Can we say "invasion of privacy"? All of a sudden police agencies from halfway around the world have jurisdiction to snoop, phish and hack their way into your living room in the name of "homeland security" and "prevention of loss", when really all this amounts to is a hard-coded feature that constantly records your whereabouts.
Personally, I'm not going to buy any new laptop unless it's from an enemy state like China or Russia, and even then I'm going to make sure that before I even begin I will flash the bios with a version known to be free of "E.T. Phone Home" features.
If this is a physical chip however that can't be removed, then it would be wise to perform a thorough port-scan of the machine (from within a local network that doesn't have net access) and see which port is being used to transmit/receive these coded calls, and then be sure to block that/those ports on your hardware router before ever letting the laptop surf the net.
Discussion on:
Message 9 of 1
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