• unix_joe@lemmy.sdf.org
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    1 year ago

    IBM ThinkPads could be reset if you beamed a certain radio frequency directly at the BIOS chip. It was documented in the user guide as a feature if you were ever locked out, or the system was no longer booting. It’s been 20 years but I doubt that feature ever went away.

    • JohannesOliver@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      For a while vendors tried to lock down the BIOS pretty hard. Dell might still, I remember having to call and get assistance when a password was forgotten and they had to generate a backdoor key of some sort. Maybe that is less of a thing now that Bitlocker is widely used on corporate laptops and it is sensitive to tampering.