Ok you lost me at “future historical fact”. Again that is a fancy way of saying pure speculation. No I don’t know for a fact that the NSA didn’t order Intel to build a buggy ME into all its processors. I can’t prove that it didn’t happen. And maybe your speculation will turn out to be right. I am arguing that my speculation that this was incompetence is significantly more likely to be correct than your speculation of conspiracy.
Your theory in the above comment is that the NSA or equivalent ordered Intel to build a C&C mechanism into their processors. Intel then did a perfect job covering up this request, but did a piss poor job of implementing it due to incompetence and has not managed to correct it for 10 years. There is no indication that this might be the case but because of other unsavory activities by the NSA or equivalent it can be assumed that at some point evidence will be uncovered that you are right and therefore we should accept it as fact. Do I have that right?
Not exactly but almost. I am saying this is the most likely outcome.
Judging by other activities of the intelligence agencies and working with pure speculation -- not hiding from these words, you are correct by calling it that -- I still think it's much more likely they commissioned the Intel ME.
You mention critical thinking in another comment. Critical thinking, the way I apply it, also requires a historical context to be applied to the situation one is analyzing. Agencies have been doing pretty shady stuff and some of it has been uncovered for the entire world to see.
Critical thinking, the way I apply it, says that the odds are there is a foul play. I merely wish you to recognize that this is the more likely scenario than a bunch of coincidences and/or people supposedly making the ME to serve data center sysadmins -- btw many of those sysadmins, including on several threads here in HN, said they never used the ME and named a plethora of other tools.
Obviously I am not trying to change the way you think in general. I believe we can both agree that none of us knows for sure. The human brain's strength is to work with many variables and be able to impose some order in the chaos by pattern recognition and using historical info. I am not gonna deny this can lead to people drawing awfully misguided conclusions sometimes -- and I've been guilty of that as well! -- but it's the best we have, especially having in mind what tiny imperfect brains we have to work with.
Everything I can name are circumstantial evidence. I accept that. It's the nature of the area. Intelligence data isn't easy to come by.
OK. And with that you are saying that you are basing this on 95% speculation and 5% pattern recognition with no direct evidence, and yet it's the most likely outcome.
And I am saying that the confidence interval on that calculation is just orders of magnitude not tight enough. I am not denying that you could be right. It's just that I am giving that possibility something like a 1% chance of being true, while something like 85% chance of this being pure incompetence by Intel management and engineers (the rest being some other explanation that's neither malice nor direct incompetence). I don't think you and I can find a common ground on this estimation.
Again though, ME is a bad thing because it's not open source, it can't be turned of, and it's buggy. Regardless of who ordered its creation, it sucks.
Your theory in the above comment is that the NSA or equivalent ordered Intel to build a C&C mechanism into their processors. Intel then did a perfect job covering up this request, but did a piss poor job of implementing it due to incompetence and has not managed to correct it for 10 years. There is no indication that this might be the case but because of other unsavory activities by the NSA or equivalent it can be assumed that at some point evidence will be uncovered that you are right and therefore we should accept it as fact. Do I have that right?