Comment on Possible AMD chips that were spychip-free as late as 2016

Mnem667@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

• Peasley@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

  i assume they mean this: en.wikipedia.org/…/AMD_Platform_Security_Processo…

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  • Mnem667@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    Yeah. I am just curious about the implications. There’s been a couple of vulnerabilities reported and patches, but anything that would indicate “spy chip”? I would normally assume some security researcher would have said something by now.

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    • hexagonwin@lemmy.today ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

      (afaik) it has the privilege to operate as a backdoor transparent from the os because it operates on low level like intel me

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• evenwicht@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

  “Spy chip” is not a claim. It’s nomenclature. I am referring to the PSP. You don’t have to call it a “spy chip” if you don’t want. You can call it “friendly alternate control mechanism”, or “helpful nanny”, if you want.

  So from there, what is a credible source for language, when the language is English? It’s not like Academy Français, which officially recrognizes words in the French language. English is more chaotic. If a lot of people are using a word or phrase, journalists will use it. If journalists are using a word frequently, maybe Oxford dictionary or Marriam Webster will add it to their dictionary. If you are American, you may not consider Oxford dictionary credible. And if you are British, you may not consider Webster’s dictionary credible.

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  • Mnem667@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    Well, my apologies for not being hip to the lingo. I appreciate your enthusiasm, but damn. I just wanted to know if there was some nefarious thing about the PSP that I had not read about yet.
    Instead I get a a diatribe of self indulgent sarcasm.
    So I suppose the answer is “no”. It’s just a scary black box that could potentially be a source of some data collection or used as a backdoor, but no one in the last 8 years has published any such papers.
    Now I am aware, and my curiosity is sated.

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    • evenwicht@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

      The official reason for the intel ME (the intel version of AMD’s PSP which hit in 2008) is so corporations could do some remote management ops on their corporate laptops, and so malware is hindered if it tries to insert itself into the bootstrap and so employees cannot install their own OS or whatever. Of course there is nothing controversial about those scenarios. Something like 99% of intel’s clientel is corporate. The individual human beings who buy personal computers for their own non-business use are in the 1% that mean nothing to intel. So of course their needs can be neglected. Only the corporate consumer matters to the bottom line.

      Corporations don’t give a shit about closed-source software. To them, accountability is paramount. And they have that. If the closed-source software does something nasty to them, managers can point fingers. Corporate lawyers can sue. If some shitty proprietary closed-source software is used against some individual, no one gives a shit. Hence why some of us like our FOSS. Transparency and control is more important than accountability to individual human beings. I don’t want some closed-source garbage deciding at the hand of some remote corporation what bootstrap is “authorized”. If you run MS Windows, none of this matters to you.

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      • gheesh@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

        Regarding ongoing efforts on laptops with POWER CPU: www.powerpc-notebook.org/en/

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