Well, heck-- that didn't take long. Remember all the controversy over Intel's new Pentium III? Basically, several privacy advocates are concerned about a new feature that Intel added to the processor, which functions as a software-readable serial number. Intel's vision for this is basically to function similarly to a "cookie" that you might receive from a given web site, which allows the site in question to identify you when you return and to remember your name, user preferences, and all that good stuff. Sites that perform e-commerce functions and the like are probably very excited about this Pentium III serial number. Of course, when you get a cookie from a web site, you can delete it-- and, in fact, you can simply refuse to accept it at all. The serial number in the Pentium III, however, has been referred to as a "nuclear cookie" because it's always there and it has the potential to eliminate the anonymity of the Internet-- it's like surfing the web with a bar code tattooed on your forehead.

So, of course, a bunch of privacy advocates threatened a boycott and various other nasty things, until Intel caved and announced that the chip would be shipped with the serial number module in the "off" position. End users would be able to decide whether or not they wanted the feature active, and they would be able to turn it on or off as necessary, with a restart of the system required for the change to take effect. Sounds pretty good. Unfortunately, in a plot twist that a semi-comatose lemur could see coming from about three miles away, someone's already figured out how to read the serial number even when the user thinks it's off. According to an article at c't Magazine (a big German guts-level computer electronics publication), their own chip specialist came up with a piece of software that switches the feature on, immediately, without a restart and without the user's knowledge.

Intel's response was basically, "Oops!" And their solution isn't to change the chip, of course, since it's now shipping and they're in the middle of spending a ridiculous amount of advertising money to promote it. Instead, they state that "PC manufacturers are encouraged to integrate the configuration of the switching into the BIOS," which would prevent any simple switching on of the chip's serial number function by a piece of software. Unfortunately, that also means that the end user is going to have to get down and dirty with the BIOS of his/her machine to enable and disable the serial number, which is not something that your average user is going to want to do-- and that's why Intel opposed that method in the first place. And, as c't points out, this new strategy is far from foolproof, anyway, since the setting read from the BIOS will still have to be held in memory. How long will it take for someone to hack that, too, we wonder? (Well, what time is it now?)