San Jose, USA: Soon, if your work computer suffers a major meltdown, your employer could tunnel into your crippled machine remotely by communicating directly with the chips inside it, allowing authorised managers to power up and repair turned-off PCs within the corporate network at virtually any time.
Intel’s Active Management Technology – introduced last year for corporates – represented a fundamental change in the way work PCs were repaired, updated and administered. Now the world’s largest chip maker is studying how to bring the same technology to the consumer market.
The company envisions consumers one day signing-up for a service that allows their Internet providers to automatically install security upgrades and patches, whether the PC is turned on or not. Once they return to their computers, users would then get an alert with a detailed record of the fixes.
The technology works by keeping a communications chip inside the PC active at virtually all times, as long the machine has battery or AC power.
Once an IT manager reaches out to that chip, it contacts the chipset inside the same machine, which can access certain data stored on a memory chip that retains information even when the computer is off.
Intel is hoping consumers will decide that the convenience of having a round-the-clock watchdog outweighs the obvious privacy concerns raised by opening a new remote access channel into the PC.
Digital-privacy experts aren’t worried about the use of such technology in the workplace, but advocates said the same technology might raise questions about the level of control consumers are willing to cede to keep their machines running smoothly.
“It’s a lot of power to give over to someone. People are storing a large portion of their lives in their computers,” said Seth Schoen, a technologist with the Electronic Frontier Foundation in the US.
The technology only allows technicians to see a small amount of mundane but critical information, mostly configuration and inventory data. They cannot rifle through an employee’s files. However, they can install missing or corrupt files, and even reinstall the entire operating system by having the system boot from a remote drive on the network.
“The technology is privacy-neutral. It doesn’t know who you are, it doesn’t care what you do,” said Intel’s Mike Ferron-Jones. “Any policy decisions about what a user can do in a business environment with their PC are up to the business owner.”
In one study of companies already using Active Management Technology, desk-side visits for hardware problems dropped 60 per cent and trips for software glitches fell 91 per cent.
http://www.mumbaimirror.com/net/mmp...&contentid=2007061902312967195bf8cc7&pageno=1
Intel’s Active Management Technology – introduced last year for corporates – represented a fundamental change in the way work PCs were repaired, updated and administered. Now the world’s largest chip maker is studying how to bring the same technology to the consumer market.
The company envisions consumers one day signing-up for a service that allows their Internet providers to automatically install security upgrades and patches, whether the PC is turned on or not. Once they return to their computers, users would then get an alert with a detailed record of the fixes.
The technology works by keeping a communications chip inside the PC active at virtually all times, as long the machine has battery or AC power.
Once an IT manager reaches out to that chip, it contacts the chipset inside the same machine, which can access certain data stored on a memory chip that retains information even when the computer is off.
Intel is hoping consumers will decide that the convenience of having a round-the-clock watchdog outweighs the obvious privacy concerns raised by opening a new remote access channel into the PC.
Digital-privacy experts aren’t worried about the use of such technology in the workplace, but advocates said the same technology might raise questions about the level of control consumers are willing to cede to keep their machines running smoothly.
“It’s a lot of power to give over to someone. People are storing a large portion of their lives in their computers,” said Seth Schoen, a technologist with the Electronic Frontier Foundation in the US.
The technology only allows technicians to see a small amount of mundane but critical information, mostly configuration and inventory data. They cannot rifle through an employee’s files. However, they can install missing or corrupt files, and even reinstall the entire operating system by having the system boot from a remote drive on the network.
“The technology is privacy-neutral. It doesn’t know who you are, it doesn’t care what you do,” said Intel’s Mike Ferron-Jones. “Any policy decisions about what a user can do in a business environment with their PC are up to the business owner.”
In one study of companies already using Active Management Technology, desk-side visits for hardware problems dropped 60 per cent and trips for software glitches fell 91 per cent.
http://www.mumbaimirror.com/net/mmp...&contentid=2007061902312967195bf8cc7&pageno=1
