (those campaign contributors taking every single cheap dirty short cut they can when providing services and pretty much fuck security, somebody else's problem and how can executives sell stuff on the side if the security is too high, keep in mind multi-million dollar payouts).

Apple's inspiration for this

"All of this for $24.99!"

I can also see people using the automatic driving to function like a second car. Right now I take mass transit, because it's far cheaper than parking and gas, which would be the bulk of the cost, and it only ads on 10-15 min to my commute. But if I could call our car from my wife's work to come take me to work, that would be tempting. An electric self-driving car would probably end up being cheaper and faster than mass transit for me, provided I sent it home or to her work for free parking.

And it's not just you that can see that, it's also the car manufacturers.
In this 40 minute interview
Elon Musk lists pretty much all of the scenarios you mentioned, saying it's part of how they feel people will start using their self-driving future Teslas.

No need for two cars then, really. Multiply that by a lot of people, and I can see the congestion staying the same or getting worse, despite the ability of self-driving cars to pack closer together.

Here's where it stops being as straightforward as it initially seems. You see, most people might not need a car of their own at all at that point. In that same interview Musk describes the way they see car/ride sharing working in the future. If you buy a self-driving Tesla, you can the adjust what you want it to do when you don't need it. You might set it up so that you only share it with your wife or the whole family. Or you might set it up so that it's shared with all of your friends. Or even all all app-users who have a high rating. Why? Because you can make money sharing it out (think: uber) thus helping you pay for the car itself.

So from this perspective people might be able to do by with less vehicles.- A group of friends living in close proximity might only need 1 car where they previously had 3-4.

So in the future I might not own a vehicle at all if I can reliably enough either loan one from a friend/family member when I need it or hire a self-driving car with a cheap enough rate that the price for the hours of driving a month I need to do (which at the moment is very low, I use mass-transit for work trips just as you because it's both faster and cheaper) is still lower than the cost of owning a car myself.

Or alternatively, if I do own a car I might program it via the app to act for example as follows:
During weekdays keep sharing off between 8 am and 10 am and 4 pm and 6 pm to be able to take me to work and back. Excluding those time windows the car is is free to be used my family and a hand picked close circle of friends for the cost of operating expenses (ie. without a margin) or to a wider group of acquaintances at those same expenses plus a 10 % margin. The car will make sure that the car keeps itself on enough charge to be able to take me to work and back each day at those times. Then when I have longer trips coming up,. I know in advance when I'll need the car for myself for say, a weekend trip, so obviously sharing will be disabled then.

Most vehicles currently sit unused in parking lots for over 90 % of the time. With automated cars, the idea is to shrink the amount of cars and instead making it so that we have less cars which see a higher amount of use.

And even if the amount of cars stays the same or even goes up, that still doesn't mean we'll have issues with congestion as much as you think. The thing is, the self-driving cars know where each of them are, so the car can route around point of high traffic, but more importantly in high traffic areas the cars can drive at high speed at relatively close distances to each other because you don't have to leave a lot of room for the self-driving car in front of you to make an emergency stop as the reaction time of both it and your own vehicle will be superior to any human driver. When the car wants to turn or change lanes, it will notify the vehicles around it and space will be made. This allows for much higher and faster tra

We need more of this
music

The reason kids like spending all this time with their smartphone is the cost is negligible. Think about all the ways kids used to spend money:

1. Eating out at the mall + cafes + Denny's
2. Driving Around

Negligible? Smartphones cost $700, and for a while there, that money was being spent every two years. It was concealed in an outrageously huge phone bill, but it was being paid. The phone bill with data plan runs $700/year. The yearly average for most of the past decade is $1050/year on phone + plan. Admittedly with inflation that doesn't buy you as much Denny's/gasoline/amusement park tickets/movie tickets as it used to, but it still buys a helluva lot of those things.

Add to that the lack of jobs. This argument comes up every time Slashdot addresses UBI. There's a contingent who are still living in the '70s who think "entry-level job" actually means something. It doesn't anymore. A startling number of so-called entry-level jobs are being filled with GenXers and Boomers, because there's literally nothing else. Used to be there was some place to "advance" all those useless unskilled people. It was called middle management. There were tiers and tiers of it available at every large corporation that could suck up millions of bumbling morons, give them pointy haircuts, and put them in charge of something totally unimportant. Those jobs have been either automated away or simply dispensed with as corporations push harder and harder for efficiency. So now they're working retail or fast food, crowding teens out.

Between lack of personal income and the vast expense of a smart phone + data plan, teens simply don't have the money to go to a movie, drive around all night, then get breakfast at Denny's at 5:00 in the morning.

Some of that is driven by consumerism. In every media every minute of the day, teens are confronted with gleaming perfection, and the message has been hammered home since birth that anything less than gleaming perfection is so ghetto you don't dare show your face in public without it being airbrushed. That's where the $700 phones come from, and that's why they can't afford to cruise around all night—the car they have to have before they're remotely socially acceptable (she don't want no scrub, hangin' out the passenger side of his best friend's ride) costs tens of thousands of dollars they don't have. Gone are the days of the $200 disposa-car. Cash For Clunkers killed them off, and that prolonged absence on the streets forced incredibly high expectations that simply can't be met.

Kids have been priced right out of traditional social interaction, both socially and financially.

By "selective breeding has nature taking a hand in the outcome" do you mean typical drift during reproduction causes "most babies, puppies and kittens self-abort?"

Nature is cruel and absolutely fair. The punishment for failure is always the same: death. But nature is also careless. Every 'natural' breeding brings in a boatload of baggage, most of it needed but some of it possibly not. An example is that Munkin kittens are adorable, short legged and perfectly healthy. But the mutation is lethal when inherited from both parents.

Instead of playing the genetic lottery with every trait in an animal or vegetable we can now tweak that single bit to see what happens. Now, waiting to thoroughly test that each change doesn't suddenly cronenberg the whole planet is probably not in Monsanto's financial plans for this quarter. But is certainly beats inbreeding corn until it rots in the sun.

This is what you get when your AI design is lazy and gets fed human data.

We don't have "capitalism" in the US. We have "crony capitalism".

Crony Capitalism = an economic system characterized by close, mutually advantageous relationships between business leaders and government officials. - https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Capitalism = an economic and political system in which a country's trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit, rather than by the state.

Free Markets = an economic system in which private business operates in competition and largely free of state control.

When companies can
1. buy, via the government, exemption from prosecution for their products
2. can buy preferential placement in the markets
3. via regulation, force competitors out of the market or from entering the market
we do not have a free market economy.

We (US) may have had a free market economy, but that is not our current system. Our government has been playing puppet master for too many years to call it a free market system anymore. To make things worse, the largest Corporations in many markets are now playing puppet master to any politician willing to take money for their next election campaign, and even to the point of writing large portions of bills being submitted so that the wording is in their favor.

In order for capitalism to work, business owners and the government must be will to accept the outcomes of business owners successes and failures. This means no bailouts and no exemptions from reasonable prosecutions for the failure of said products. Along with personal responsibility is the idea of properly informing the consumer about the products (labeling?) being produced/consumed. If a GMO (transgenic) item has shellfish or peanut genes spliced in, the consumer might want to know this before they have to run for their EpiPen or end up in the ER.

...lying sacks of shit making it so an entire industry is not trusted and not the powerless hippies you keep blaming.

Unlike the coal industry.

1) Your inability to tell a consistent, truthful story;

Adding details to my stories confuses the hell out of my adoring trolls.

2) Your self-righteous & condescending attitude;

The hallmarks of a college education.

3) Your smug self-importance which is well out of proportion to your accomplishments in life;

The alternative is failure. I would rather be known as a successful failure than someone who never tried to be successful.

4) Your physically impossible self-delusion about your body composition, weight, and health;

I weighed 357 pounds this morning, down 13 pounds from 13 weeks ago.

5) Your blithe acknowledgement that you defraud your employer by working on your "side business" during working hours;

I suggest you never work at eBay, where every employee is encouraged to have their own eBay storefront. You may not like the idea that the person in the next cube over is grossing $1M in sales on PEZ dispensers.

6) Your frequent inability to construct a coherent English sentence without glaring errors;

Someone has to neuter all the grammar nazis on Slashdot.

7) Your spamming of amazon affiliate links into any conversation you can find a way to do so, while providing little to no actual interesting content to wrap them in;

Casey Neistat did a video about "Ready Player One" by Ernest Cline because Steven Spielberg is turning the book into a movie.

8) Your off-topic posts which add nothing to the conversation;

I'm always fascinated by what topics my adoring trolls troll me on. The more technical the topic, the less likely I get trolls responding.

1) Your inability to tell a consistent, truthful story;

Adding details to my stories confuses the hell out of my adoring trolls.

2) Your self-righteous & condescending attitude;

The hallmarks of a college education.

3) Your smug self-importance which is well out of proportion to your accomplishments in life;

The alternative is failure. I would rather be known as a successful failure than someone who never tried to be successful.

4) Your physically impossible self-delusion about your body composition, weight, and health;

I weighed 357 pounds this morning, down 13 pounds from 13 weeks ago.

5) Your blithe acknowledgement that you defraud your employer by working on your "side business" during working hours;

I suggest you never work at eBay, where every employee is encouraged to have their own eBay storefront. You may not like the idea that the person in the next cube over is grossing $1M in sales on PEZ dispensers.

6) Your frequent inability to construct a coherent English sentence without glaring errors;

Someone has to neuter all the grammar nazis on Slashdot.

7) Your spamming of amazon affiliate links into any conversation you can find a way to do so, while providing little to no actual interesting content to wrap them in;

Casey Neistat did a video about "Ready Player One" by Ernest Cline because Steven Spielberg is turning the book into a movie.

8) Your off-topic posts which add nothing to the conversation;

I'm always fascinated by what topics my adoring trolls troll me on. The more technical the topic, the less likely I get trolls responding.

Specifically, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6sM8pDH-HMc

But do they recognize 0118 999 881 999 119 725... 3?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

The goal of this report is to make the existence of Intel CPU backdoors a common knowledge and provide information on backdoor removal.

What we know about Intel CPU backdoors so far:

TL;DR version

Your Intel CPU and Chipset is running a backdoor as we speak.

The backdoor hardware is inside the CPU/Bridge and the backdoor firmware (Intel Management Engine) is in the chipset flash memory.

30C3 Intel ME live hack:
[Video] 30C3: Persistent, Stealthy, Remote-controlled Dedicated Hardware Malware
@21:43, keystrokes leaked from Intel ME above the OS, wireshark failed to detect packets.

[Quotes] Vortrag:
"the ME provides a perfect environment for undetectable sensitive data leakage on behalf of the attacker".

"We can permanently monitor the keyboard buffer on both operating system targets."

Backdoor removal:
The backdoor firmware can be removed by following this guide using the me_cleaner script.
Removal requires a Raspberry Pi (with GPIO pins) and a SOIC clip.

Decoding Intel backdoors:
The situation is out of control and the Libreboot/Coreboot community is looking for BIOS/Firmware experts to help with the Intel ME decoding effort.

If you are skilled in these areas, download Intel ME firmwares from this collection and have a go at them, beware Intel is using a lot of counter measures to prevent their backdoors from being decoded (explained below).

Useful links:
The Intel ME subsystem can take over your machine, can't be audited
REcon 2014 - Intel Management Engine Secrets
Untrusting the CPU (33c3)
Towards (reasonably) trustworthy x86 laptops
30C3 To Protect And Infect - The militarization of the Internet
30c3: To Protect And Infect Part 2 - Mass Surveillance Tools & Software

1. Introduction, what is Intel ME

Short version, from Intel staff:

Re: What Intel CPUs lack Intel ME secondary processor?
Amy_Intel Feb 8, 2016 9:27 AM

The Management Engine (ME) is an isolated and protected coprocessor, embedded as a non-optional part in all current Intel chipsets, I even checked with the engineering department and they confirmed it.

Long version:

ME: Management Engine

The Intel Management Engine (ME) is a separate computing environment physically located in the MCH chip or PCH chip replacing ICH.

The ME consists of an individual processor core, code and data caches, a timer, and a secure internal bus to which additional devices are connected, including a cryptography engine, internal ROM and RAM, memory controllers, and a direct memory access (DMA) engine to access the host operating system's memory as well as to reserve a region of protected external memory to supplement the ME's limited internal RAM. The ME also has network access with its own MAC address through the Intel Gigabit Ethernet Controller integrated in the southbridge (ICH or

The goal of this report is to make the existence of Intel CPU backdoors a common knowledge and provide information on backdoor removal.

What we know about Intel CPU backdoors so far:

TL;DR version

Your Intel CPU and Chipset is running a backdoor as we speak.

The backdoor hardware is inside the CPU/Bridge and the backdoor firmware (Intel Management Engine) is in the chipset flash memory.

30C3 Intel ME live hack:
[Video] 30C3: Persistent, Stealthy, Remote-controlled Dedicated Hardware Malware
@21:43, keystrokes leaked from Intel ME above the OS, wireshark failed to detect packets.

[Quotes] Vortrag:
"the ME provides a perfect environment for undetectable sensitive data leakage on behalf of the attacker".

"We can permanently monitor the keyboard buffer on both operating system targets."

Backdoor removal:
The backdoor firmware can be removed by following this guide using the me_cleaner script.
Removal requires a Raspberry Pi (with GPIO pins) and a SOIC clip.

Decoding Intel backdoors:
The situation is out of control and the Libreboot/Coreboot community is looking for BIOS/Firmware experts to help with the Intel ME decoding effort.

If you are skilled in these areas, download Intel ME firmwares from this collection and have a go at them, beware Intel is using a lot of counter measures to prevent their backdoors from being decoded (explained below).

Useful links:
The Intel ME subsystem can take over your machine, can't be audited
REcon 2014 - Intel Management Engine Secrets
Untrusting the CPU (33c3)
Towards (reasonably) trustworthy x86 laptops
30C3 To Protect And Infect - The militarization of the Internet
30c3: To Protect And Infect Part 2 - Mass Surveillance Tools & Software

1. Introduction, what is Intel ME

Short version, from Intel staff:

Re: What Intel CPUs lack Intel ME secondary processor?
Amy_Intel Feb 8, 2016 9:27 AM

The Management Engine (ME) is an isolated and protected coprocessor, embedded as a non-optional part in all current Intel chipsets, I even checked with the engineering department and they confirmed it.

Long version:

ME: Management Engine

The Intel Management Engine (ME) is a separate computing environment physically located in the MCH chip or PCH chip replacing ICH.

The ME consists of an individual processor core, code and data caches, a timer, and a secure internal bus to which additional devices are connected, including a cryptography engine, internal ROM and RAM, memory controllers, and a direct memory access (DMA) engine to access the host operating system's memory as well as to reserve a region of protected external memory to supplement the ME's limited internal RAM. The ME also has network access with its own MAC address through the Intel Gigabit Ethernet Controller integrated in the southbridge (ICH or