Intel Wants To Charge $50 To Unlock Your CPU's Full Capabilities

MBCook writes "Turnkey CPU upgrades aren't just for mainframes anymore. According to Engadget, OEMs (including Gateway) are selling computers with the Intel Pentium G6951, which can have extra cache and hyper-threading enabled through a $50 software unlock called Intel Upgrade Service."

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Re:Step right up, place your bets

[blai]

Bollocks! Intel has Intel Genuine Advantage installed on the CPU!!

Re:I hope this doesn't fly ...

[Anonymous Coward]

That sounds an awful like circumventing a digital rights management technology. Remember, you didn't buy a CPU, you bought a /license/ to use the CPU.

Re:Yeah, That'll Last

[BlkRb0t]

Finally, we can pirate hardware.

Intel Fanboys

[r6_jason]

I wonder if the Intel Fanboys have udders, because Intel sure is trying to milk them.

Re:Similar experience at bestbuy

[Kitkoan]

Fifteen enormous cocks raping every orifice in your body.

I couldn't describe hiring the geeksquad any better then that.

Ive seen this somewhere....

[metalmaster]

Salesman: Thank you sir. Thats all the paperwork. Here are the keys to your brand new Toyota Camry. Oh wait, there's just one more caveat. We'll need you to pay the "accelerator calibration" fee

Joe: Nah, i'll take my chances.

The rest is history...

Re:Yeah, That'll Last

[Ethanol-fueled]

No, a one-time pad is a butterfly-shaped absorbant sheet of cotton and/or synthetic fiber. It goes where no Slashdotter has gone before.

Re:What's next, Windows only CPUs?

[tomz16]

EXACTLY! I'm new at this stuff too, and I think you are on to something. You just have to boolean the bit that controls the memory hash function pointer. Then you can probably just decrypt the parity bit endian stack!

Re:I hope this doesn't fly ...

[MaskedSlacker]

Fuck em?

Re:I'm all for it

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure, you will probably just have to short circuit two parts of the chip to set the bit to unlock it. All you have to do is remove the cpu case (Carefully!) and connect line 259 and 2051 with your 40nm probes. Don't push to hard or you will damage the chip.

There is no such thing as absolute security. But this is not necessarily a case where the value you get by hacking the device ougtweights the cost of doing so.
Absolute security is never worth the effort. Enough security is probably what you want and for that even obscurity will do the trick sometimes.