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Disabling Intel’s backdoors on modern laptops
(hackaday.com)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
It's a microcontroller that runs within Intel based systems allowing full control access at the processor level. It runs outside of your processor and any time the system is plugged in or is on battery. It doesn't require the main processor up for it to be accessible. More info on it on [wikipedia]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Management_Engine).
AMD's equivalent is called AMD Secure Technology.