• perestroika@lemm.ee
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    13 hours ago

    The first and central provision of the bill is the requirement for tracking technology to be embedded in any high-end processor module or device that falls under the U.S. export restrictions.

    As a coder with some hardware awareness, I find the concept laughable.

    How does he think they (read: the Taiwanese, if they are willing to) would go about doing it?

    Add a GPS receiver onto every GPU? Add an inertial navigation module to every GPU? Add a radio to every GPU? :D

    The poor politician needs a technically competent advisor forced on him. To make him aware (preferably in the most blunt way) of real possibilities in the real world.

    In the real world, you can prevent a chip from knowing where it’s running and you can’t add random shit onto a chip, and if someone does, you can stop buying bugged hardware or prevent that random addition from getting a reading.

    • Rin@lemm.ee
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      3 hours ago

      Taiwanese

      AMD & Nvidia are American companies, for better or worse. The Taiwanese just make the chips, they don’t actually decide what they look like…

      Add a GPS receiver onto every GPU? Add an inertial navigation module to every GPU? Add a radio to every GPU? :D

      if it’s possible, which I agree with you, is highly unlikely, i’d assume it’d be something like html canvas fingerprinting. Rather than adding more stuff to the gpu, the gpu could be made to generate a specific fingerprint. I recon it’d be a very easy task for the hardware vendors.

      Heck, there might be other ways we don’t even know yet, kinda like the glowy ethernet port. I could see that working very easily in conjunction to the GPU.

      In the real world, you can prevent a chip from knowing where it’s running and you can’t add random shit onto a chip, and if someone does, you can stop buying bugged hardware or prevent that random addition from getting a reading.

      please read up on intel management engine and amd’s equivelent. That shit runs on your system in ring minus 3. Oh yeah, ARM also has something similar.

      China is also making it’s own x86 cpus, but I bet they’re laced with more spyware than the above.

      You honestly have virtually 0 other cpu options. Everything is bugged… Who would you buy from in this case? It’s virtually unavoidable :/

      • Rin@lemm.ee
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        2 hours ago

        Also, don’t get me started on speculative execution vulns…