Could easily replace some people and significantly improve things.

See that’s your problem you used common sense

Must be nice for them fitting 100% into the system.

I like your analogy but from my perspective it isn’t fitting.

It would be more like the postal service opening your letters.

Now imagine a rapist taking over your country.

Naive. There must be more practical methods to counter child abuse. For example always holding people accountable when they are known to hurt children would be a good start.

Like install windows?

So what exactly is going on over there?

Can you use your own devices?

You’d have to disable IME for Intel or the equivalent for AMD and then reinstall the OS.

However you might simply want to run some rootkit detecting tools, check what programs and drivers you have installed and look up each one, and browser extensions.

Maybe dual boot into Linux

Well if it’s anything like the IME then you can disable it on a hardware level, and an OS wouldn’t have any control over it.

I’m no expert in the matter, I learned it from a def con-like talk.

I’m no expert in the matter however this is what I understand from it.

Chips like the one in your debit card are fully fledged computers and do run software. When you plug it into something it receives power and interfaces with the other system. That’s why it is secure, because like a pc it can use encryption etc.

Come to think of it, they must also be able to run with the low power provided by near field transmission, aka contactless payment.

Anyhoots the same kinda chip is on a simcard.

As far as I understand it they run a more limited version of Java, has full access to your hardware including being able to read all memory, and being updatable remotely.

You might also be interested to know that modern hardware commonly has such secondary computers with full access built in. Take the intel management engine for example, which is part of every modern intel cpu. However there are privacy oriented companies that disable these.

The real question is who has access to these things and what are their interests. It might not necessarily be a malevolent actor. It’s one of the challenges of our time to answer questions related to these topics.

Afaik simcards run a simplified version of Java that has full hardware access and can be updated remotely. I don’t see how it can possibly get any worse than that.