I think many posters are talking past each other, not that I know anything about computers.
Nunzio seems to be referring to a computer which has an “always on” connection to the internet. Others are referring to computers which have been turned “off.”
Again, I’m not a computer geek.
So Intel has this sooper sekret way to take over machines, but Microsoft doesn’t know about it? Microsoft could save a lot of money paying all those guys to maintain machines if they could do it by remote control.
“Powered down” means off. And on that point, Nunzio is dead wrong, all my fellow computer geeks have shown.
I think the reference is to Wake-on-LAN, which according to Wikipedia “is an Ethernet computer networking standard that allows a computer to be turned on or woken up remotely by a network message sent usually by a simple program executed on another computer on the network.” This sort of thing might be useful in a corporate environment if the IT department needs to update the computer after hours.
Well, that’s just the point about the computer being off. Your cable service is “always on” but the cable company cannot see, talk to, turn on, or other manipulate a TV if it has been turned off.
Your computer is exactly the same. Off is off - incapable of receiving, let alone responding to any message.
(Assuming, of course, that it is off and not asleep, as some computer have the capability for a wake command via ethernet. But, again, even those computers cannot be woken from “off” only from “sleep”).
There is a grain of truth in the Intel story. There is tecnology called wake-on-LANwhich allows a computer in a soft-off or hibernating state to be woken/powered up in response to a special Ethernet packet. It is not exclusive to Intel and it is intended to be able to control unattended computers such as you might have in a datacenter. It is not intended to spy on users, but like any technology may have some way for it to be used to nefarious purpose. Paranoid (or prudent for that matter) users can disable this feature through BIOS, or if you are really cautious you could disable the pin connections that enable it to work. A good network administrator should also make sure that the magic packets can not penetrate the firewall.
ETA: Glenn Beck needs to be reigned in somehow. He has millions of viewers and continues to spread complete paranoid bullshit. He may well be responsible for a new American civil war or Obama being shot by some crazy.
So how does a TV remote turn on a TV that is “off”?
Because it’s not off! It’s asleep or in standby mode (different manufacturers use different terms). It’s the equivalent of putting your computer to sleep.
One of my TVs is nice enough to provide two buttons - one puts it into standby mode. The remote also puts it into standby, and it can be turned on using the remote in standby mode. The other off button turns it OFF - the remote cannot turn it back on. The TV offers the two buttons because TVs use power to remain in standby mode; by turning it completely off, I can save power.
I think that we can all agree that pulling the power cord out of the computer and wrapping the entire unit in aluminum foil when we aren’t using it is the most prudent thing to do.
There is a specfic meaning to the term “sleep” for a computer as there is for “hibernate”. A computer that is sleeping has a small amount of power keeping the memory alive so that the machine can start up just where it left off when power is supplied again to the processor and peripherals. Wake-on-LAN handles both that case as well as the case where the computer when fully powered back on will totally reboot from scratch. It does this by keeping the network card powered up but not the processor and memory. A controller on the network card will recognize the packet and power on the rest of the computer. This is almost exactly the case as a TV.
Now wake-on-LAN will not work on a PC if it is unplugged, or if there is a phyiscal switch that cuts power. Most new PCs do not have physical switches, they have electronically controlled relays that can cut power to the processor and memory but keep the network card powered on.
Go read the Wkipedia article.
The story is partly true. It doesn’t apply to individuals logging into cars.gov, but it does apply to dealers - who are also private citizens.
Here’s the exact text from the government page:
It sure sounds like the government is demanding that if a dealer should use his computer to log onto the system, ownership of the dealer’s computer reverts to the government for the duration of the transaction, and the government has the right to inspect ALL files on the dealer’s computer.
How much of a civil liberties problem this is, I don’t know. I know nothing about the nature of the computer systems dealers use. But the text is pretty plain that merely logging on to the government’s system means you’re waiving all rights to privacy on the logged in computer.
I take it as saying that all files on the “system”; i.e., the CARS system are vulnerable to interception, monitoring, etc.
I can see why dealers would be alarmed by such a broadly and poorly worded disclosure.
Wouldn’t the information from their customers be vulnerable to government inspection?
You know, I don’t want to be lumped in with the right wingnuts, but even if this is supposed to affect the dealers and not me, I find it pretty distasteful.
So am I correct in assuming if the dealer’s computer is open for government inspection, my customer information is too?
But logging on to a website does not give access to the files on your computer, so I think the warning is simply poorly written. It is just saying that you have no presumption of privacy on the information you are supplying to the goverment. I suspect that this is standard boilerplate that is displayed anytime you access a similar govt. service. I bet even under Reagan (genuflect) and Bush there was similar verbiage.
Like DanBlather said just above (his post before his most recent), it probably refers to the relevant info to the transaction. The wording is a little strange, but really, what info could the government want that they don’t already have access to via tax records and what not? And I can’t see a situation where a dealer would agree that everything on their computers would/could belong to the gov; they’d just refuse to participate. As for customer info, as long as it relates to the CARS program, I can’t get too excited about them wanting to have records for it. When they’re shelling out a few thousand bucks, I don’t see it as unreasonable to know a few details.
At the risk of straying into GD territory, I think its an issue of when you expect privacy. When I’m talking on the phone or sending emails, I expect the government to GTFO. When I’m buying something at the store and pay sales tax, I don’t think its the governments business what I bought, as long as they get their cut. But when I’m buying something with a government subsidy, I don’t expect them to butt out since they are, in a sense, a party in the transaction.
I remember that during Obama’s campaign they had a group that tried to quickly react to rumors and misinformation distributed on the internet. I wish they were doing this now as well. There is an saying “A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on” that has even more relevance today. At the very least, one would expect that Glenn Beck’s staff to ask for some clarification on what the warning meant before he repeated the rumors on air.
I’m sorry, but I don’t think you have any Fourth Amendment protections here. Nor, for that matter, does any of the data your supermarket has collected on you. Or any other marketer or virtually any other entity that has information on you. They may have Fourth Amendment protections, but sorry, you have no legally protected privacy interest in information you’ve given to a third party or a third party has collected about you, and you do you have any legally protected privacy interest in that third party’s analysis or conclusions regarding that information.
I am, of course, speaking in generalities, and there are several areas of information (especially such things as medical or compulsorily given information) that are legislatively protected. But even if the information in question was improperly obtained by the government (e.g., invalid warrant), they are free to do whatever they want with information about you. The subject of the improper search can move to exclude evidence against them, but not you–the subject’s Fourth Amendment rights were violated, not yours.
And ironically, protecting consumer information would require big govt to legislate controls on private business.
I don’t know how you can make that interpretation, when the first paragraph says that while you are logged in, YOUR computer is considered United States property.
That depends. Maybe upon logging in the government downloads an activeX control to your computer which is outside the browser sandbox, giving them access to your complete computer. Hell, you can download software on the internet that gives others full remote access to your computer. Not being able to log in, I can’t tell you that this is the case.
Again, I don’t know how much of a civil liberties issue this is, because I don’t know the nature of the dealer computer systems. Perhaps they are required by law to contain nothing but transaction records, and therefore making them available to the government may be no big deal.
I do find it weird that the government says that they also reserve the right to provide any information they find to other agencies, foreign or domestic.
If I were a dealer, I’d make damned sure that the computer I used for this program was completely clean of any data I didn’t want the government looking at. For good measure, I’d remove it from my LAN, too.
Getting back to Intel vPro:
A Computer can be
ON - all elements of the system are powered on and doing things
SLEEP/STANDBY - the CPU and disk are powered off, but memory and motherboard subsystems are maintained by the chipset for rapid wakeup
HIBERNATE - all elements of the system (except maybe Wake-On-Lan and the bits of the motherboard responsible for soft startup) are powered off, but memory state has been written to disk for a slower wakeup
OFF - all elements of the system are powered down, apart from the ethernet card (for WOL) and the bits of the motherboard responsible for soft startup
HARD OFF - no power supplied to the system at all.
What vPro supplies is additional chipset and ethernet functionality to do more remote management when the system is in ON (including para-OS functions), SLEEP, HIBERNATE and OFF states. The referred article makes some pretty speculative guesses about what could be done with vPro - the Q45 chipset almost certainly does not have the ability to read files off the disk or monitor keystrokes. The “I need help” key sequence will trigger a hardware interrupt in the chipset that sends a packet to the monitoring tools, and maybe some details about cpu state (registers, stack, system temp, last queued disk request, maybe a partial memory dump), and will be able to initiate actions (reboot, mostly). This is incredibly useful in a corporate environment. However, it is improbably that any ADSL/Cable modem will pass the packets required to allow anyone to do things to a home PC from the internet - they will not be TCP/IP, like WOL packets, and thus not routable without specific helpers in the network devices.
So a PC that is OFF may not be as off as you expect. If you want it OFF off, pull the power cable.
Si