If politicians had advisors then how would they justify doing the dumb shit their owners want them to, then they can’t plead ignorance.
Comment on U.S. inks bill to force geo-tracking tech for high-end gaming and AI GPUs
perestroika@lemm.ee 1 week 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 notion 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.
PresidentCamacho@lemm.ee 1 week ago
BigDanishGuy@sh.itjust.works 1 week ago
How about locking all the advanced functions behind a hardware lock that requires an online key to unlock? Besides getting an IP address for geolocation, this approach would enable manufacturers to put a subscription on the features as well. Require users to provide a government issued ID that matches the name on the credit card used.
VPN! I hear you cry. But the driver is already running pretty close to the hardware, so good luck hiding a VPN client.
So while you can’t guarantee a street address accuracy, you can get country and overall regional subdivision.
perestroika@lemm.ee 1 week ago
But who would buy such hardware? :)
Rin@lemm.ee 1 week ago
AMD & Nvidia are American companies, for better or worse. The Taiwanese just make the chips, they don’t actually decide what they look like…
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.
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 :/
perestroika@lemm.ee 1 week ago
I’m already familiar with it. On the systems I buy and intall, if they are Intel based, ME gets disabled.
Since this is more relevant to me (numerically, most of the systems that I install are Raspberry Pi based robots), I’m happy to announce that TrustZone is not supported on Pi 4 (I haven’t checked about other models). I haven’t tested, however - don’t trust my word.
From the Raspberry Pi Foundation, who are doubtless ordering silicon from TSMC and various other services from other companies. If they didn’t exist, I would likely fall back on RockChip based products from China.
Rin@lemm.ee 1 week ago
I didn’t know you could disable it. I figured it was very impractical or near impossible to do. how did you do it?
I’m not going to lie, raspberry pis are a good candidate for a desktop but they’re still very underpowered compared to modern computers. That’s my only critcism. But yes, i’m not sure if there’s any spookware on any of the raspberry pis.
perestroika@lemm.ee 1 week ago
In the BIOS options of that specific server (nothing fancy, a generic Dell with some Xeon processor) the option to enable/disable ME was just plainly offered. Chipset features > Intel AMT > disable (or something similar, my memory is a bit fuzzy). I researched the option, got worried about the outcomes if someone learned to exploit it, and made it a policy of turning it off. It was about 2 years ago.
Rin@lemm.ee 1 week ago
Also, don’t get me started on speculative execution vulns…