System76 ME Firmware Updates Plan
You don&#x27;t need to buy branded laptops to be able to disable Intel ME. Thanks to me_cleaner, I have been running my Chromebooks with Intel ME disabled for years. You can do it too if you have 30 minutes and a raspberry pi.<p>Here is what the intelmetool [1] says on my laptop: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;yKTt5ga.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;yKTt5ga.png</a><p>What&#x27;s even more interesting is that there is a simple, automatic, no-frills method to clamp a SOIC clip connected to a Raspberry Pi zero to any Chromebook and it will clear out the Intel ME automatically with no user interaction. It&#x27;s not even hard, all you have to do is to configure the Pi to enable SPI, and then make the pi automatically run flashrom to pull out the ROM from the Chromebook&#x27;s flash chip, run .&#x2F;me_cleaner on the ROM image, and then flash it back.<p>It can be done safely and automatically, and you wouldn&#x27;t have to risk frying your laptop, so everyone could do it provided they can open their laptop. However, I&#x27;m too lazy to document it properly: either by providing the image tool to create the said Raspberry Pi Zero image + h&#x2F;w instruction or by providing a premade hardware to do it.<p>I have reasons to believe that downloading a random binary image from a random guy nicknamed jimmies and use it to flash the firmware to your laptop because you don&#x27;t trust Intel is probably not a great idea. The act of creating such a script to customize Raspbian, and testing out to make sure that it works for every Chromebook or laptop, and make a hardware compatibility list is quite a daunting task. I was talking about that briefly to some of the security people, but then as a grad student trying to graduate it got to the pile of TODOs. So if anyone is interested in it, let me know and I can provide some more details.<p>Currently, I&#x27;m running a Dell 13 inches Chromebook that can be had for $300 and does everything I need.<p>1: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;coreboot&#x2F;coreboot&#x2F;tree&#x2F;master&#x2F;util&#x2F;intelmetool" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;coreboot&#x2F;coreboot&#x2F;tree&#x2F;master&#x2F;util&#x2F;intelm...</a> - disclaimer: I contributed a patch to the intelmetool to make it work on the Chromebook.