He's not saying that all machines are actively doing any of that, or even that Intel/AMD/anybody have already developed code to do so. He's just pointing out that this chip exists, it has to capability to do what he's described, and there's nothing that we can currently do to stop it if we're using an affected machine, as we don't have any control over the code being run. As to why the companies would do this ... it wouldn't necessarily be them if they lost control of the signing keys. And you can't ignore the fact that the FBI just tried to get Apple to do something pretty damn similar.
> And you can't ignore the fact that the FBI just tried to get Apple to do something pretty damn similar.
I was very against the FBI's reasoning in the Apple case (and in fact, I'm against their existence generally).
But I don't think that bypassing an unlock retry limit is "pretty damn similar" morally, legally, or technologically to a solution that can arbitrarily execute code remotely, on demand, and with root privileges on nearly any PC and game console in the world.
Have to quite strongly disagree with you there. The FBI wanted Apple to create and sign software that they could forcibly push onto the phone in order to get it to do what they wanted it to do. In the recent case it was about bruteforcing a passcode, but the concept is identical regardless of the payload. It's exactly the same scenario Intel or AMD could be faced with. The entire Apple situation hinged on the fact that it was possible for Apple to comply, without that there would be no situation.
