open1414

I am curious how other people are using the API in their company. I've mostly just used it to help write up generic emails in my personal life.

I am looking to purchase a old laptop from what seems to be a reseller of decommissioned laptops.

I read about Intel Management Engine and how it is a backdoor at the CPU level and does is not installed at the operating system level.

I tried googling this but how would I know if the laptop is still enrolled into some network? I would hate if some sysadmin could remotely do stuff to my PC.

Xiamoi makes some amazing phones at an affordable price point. They also tend to use flagship Snapdragon processors and release the device tree and kernel source making third party ROM support much easier.

I would like to buy one of these phones with the intent of installing ASOP or lineageOS. I don't mind maintaining the kernel branch myself and backporting fixes. I understand that there are proprietary blobs that run in userspace but I would trust these as I would get them from Snapdragon's official BSP website: codeaurora. I would remove anything that isn't necessary.

Since I am very nice in this field, I had a few questions:

1. Is it possible for Xiamoi to place a hardware backdoor? Or would this be near impossible to do at a large scale especially when using an American SoC?

2. I notice that the firmware for various chips are loaded from the Android image on boot. I assume this is because it's cheaper and allows firmware to be updated. Are there any components in a normal phone where the firmware in some read only flash? This would mean flashing a new ROM/OS would not remove this firmware.

Please note, I am looking for reasonable security. I am not a target in any way so it's unlikely I would be targeted specifically. I just don't like the idea of backdoors and/or malware calling home.

I've used ThinkPads all the way from the IBM days and those good old solid Dell computers too.

Recently, I decided it was time for an update. I use Linux on the often so it was important for me to purchase a laptop that was compatible.

I bought 2 laptops, all of which I had to return in the last 2 months.

1. Dell XPS: I spent over 20+ hours with their support going back and forth. I also had a tech come to my house to replace my motherboard before I gave up and demanded a return

2. Lenovo Carbon X1: The laptop came with a faulty keyboard so I just returned it because I didn't want to wait 30 days for a mail-in repair or drive 2 hours to go to a "local" repair shop. They also made me order the laptop 3 times because their system kept cancelling it for whatever reason so it took an insane amount of time to just purchase the laptop (I spent ~6 hours to just purchase the laptop)

Maybe I'm just unlucky but the time I spent and energy I spent to just purchase these laptops shows you why people buy from Apple instead. I strongly dislike MacOS because they force the "apple way" of doing things. But it seems to be the only option these days to buy a computer with ease and get a computer "that just works". My Macbook was more expensive but the time I saved outweighs the price imo.