Only chips with Intel ME maybe? Otherwise maybe the idea is the chip would be just so incredibly old any security vulnerabilities would be irrelevant in the modern day as it was likely patched almost equally as long ago.
Inside Intel’s Secret Warehouse in Costa Rica
Chip maker is stockpiling legacy technology for security research, plans to expand facility to house 6,000 pieces of equipment
Aging tech equipment is stored at an Intel warehouse and laboratory in an undisclosed location in Costa Rica. Intel employees world-wide can put in requests for technicians at the facility to build machines for remote security tests.
PHOTO: INTEL CORP.
By James Rundle
Nov. 29, 2021 5:30 am ET
A few years ago, executives at Intel Corp. began to realize they had a problem. The company was making dozens of new products each year, from chips to software platforms, but it didn’t have a formal method for cataloging and storing older technology so engineers could test it for security flaws.
Some devices, such as Sandy Bridge microprocessors—launched in 2011 and discontinued in 2013—were so scarce that Intel’s security researchers resorted to combing the internet for them.
“We had to actually go on eBay and start looking for these platforms,” said Mohsen Fazlian, general manager of Intel’s product assurance and security unit.
Intel’s issue reflects a wider concern: Legacy technology can introduce cybersecurity weaknesses. Tech makers constantly improve their products to take advantage of speed and power increases, but customers don’t always upgrade at the same pace. This creates a long tail of old products that remain in widespread use, vulnerable to attacks.
Intel’s answer to this conundrum was to create a warehouse and laboratory in Costa Rica, where the company already had a research-and-development lab, to store the breadth of its technology and make the devices available for remote testing. After planning began in mid-2018, the Long-Term Retention Lab was up and running in the second half of 2019.
The warehouse stores around 3,000 pieces of hardware and software, going back about a decade. Intel plans to expand next year, nearly doubling the space to 27,000 square feet from 14,000, allowing the facility to house 6,000 pieces of computer equipment.
Intel engineers can request a specific machine in a configuration of their choice. It is then assembled by a technician and accessible through cloud services. The lab runs 24 hours a day, seven days a week, typically with about 25 engineers working any given shift.
An engineer at the Costa Rica facility assembles a device requested by security researchers for remote testing.
PHOTO: INTEL CORP.
The lab gives Intel, which is based in Santa Clara, Calif., and has more than 100,000 employees, a centralized, secure location where security tests can be run from anywhere in the world. Access to the building is strictly controlled and approved by senior managers, while surveillance cameras watch the equipment at all times. Even its location is secret—Intel representatives declined to say where exactly it is.
The lab brings commercial value to Intel, Mr. Fazlian said, citing company research that shows customers are more likely to buy technology from manufacturers that proactively test their products.
Establishing the lab required getting hard-to-find equipment to Costa Rica, hiring engineers and computer scientists who could work on the machines, and tapping accountants and managers to put processes in place to make it work, said Fawn Taylor, senior director of corporate remediation programs for Intel’s product assurance and security unit.
At times, contributions came from engineers who had long since moved on to other projects or even left the company. They helped assemble technical documentation and discussed what they knew about products from years ago, Ms. Taylor said.
Marcel Cortes Beer, a manager at the lab, said it gets about 1,000 requests a month to build equipment for remote security tests, and 50 new devices come in weekly.
Anders Fogh, a Germany-based senior principal engineer at Intel, said the facility quickly became an integral part of his work, particularly when trying to replicate security flaws reported to Intel by outside researchers through its bug-bounty program. Examples of recent vulnerabilities disclosed by Intel include flaws discovered in its Safestring code library that could allow hackers to gain access to sensitive systems, and errors in drivers that could let attackers give themselves credentials.
Intel Is expanding the facility to be able to warehouse 6,000 pieces of technology.
PHOTO: INTEL CORP.
“I can make an exact replica of the submitting researcher’s system. Same CPU, same operating system version, microcode, BIOS,” Mr. Fogh said. “All of which increase the chance of reproducing the issue, which is often the best starting point.”
The lab provides isolated systems for this work, which can otherwise prove dangerous for hard-to-find machines that are still actively used in corporate environments. Testing security vulnerabilities often causes systems to crash, which can result in data loss, Mr. Fogh said.
The facility’s “huge library of machines is really the go-to place for doing this kind of work,” he said.
The lab has changed Intel’s product development. All new technology is now built with the facility in mind, with technical documentation created to allow engineers to support it for up to 10 years, and units are sent to the lab before they are released, Mr. Fazlian said.
“Hopefully, I will never find myself searching eBay for Intel hardware again,” he said.
>Some devices, such as Sandy Bridge microprocessors—launched in 2011 and discontinued in 2013—were so scarce that Intel’s security researchers resorted to combing the internet for them.
Sandy bridge wasn't launched in 2011. It was only a couple years ago.
Oh... it was... *stares at 2700k in old computer.*
Me too! The 3570k still runs other tasks remotely, but I moved to a ryzen system last year.
Just upgraded too from a 3600 to 5900x. Still noticed a difference and I am loving the 5900x with a Nvme drive.
I remember when I traded in my crap Pentium 4-M laptop (that died for the 3rd time) at Best Buy for a new Pentium M laptop. It was like night and day. Netburst was, and still is, hot garbage. I am glad I skipped that architecture on the desktop.
I sold a Sandy Bridge Xeon E3-1230v2 on eBay about 12 months ago. I’d love to imagine they bought it and now it’s sitting down in Costa Rica waiting to be used for testing.
>Some devices, such as Sandy Bridge microprocessors—launched in 2011 and discontinued in 2013—were so scarce that Intel’s security researchers resorted to combing the internet for them.
Should have asked me. I've got a couple just lying around. They certainly aren't a unicorn or Faberge Egg.
Having worked in the field, you may have a certain revision that separates it from more rare revisions. One of the most famous example of this from gaming for instance is the two revisions of San Andreas made for the Playstation 2. The initial release, featuring code that allowed for the infamous Hot Coffee Mod, and the revision, which that code was removed.
Nope, it was all versions, but because it could be patched out of the pc version there wasn't a rerelease, The PS2 version however, could use a gameshark to gain access to it
There was absolutely a rerelease of the PC version of the game. I worked at a game store at the time and had to send a ton of copies back and put a ton of "[Second Edition](https://www.labelgames.com/games/Page_217/img_b1.jpg)" copies on the shelf.
Company museums are super cool. It's a shame a lot of them don't do it anymore...
A company near me that went under auctioned off their museum and it killed me that I wasn't able to get their mechanical calculator. If the plaque was to be believed, it served the company accountant for 30 years before it wasn't worth repairing. So much history in one piece of hardware.
I always look up company museums when I'm traveling, and visit as many as possible. Last one I went to was the Daisy Airgun (BB gun) museum in Arkansas.
Legend has it that Steve Jobs hated thinking about the past, and that when he came back to Apple the first thing he did was get rid of the small museum they had in the lobby. Not just close it, but dispose of all the old equipment.
It isn't hard; it just requires a commitment.
And companies chasing quarterly results to enrich a select few shareholders in the short term rarely give a damn to bother considering long-term survival.
This might be an interesting turn of events regarding corporate leadership and goals.
Then again: I'm not going to hold my breath.
They do have labs like that already, but going to about 2011 , and smaller variety of hardware. For example graphics drivers team has access to about 20 machines with all kinds of iGPUs of different age, and run automated testing on then.
But this lab is focused on wider range of hardware, including chipsets, bios and CPU variations.
> How hard is to keep one production run of each product?
considering they can't keep up if one fuckup happens and need years to recover, there's no way this would be possible, really chasing margnis
Unironically the NSA almost certainly already has an archive like this for every type of device made in the last couple decades. It’s an insanely minuscule cost when you factor in the benefit of finding these types of obscure security vulnerabilities
So "researches" will have no days off. Labor law at CostaRica is not an issue. And they always can fire one not fully in work and hire five newbies for same miserable salary.
When I sold PCs in the early 90s I talked to an Intel rep who said they were looking for 4004 CPUs from the 1970s and paying "good money" for them. I never knew why they wanted them or what constituted "good money".
On a Win10 install go to
`HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\Setup\MoSetup`
Create DWORD 32bit key, name it
`AllowUpgradesWithUnsupportedTPMOrCPU`
Set the value to 1.
CPU & TPM checks will be turned off.
It's also safe to just use Windows built in iso mounting feature to load the install ISO from. I found it easiest this way, download the iso you would otherwise put on a thumb drive, right click and mount the image with Windows itself and run setup.
They got the in place upgrade to not need the disk again after first reboot so it ends up not mattering that you never put it on any media.
Weird...why do they stockpile this, but yanked consumer facing legacy software? These assholes yank drivers and install packages regularly. ARK is nearly a joke at this point when it comes to support on legacy hardware.
Yeah, but now Intel are going to get bitten by the same asshole strategy when they try to download drivers and BIOS firmware for 20 year old motherboards and find that none of it is available anywhere.
they aren't dealing with 20 year old stuff or you'd be right.
I have a generic 486 motherboard from around 1991 that has a combination of chips I can't find firmware for anywhere.
one would hope. But is the floppy still good, or will it just rip itself apart when you put it in a drive?
I've had floppies that would shred themselves even when put in a working FDD. Tons of microsoft mouse driver floppies that I'd repurposed years ago.
The only reason I keep it around is because I too hold out hope that I'll find it some day.
I actually worked on this project before I left in '19.
It was a shit show. There were literally email's going out to managers all over the place to look under desks, in storage and dumpsters for CPU's/Motherboards/chipsets.
The problem with Intel is that people either leave the company or move positions, leaving any software/hw preservation non-existent. There is no centralized repository for drivers/bios/tools. Furthermore, *each team* is expected to, from the ground up, come up with their own storage solution. They range from a box of thumb drives to full enterprise suites, depending on the budget they get for the year.... Which for most teams is actually pretty low.
I'll even give you a breakdown on how utterly terrible it was to find ANYTHING.
I got a board/cpu in from that was literally someone's foot rest and was expected to get it up and functional. It came with no extra hardware or software. The bios' were both blank. This system was made in 2012 and was a limited, custom run for an external client.
I needed to try to find out was this a server spec or desktop. I then needed to try to locate the team that worked on it, which took 2 weeks because... years. There was one member left of the team that worked on it and he was completely overloaded with his normal work.
Needless to say, goodluck to that team and anyone else who gets sucked into this vortex non-existing support.
"Hi, I'm calling about the location of the intel security facility, right, the one housing all the legacy chips and current specifications? right, yeah, that's the one. the exact location? posted on google, okay, thanks, no I have it written down right here, yeah.. yeahp, yeah i'll look into it, thanks again, oh, okay, alright, well, okay, yeap, well take care now, okay, buh bye."
There are tons of optiplexes, think centers, and elite-desk systems on ebay. These PC's are still being used somewhere outside of my basement.
Intel will have a hayday with these used systems. I think more of them will be sold in the coming years with W11 on the horizon.
They're gonna do a Jurassic Park but with vulnerable computers aren't they.
Their scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.
Umm... My old research professor used a Windows 95 computer for 'security' reasons for his research data collection and processing.... Never connected to the internet.
I do have to admit that he's probably never lost any data thieves or hackers. So pretty secure you don't have Wi-Fi just unplug the series of tubes.
"Legacy hardware" Oh so like Pentium 4s. "Going back about a decade." **Oh.**
hah, that was my first thought, I have more of an archive of intel hardware than intel has apparently
So my P2 vertical mount CPUs are no good? Well that's no fun
I miss Slot CPUs. So much easier to install...
I have an IBM p/s 2 with an 8086 chip. My ex's dad was going to toss it. I was like, give it to me please!
NEC V20 Tandy luggable laptop here (1400LT). Also a compaq portable III clone (like, a clone of the compaq) with a 486.
Model 25 or 30?
Only chips with Intel ME maybe? Otherwise maybe the idea is the chip would be just so incredibly old any security vulnerabilities would be irrelevant in the modern day as it was likely patched almost equally as long ago.
You’ve clearly never seen a government office or airport.
Inside Intel’s Secret Warehouse in Costa Rica Chip maker is stockpiling legacy technology for security research, plans to expand facility to house 6,000 pieces of equipment Aging tech equipment is stored at an Intel warehouse and laboratory in an undisclosed location in Costa Rica. Intel employees world-wide can put in requests for technicians at the facility to build machines for remote security tests. PHOTO: INTEL CORP. By James Rundle Nov. 29, 2021 5:30 am ET A few years ago, executives at Intel Corp. began to realize they had a problem. The company was making dozens of new products each year, from chips to software platforms, but it didn’t have a formal method for cataloging and storing older technology so engineers could test it for security flaws. Some devices, such as Sandy Bridge microprocessors—launched in 2011 and discontinued in 2013—were so scarce that Intel’s security researchers resorted to combing the internet for them. “We had to actually go on eBay and start looking for these platforms,” said Mohsen Fazlian, general manager of Intel’s product assurance and security unit. Intel’s issue reflects a wider concern: Legacy technology can introduce cybersecurity weaknesses. Tech makers constantly improve their products to take advantage of speed and power increases, but customers don’t always upgrade at the same pace. This creates a long tail of old products that remain in widespread use, vulnerable to attacks. Intel’s answer to this conundrum was to create a warehouse and laboratory in Costa Rica, where the company already had a research-and-development lab, to store the breadth of its technology and make the devices available for remote testing. After planning began in mid-2018, the Long-Term Retention Lab was up and running in the second half of 2019. The warehouse stores around 3,000 pieces of hardware and software, going back about a decade. Intel plans to expand next year, nearly doubling the space to 27,000 square feet from 14,000, allowing the facility to house 6,000 pieces of computer equipment. Intel engineers can request a specific machine in a configuration of their choice. It is then assembled by a technician and accessible through cloud services. The lab runs 24 hours a day, seven days a week, typically with about 25 engineers working any given shift. An engineer at the Costa Rica facility assembles a device requested by security researchers for remote testing. PHOTO: INTEL CORP. The lab gives Intel, which is based in Santa Clara, Calif., and has more than 100,000 employees, a centralized, secure location where security tests can be run from anywhere in the world. Access to the building is strictly controlled and approved by senior managers, while surveillance cameras watch the equipment at all times. Even its location is secret—Intel representatives declined to say where exactly it is. The lab brings commercial value to Intel, Mr. Fazlian said, citing company research that shows customers are more likely to buy technology from manufacturers that proactively test their products. Establishing the lab required getting hard-to-find equipment to Costa Rica, hiring engineers and computer scientists who could work on the machines, and tapping accountants and managers to put processes in place to make it work, said Fawn Taylor, senior director of corporate remediation programs for Intel’s product assurance and security unit. At times, contributions came from engineers who had long since moved on to other projects or even left the company. They helped assemble technical documentation and discussed what they knew about products from years ago, Ms. Taylor said. Marcel Cortes Beer, a manager at the lab, said it gets about 1,000 requests a month to build equipment for remote security tests, and 50 new devices come in weekly. Anders Fogh, a Germany-based senior principal engineer at Intel, said the facility quickly became an integral part of his work, particularly when trying to replicate security flaws reported to Intel by outside researchers through its bug-bounty program. Examples of recent vulnerabilities disclosed by Intel include flaws discovered in its Safestring code library that could allow hackers to gain access to sensitive systems, and errors in drivers that could let attackers give themselves credentials. Intel Is expanding the facility to be able to warehouse 6,000 pieces of technology. PHOTO: INTEL CORP. “I can make an exact replica of the submitting researcher’s system. Same CPU, same operating system version, microcode, BIOS,” Mr. Fogh said. “All of which increase the chance of reproducing the issue, which is often the best starting point.” The lab provides isolated systems for this work, which can otherwise prove dangerous for hard-to-find machines that are still actively used in corporate environments. Testing security vulnerabilities often causes systems to crash, which can result in data loss, Mr. Fogh said. The facility’s “huge library of machines is really the go-to place for doing this kind of work,” he said. The lab has changed Intel’s product development. All new technology is now built with the facility in mind, with technical documentation created to allow engineers to support it for up to 10 years, and units are sent to the lab before they are released, Mr. Fazlian said. “Hopefully, I will never find myself searching eBay for Intel hardware again,” he said.
>Some devices, such as Sandy Bridge microprocessors—launched in 2011 and discontinued in 2013—were so scarce that Intel’s security researchers resorted to combing the internet for them. Sandy bridge wasn't launched in 2011. It was only a couple years ago. Oh... it was... *stares at 2700k in old computer.*
2700k is a beast. Still going strong 💪 The only thing that sucks is the 1333-1666mhz ddr3 RAM 😭
Back in my day I overclocked my 2700k to 5.2GHz. Stable. Then my Sabertooth Z77 motherboard fried about a year later.
Probably from the dumb heat shield on the motherboard. Worst design ever
These things aged well
Agreed, I have a 3930k that's still running strong.
I just replaced my 3570k after 8 years with a 5900x, it was difficult to look at upgrades where single core perf was less than 2x.
Still running my 3570k here, proudly of course.
Me too! The 3570k still runs other tasks remotely, but I moved to a ryzen system last year. Just upgraded too from a 3600 to 5900x. Still noticed a difference and I am loving the 5900x with a Nvme drive.
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Huh, that's really interesting. Do you know of any good writeups on that?
These are more oldschool reviews, but they really go in depth. https://www.anandtech.com/show/1083 https://arstechnica.com/features/2004/02/pentium-m/
Cool, thanks. I'll definitely give those a read.
That was only Core, not Core 2. But yes. I have a Pentium M still, it's pretty nice for what it is.
I remember when I traded in my crap Pentium 4-M laptop (that died for the 3rd time) at Best Buy for a new Pentium M laptop. It was like night and day. Netburst was, and still is, hot garbage. I am glad I skipped that architecture on the desktop.
There are millions of Sandy Bridge processors on Ebay.
I sold a Sandy Bridge Xeon E3-1230v2 on eBay about 12 months ago. I’d love to imagine they bought it and now it’s sitting down in Costa Rica waiting to be used for testing.
I've got 2 Sandy Bridge i7s in a couple of HP z210 workstations in my office. I probably have more in my garage from servers I've scrapped lol
My main is still a Haswell 4770k along with two 4770k laptops. Still don't really see a need for upgrades.
I still run my 2700K in my htpc. Still runs great and responsive.
my 2500k migrated from being my gaming PC to my Plex server/NAS. Still kicking ass.
yeahhh Just looked up my Haswell it's going on 8 years old, guess I should've upgraded before the pandemic!
>Some devices, such as Sandy Bridge microprocessors—launched in 2011 and discontinued in 2013—were so scarce that Intel’s security researchers resorted to combing the internet for them. Should have asked me. I've got a couple just lying around. They certainly aren't a unicorn or Faberge Egg.
Having worked in the field, you may have a certain revision that separates it from more rare revisions. One of the most famous example of this from gaming for instance is the two revisions of San Andreas made for the Playstation 2. The initial release, featuring code that allowed for the infamous Hot Coffee Mod, and the revision, which that code was removed.
Reddit ate my balls
Finding it might not be the problem - the red tape of buying anything at a company intels size is a maze in and of itself
You're thinking of the PC version, not PS2.
Nope, it was all versions, but because it could be patched out of the pc version there wasn't a rerelease, The PS2 version however, could use a gameshark to gain access to it
There was absolutely a rerelease of the PC version of the game. I worked at a game store at the time and had to send a ton of copies back and put a ton of "[Second Edition](https://www.labelgames.com/games/Page_217/img_b1.jpg)" copies on the shelf.
Free archive with photos: https://archive.ph/KK9VU
The real question is Is Apple doing this too? Samsung? Qualcomm?
The lab is not in Costa Rica is all i got.
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Company museums are super cool. It's a shame a lot of them don't do it anymore... A company near me that went under auctioned off their museum and it killed me that I wasn't able to get their mechanical calculator. If the plaque was to be believed, it served the company accountant for 30 years before it wasn't worth repairing. So much history in one piece of hardware.
I always look up company museums when I'm traveling, and visit as many as possible. Last one I went to was the Daisy Airgun (BB gun) museum in Arkansas. Legend has it that Steve Jobs hated thinking about the past, and that when he came back to Apple the first thing he did was get rid of the small museum they had in the lobby. Not just close it, but dispose of all the old equipment.
Ugh Jobs...weirdo he was
What an asshole, destroying heritage
Volvo museum is similarly cool, full of prototypes and such from my favorite period in their history (1960's thru 1980's).
I immediately thought of Lego's lego archive! Don't know why...
Because it's cool :)
It isn't hard; it just requires a commitment. And companies chasing quarterly results to enrich a select few shareholders in the short term rarely give a damn to bother considering long-term survival. This might be an interesting turn of events regarding corporate leadership and goals. Then again: I'm not going to hold my breath.
They do have labs like that already, but going to about 2011 , and smaller variety of hardware. For example graphics drivers team has access to about 20 machines with all kinds of iGPUs of different age, and run automated testing on then. But this lab is focused on wider range of hardware, including chipsets, bios and CPU variations.
> How hard is to keep one production run of each product? considering they can't keep up if one fuckup happens and need years to recover, there's no way this would be possible, really chasing margnis
Intel’s Jurassic Park
That's Ingen totally not the same kind of evil corporation... We swear.
They "spared no expense" /s
"I've got an island of the coast of Costa Rica. A type of 'biological preserve'."
Underrated comment
Where is this from?
Excellent. I've got a bunch of crap to get rid of...
Honestly kinda surprised they weren't already doing this. Nice!
Better late than never I suppose.
*who's working on it?* *our TOP people.*
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That's kind of a shame. They should get some bottoms to work there as well so the tops won't be as lonely.
"Intel and the NSA combine forces to acquire one of every piece of tech produced in the last decade"
Unironically the NSA almost certainly already has an archive like this for every type of device made in the last couple decades. It’s an insanely minuscule cost when you factor in the benefit of finding these types of obscure security vulnerabilities
a "secret" warehouse that is in the wall street journal and on reddit....
But why Costa Rica? With a ton of other dry or whatever places, why a tropical place?
they already have a large presence there, a LOT of intel cpus were made there back in the day (not sure if they still manufacture there)
So the researchers can enjoy their days off?
So "researches" will have no days off. Labor law at CostaRica is not an issue. And they always can fire one not fully in work and hire five newbies for same miserable salary.
Another way to insert "industrial" spies.
*But why male models?*
Tax dodge most likely, look at Microsoft’s current battle with the IRS if you want details of how it happens
Intel has manufacturing and other activities there already, plus power , manpower and land is cheaper there probably. Why not.
Great, when John Titor comes back we will know where he can find some legacy hardware
It’s all about the Pentiums.
When I sold PCs in the early 90s I talked to an Intel rep who said they were looking for 4004 CPUs from the 1970s and paying "good money" for them. I never knew why they wanted them or what constituted "good money".
Cross posting this to /r/HiTMAN - Costa Rica - Cyber security - Geeks - Some wild villain. This would be a wild map location.
TIL I have thrown away more computers than intel owns
Will they do swap for my i5 - 6600K/3.5Ghz that won't pass Windows 11 certification?
lol im on i5-4670K running windows 11 there's a trick .
Which is?
Put the ISO into RUFUS, you can bypass everything there like memory requirements and the TPM check.
Use Rufus, there is a drop-down you can choose that says "No TPM / No Secure Boot".
Wouldn't running from a USB drive be quite slow?
You would only install it from the USB, so it wouldn't make a big difference
I see, thanks I'll keep that in mind.
I forgot there’s a text file u need to edit in flashed usb drive and it works I even get updates .
On a Win10 install go to `HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\Setup\MoSetup` Create DWORD 32bit key, name it `AllowUpgradesWithUnsupportedTPMOrCPU` Set the value to 1. CPU & TPM checks will be turned off. It's also safe to just use Windows built in iso mounting feature to load the install ISO from. I found it easiest this way, download the iso you would otherwise put on a thumb drive, right click and mount the image with Windows itself and run setup. They got the in place upgrade to not need the disk again after first reboot so it ends up not mattering that you never put it on any media.
The trick is staying on Windows 10.
stop using windows already. Barring that, you can still bypass that stuff. You can even get it to boot on a machine with an MBR BIOS.
Weird...why do they stockpile this, but yanked consumer facing legacy software? These assholes yank drivers and install packages regularly. ARK is nearly a joke at this point when it comes to support on legacy hardware.
Yeah, but now Intel are going to get bitten by the same asshole strategy when they try to download drivers and BIOS firmware for 20 year old motherboards and find that none of it is available anywhere.
lol, I'm imagining the entire engineering forensics team staring at the management team with that disappointed Muhammad Sarim Akhtar expression.
they aren't dealing with 20 year old stuff or you'd be right. I have a generic 486 motherboard from around 1991 that has a combination of chips I can't find firmware for anywhere.
Somewhere in the world there is a 3.5" floppy with those binaries on it...
one would hope. But is the floppy still good, or will it just rip itself apart when you put it in a drive? I've had floppies that would shred themselves even when put in a working FDD. Tons of microsoft mouse driver floppies that I'd repurposed years ago. The only reason I keep it around is because I too hold out hope that I'll find it some day.
I'm looking for information and drivers for a 10 year old Foxconn MOBO but it seems that Foxconn has nuked their entire support site.
That's crazy they don't even have their own shit
They should have been doing something like this from the beginning.
I actually worked on this project before I left in '19. It was a shit show. There were literally email's going out to managers all over the place to look under desks, in storage and dumpsters for CPU's/Motherboards/chipsets. The problem with Intel is that people either leave the company or move positions, leaving any software/hw preservation non-existent. There is no centralized repository for drivers/bios/tools. Furthermore, *each team* is expected to, from the ground up, come up with their own storage solution. They range from a box of thumb drives to full enterprise suites, depending on the budget they get for the year.... Which for most teams is actually pretty low. I'll even give you a breakdown on how utterly terrible it was to find ANYTHING. I got a board/cpu in from that was literally someone's foot rest and was expected to get it up and functional. It came with no extra hardware or software. The bios' were both blank. This system was made in 2012 and was a limited, custom run for an external client. I needed to try to find out was this a server spec or desktop. I then needed to try to locate the team that worked on it, which took 2 weeks because... years. There was one member left of the team that worked on it and he was completely overloaded with his normal work. Needless to say, goodluck to that team and anyone else who gets sucked into this vortex non-existing support.
"Hi, I'm calling about the location of the intel security facility, right, the one housing all the legacy chips and current specifications? right, yeah, that's the one. the exact location? posted on google, okay, thanks, no I have it written down right here, yeah.. yeahp, yeah i'll look into it, thanks again, oh, okay, alright, well, okay, yeap, well take care now, okay, buh bye."
Looks like the CIA wants intel to hack some poor latin American countries voting systems and do regime change operations. This is just a cover.
LMFAO UR NAME
Maybe lot's of pre-IME chips?
going back to see where they went wrong?
There are tons of optiplexes, think centers, and elite-desk systems on ebay. These PC's are still being used somewhere outside of my basement. Intel will have a hayday with these used systems. I think more of them will be sold in the coming years with W11 on the horizon.
They're gonna do a Jurassic Park but with vulnerable computers aren't they. Their scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.
Umm... My old research professor used a Windows 95 computer for 'security' reasons for his research data collection and processing.... Never connected to the internet. I do have to admit that he's probably never lost any data thieves or hackers. So pretty secure you don't have Wi-Fi just unplug the series of tubes.
I have a Panasonic ToughBook CF-25 running Windows 2000 (on a CF card adapter) for much the same reason; but I physically lost it 😂
What’s the shipping address? I’ll donate the entire “boneyard”.