>>>>>>You are right - it did not occur to me at the time. I shall consider doing so this coming weekend. Perhaps a good reason to make the move to Linux. The laptop is "beefy" enough; 8Gb RAM, 2.5Ghz CPU, Lenovo Thinkpad T520 model.
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>>>>>There is some interesting reading if you Google [lenovo banned].
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>>>>Interesting but not conclusive enough. Australia government denies it too. Lenovo does come preinstalled with various services running which call home to look for updates (bios, drivers, etc). I always switch all that off. But there could of course be far deeper, pre O/S backdoors. Who knows...
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>>>Intel's vPro allows for any code injection over a network, wired or wireless. It monitors every keystroke, and using hyper-threading, injection of code to execute on the CPU is outside of any awareness by the OS or machine state.
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>>Yes, I read about this - Joanna Rutkowska - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Pill_%28software%29
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>That one's different using virtualization. The vPro system works without installing anything on the machine.

Fascinating. But what can one do? If you cant detect it then what to do? Use old hardware, old O/S, old drivers, etc?