The same way you would do it with a black box while optionally taking as many shortcuts as one is comfortable with by virtue of assuming having a better understanding of it’s been built?

You can audit IntelME a similar way, it’s just more annoying and tedious, it’s also been done before by people. Honestly I don’t bother much with the IntelME conspiracy theory much anymore (and yes I will call it a conspiracy theory, more on why later), I did used to be extremely interested in it about 2 years ago, I researched the topic heavily. I met people and colleagues who were also interested in it. However I found when I suggested ways to study or prove the claims made about it, like where it’s communicating to or how it interacts with the system or even just disassembling the rom I would get weird answers about it knowing when it’s being probed and that I wouldn’t consider entirely rational when describing a tiny embedded system like this. Then I came across the 34C3 video and basically I realized then and there that this is a conspiracy theory, as there is a whole great study done by these guys and everyone is ignoring it.

Then there’s the fact that many of the theories out there seem to resist investigation, and people seem to come up with more elaborate ways of it resisting. Example: I presented the idea of sniffing the Ethernet connection of the computer by cutting the cable in half and probing it with a debugger and they claimed that the chip would listen with the microphone and abort, or that IntelME would skew the data collected when loaded up on another computer.

The end result is that I bought a high end PC from System76 with the capability to disable IntelME largely for nothing, which would be fine if the Laptop wasn’t so problematic, like the fact that it gets insanely hot and chews through battery insanely fast (seriously Battery consumption is worse on this laptop than my Steam Deck). Also it chews through power like this even on the iGPU, but it was way worse on the nvidia GPU, like way way worse. I wish I had gotten something AMD based, They’re killing it when it comes to performance and efficiency, more than I can say for Toasty old Intel.

I think that a lot of the IntelME stuff is what people would typically call a conspiracy theory, not like a theory of a conspiracy, but rather where the conspiracy is largely invented for the purpose of being scared or angry, or for attention from others who get scared or angry. Obviously not all of it is, and there are people who do research it, but the videos about it that you usually see on YouTube, most of them are like this.

The thing is that intelME isn’t like a government conspiracy where there isn’t much if any tangible evidence for it, IntelME is physically installed on millions upon millions of Intel PCs around the world, so it’s very easy to test the myths and claims by sacrificing some of these Intel computers. The fact though that most of the people making claims seem to not want to do that, suggests that they don’t think it’s as big a problem as they say it is. There are few people who have tested it though, a notable example from 34C3 where they found that it’s actually much more boring. Honestly the idea that people say it cracks Wifi passwords, or exchanges data home with a server, all this stuff people claim can be easily tested, even analyzing the network packets from a PC to see if it actually phones home when it’s off (can do that by probing an Ethernet cable and capturing the signals externally. The reason I claim the IntelME stiff is a conspiracy is because most of the people making the claims resist investigation, the same way that Flat earth theories and Lizard people theories resist investigation. My example of probing the network cable? Yeah I proposed that to someone already and they claimed IntelME would know the Ethernet is being probed, when I inquired how I was given many nonsensical claims, from microphone listening to talking to IntelME on another computer skewing the results, can’t make this shit up.

So to summarize, a lot of the claims are unsubstantiated claims, which could be easily proven or disproven due to easy access to IntelME based systems, but isn’t because the people making the claims can’t be bothered, and to top it all off many of them simply make arguments to resist investigation of IntelME in the first place, just like classical bad-faith conspiracy theories, and actual investigations like the one shown as 34C3 are swept under the rug. I don’t think IntelME doesn’t have issues or that it isn’t a security risk, it is like any firmware, but the sensationalized claims made about it regularly online don’t hold water, and the people making them should be called out for perpetrating conspiracy theories without merit. I’d leave some links to them but I don’t know if that’s allowed here, could be considered harassment.

This is why we need better resource/battery management services with Magisk or Xposed integration. On my phone the Rom has one integrated already, lets you set apps to be prevented from running in the background completely, preventing tracking, annoying notifications, and battery usage. Though unfortunately these types of tools aren’t available on all roms, and they really need root or system access to be effective.

Didn’t some older movies as well certain rides at theme parks in the past featuring skeletons at one point use real bones instead of fake ones.

The mount method using root will still work since it writes over the app rather than installing it as an update, will still seem like it was installed from play, same way it still thinks it’s google signed in that state.

I threw up in my mouth looking at and thinking about this. It just seems so disgusting.

I’ll never understand why nipples are seen as gross or sexual, I mean all mammals have them, and their function isn’t even sexual in nature, it’s to feed babies. Do people think that babies nursing is a sexual thing? (If you do there’s something wrong with you)

They’re not exactly the same but they are extremely similar. Which I guess makes sense since they both are a type of Cola.

If everyone refused to pay their taxes the government would just get the money from elsewhere, either by making cuts to infrastructure or worse, by just printing more money and driving up inflation. So cutting them off from tax money doesn’t do anything, they made up this game (money) and they can break the rules of it.

Who says it needs to be a transfem, there are cool linux nerds of the transmasc and enby variety as well.