zlacker

>>doener+(OP)
Is this something we could achieve with a corporate alliance? I know a lot of tech companies would like to give their employees secure laptops. I also know that there are large costs associated with making hardware, especially if you are talking about dropping ME.

A dozen companies with 1000 employees each and a budget of $2,500 per employee gets you $30 million, which is surely enough to get a decent, qubes-secure laptop with no ME. You aren't going to be designing your own chips at that point, but you could grab power8 or sparc or arm.

Are there companies that would reasonably be willing to throw in a few million to fund a secure laptop? I imagine at least a few. And maybe we could get a Google or someone to put in $10m plus.

>>Taek+P9
Intel ME is effectively the result of a corporate alliance... large organizations want central control of the computers they give their employees regardless of what that employee, the computer's user, wants.

>>Canada+mk
not exacting. they want disk encryption with a master password fallback and bios tampering detection. then there is nsa and nist and darpa et al which want lots more.

Intel just decided to clump it all together. and it doesn't even fully address the two main corporate requests.