Intel vPro SBA and Anti-Theft: Patrick on Tom’s Hardware

Want to take a look at the Ivy Bridge generation vPro, Small Business Advantage (SBA) and Anti-Theft? Check out my latest guest post on Tom’s Hardware this morning. As some may recall, Tom’s Published another Intel vPro article around this time last year. This time, I looked at the incremental improvement of the newest generation of Ivy Bridge based Intel vPro. This generation of Intel vPro brings things like portrait display and triple display to remote administration. I also looked at the new Small Business Advantage offering, which I hope will one day have some Intel vPro features. Finally, I walked through Intel Anti-Theft technology which allows one to potentially secure and locate a wayward laptop. A fun piece to write but now back to servers and workstations! If and when I do another, I may try doing something like the Intel Xeon 2U server piece.

I did want to add two things. First, as I mention in the article, and a point that will be seen here next week, I do wish Intel standardized security features a bit more. Second, a commenter on Tom’s mentioned a Semi Accurate piece on the potential security risks involved by having Intel management engines enabled. It makes sense that any time there is an additional layer of security or management, that that layer can be a vulnerability.

Overall it has been a bit rough doing a large piece for Tom’s while at the same time maintaining and growing this site like crazy. Just to give you an idea, the site has grown to about double its previous traffic over the past nine months and appears to have broken into the top 50,000 sites in the US and 100,000 worldwide just this week! Server (OK Amazon EC2 infrastructure) upgrades will be coming shortly. Thanks for making that possible.

If you have thoughts for what my next guest post should be, feel free to let me know.