Finally my Intel stock will rise. This will definitely force Nvidia GPU to be manufactured in the US with always on DRM.
Laughs in Faraday.
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.
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.
If politicians had advisors then how would they justify doing the dumb shit their owners want them to, then they can’t plead ignorance.
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 :/
please read up on intel management engine
I’m already familiar with it. On the systems I buy and intall, if they are Intel based, ME gets disabled since I haven’t found a reasonable use for it.
Oh yeah, ARM also has something similar.
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.
Who would you buy from in this case?
From the Raspberry Pi Foundation, who are doubtless ordering silicon from TSMC for the Pico series and ready-made CPUs for their bigger products, and various other services from other companies. If they didn’t exist, I would likely fall back on RockChip based products from China.
https://www.cryptomuseum.com/covert/bugs/nsaant/firewalk/index.htm
Wow. :) Neat trick. (Would be revealed in competent hands, though. Snap an X-ray photo and find excess electronics in the socket.)
However, a radio transceiver is an extremely poor candidate for embedding on a chip. It’s good for bugging boards, not chips.
ME gets disabled
I didn’t know you could disable it. I figured it was very impractical or near impossible to do. how did you do it?
Raspberry Pi Foundation
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.
how did you do it?
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 (active management technology) > 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.
P.S.
I’m sure there exist tools for the really security-conscious folks to verify whether ME has become disabled, but I was installing a boring warehouse system, so I didn’t check.
Also, don’t get me started on speculative execution vulns…
Why do gpus need geo tracking? They’re usually pretty stationary right?
It’s about not letting them be used in China, and any other future enemy countries.
Because China supposedly used Nvidia cards to train DeepSeek, which blew all of the US AI out of the water. And apparently that raised some eyebrows, because Nvidia wasn’t supposed to be selling to China (free market, right?). Since China was eating big tech’s lunch, they cried to republicans (and gave them a bunch of reelection money) and now we have this bill. The point is to be able to remotely disable cards if they’re outside of their sale region.
Such a well-conceived feature could never possibly be abused for unintended purposes.
Senator Tom Cotton’s legislation seeks to “prevent advanced
AmericanTAIWANESE chips from falling into the hands of adversaries like Communist China.”FTFY
Nvidia, Intel, and AMD are all American companies. Yes, their GPUs are manufactured by TSMC in Taiwan but they just follow the designs given to them. The layout of these GPUs and the architecture of the chips are all designed and controlled by these American corporations.
So why are they made in Taiwan then? Why not make them in america?
And how do they plan to do this? even if they add (GPS) tracking hardware the Chinese will just cut the connection to the Antenna and the GPU is gone. If they do it in software (like driver) it will just be patched out.
Sure, but now a new company selling Geo tracking shit for GPUs is making billions per year. Problem solved!
How is this even legal? I am not even american nor living there, so how would the US be allowed to operate massive and unregulated surveillance through GPUs ?
The US is becoming worse than those they call villain.
How is this even legal?
That’s the neat part, if it isn’t no one will enforce it or protect you.
The US has very low engagement of its voters, so even things that are illegal are starting to happen regularly.
It’s the same as so many countries, once a few rich guys get into power, as long as the guys with guns will take their money, it doesn’t really matter what want, the government gets captured and corrupted.
There’s ways to fight it but it’s a slog. I might give up. It’s not my job to fix it, fixing things doesn’t pay.
Isn’t it the reason for donald? Only like 60% vote, so the “stupid 30%” of the population can be used to grab the power seat?
Basically yes. That’s why Fox News is such an important instrument to the movement. They get their voters primed up and angry all year. They came out and voted against trans people in bathrooms and they are okay to suffer if that is achieved
If you’re in Europe I’m pretty sure those chips would violate the hell out of the GDPR and as such can’t be sold there.
Even then, as posted in a different too level comment, this is just too easy to fake, or block.
It’s an idiot law for idiots
Yeah that is fun and all but I can at least guarantee you that that shit won’t fly in Europe, and likely neither in Canada. I can only imagine other countries will be penning their own laws outlawing this.
So tech giants then have the option to either go for separate chipsets for those countries or stip selling there.
Also, how do you want to implement this? Have the GPU request GPS data from the computer? That won’t be hard to forgr., but let’s say you ge that, then what?
You need to send that info somewhere or it’ll be useless. How? Over the Internet? Ahw, my firewall told you to go fuck yourself. Over its own GPS line? A little bit of aluminum foil can do miracles.
So what are you going to do then? Require an active internet connection for your GPU to work? Bwhahahahha. Have you seen gamers responses to games that require active internet connections to play? You won’t sell shit.
This is again a law designed by absolutely.emoty headed idiots tompleae some other empty headed idiots.
Between this, the tarrifs and the brain drain, why would any manufacturers consider operating in the US anymore?
They’ll still want access to Americans coz there are profits to be had, and they can price gouge under a fascist kleptocracy many orders of magnitude harder than elsewhere.
What they don’t understand is that the fascist leadership will backstab many/most of them eventually, especially if they possess any moral fiber whatsoever. Luckily for them, capitalism has already purged corporate leadership of morality and ethics.
But if we don’t have as much money due to increased prices on life essentials and assistance cuts, how are we supposed to buy all these things? Bad logic on their part, if this is their approach.
There is no bottom. They’ll continue crushing the working class all the way to slavery and feudalism.
Stop expecting logic. MAGA and fascism is a severely psychotic mental illness that is empirically a dead end. A death cult.
schizo
Nah you pretty much established the death cult in 2020. The first hundred days of this in administration you went about doing the most harm to the world that you possibly could in order to save a couple pennies to give back to rich people. The Republican Party is a death cult. Everyone obsessed with some nuanced return to slavery, ending healthcare, and poisoning everything you can. For a smol profitorino
i wish you were wrong so fuckin bad :(
There’s no real push for that to happen. This is about crashing an economy, stealing wealth and creating a a massive almost slave labor class at the bottom.
So it’s about communism? No the other guys wanted that.
Communism is exactly the opposite of that. You’re thinking of late stage capitalism.
Stealing wealth and creating a slave class is what happens in communism. Every. Single. Time.
Remember the slaves with 12+ public holidays a year, 20+ vacation days, free healthcare, free education, free child care and price controls for rent and food and no billionaires and job security?
Where?
East Germany and pretty much all other eastern block countries till ~1990.
Yea I’ll share some down votes. I was laughing because the president was just threatening an American company yesterday, telling it how to operate. Telling it where to operate. Like isn’t this what they screeched legendary communist Obama would do? We just switched to a centralized planned economy over night. Welcome to USSR2
Sounds like US capitalism in 2025… tax the poor (slave class) to give more money to the rich.
Somebody needs to learn to use Wikipedia.
Someone needs to learn not to blindly believe Wikipedia.
Which communist countries/states is this not the case btw?
Somebody needs to learn not to blindly believe a century of capitalist propaganda. At least Wikipedia cites sources.
You made the claim. You said every single time. Citation required.
Which other guys? The couple thousand people who voted third party because they didn’t view Harris as an acceptable compromise between fascism and humanity?
Why would any manufacturer want access to the biggest market in the world? Hmmm let me think about that……
Capitalism is a system of whores. And there’s nothing wrong with whores, but a whore is a whore. Good luck. It’s going to be like trying to hold a bar of soap that’s slipping out of your hands. You can keep grabbing at it, but it’s just going to keep slipping. I just recall when America leaked nuclear secrets because soldiers were using a private private flashcard program and they forgot to check mark the box that said private. And so they ended up leaking all these secrets all over the internet. And let’s not forget. The open source information that was used from some snot-nosed person on an osint account on twitter for targeting a supposed underground base, that cost the lives of innocent civilians via the Palantir and Peter Thiel’s stupid AI. They did not get an underground base. They just wasted millions of dollars on something that wasn’t there.
It’s like their plans are dystopic and terrifying, but they’re not going to be able to implement them in a way that’s worth a damn. And also, their actual product that they produce is so stupid that it’s even more terrifying than the original idea. It’s just straight up fucking madness. It’s like, look mom, no hands. Then you fall off the goddamn bike and you’re sitting there crying.
This still remains. There is so much corruption and greed in this country that we can’t even function as an empire. We can’t even get a chip’s factory figured out. We don’t make shit. Everybody in this country is so goddamn lazy and stupid. I can’t even find a noble cause because I feel like I’m just enabling stupid people. I’m sure we just operate off of bare necessities. Like the need to just stay alive one more day. But it gets to the point where it’s like, what’s the fucking point? This country is nonsensical. It’s absurd. It’s laughable. It’s weak. It’s limp dicked. And this happened way before Joe Biden or Trump. This has been a continuation ever since I’ve been alive for 40 fucking dumb ass years.
What the fuck is your metaphor with whores all about??
Yeah right, a couple of my good friends used to be sex workers so
but a whore is a whore
just seems ignorant and misogynist to me.
A sex worker can be a honest whore. Nothing wrong with being a honest whore.
Now being a sales weasel and making backroom deals, that’s a lying whore.
Your comment feels like “a honest black person can be a good nigga, no wrong with that, but if hes not nice he’s a ***** nigga” IDK you just sound bad as hell.
It’s probably the word ‘whore’. Similar to ‘cunt’, it hits a little different from ‘prostitute’ or ‘pussy’.
Culturally, ‘whore’ is an acceptable word for me to use. Any permutation of the N word is not.
I’ve spent a fair amount of time among drag queens(not necessarily sex workers but there is overlap), strippers, prostitutes and crack whores. Most of them are decent folks in hard times. It is rare that people willingly choose sex work, instead, it’s usually desperation and addiction. A desperate population does desperate things like petty crime.
Everything you say feels A-ok (except you americans have a weird way forbidding words) but I think you missed my point. Whore is a way more loaded word than cunt, and in many ways, it’s not just an insult but also misogynist and so on, if used as an insult. So you can throw it around when it isn’t (my little cookie whore! or something I guess) but you can’t balance that off with the insult part, because it’s just too raw and bad IMO.
Sorry for the word salad!
Whore isn’t really gendered? There are more female whores than male whores in sex work but there are more male whores in politics than female. It is an insult about submission and service with a sexual connotation.
I think you’re seeing a difference in cultural weighting of common profanity. I’m from the deep south of the US.
I’m used to cunt being considered more offensive than whore. Whore is a milder obscenity than fuck, shit, or cunt. It is similar to slut, dick, or piss.
Its just a phrase about managing expectations. You can replace whore with literally any profession and its the same message.
Ah yes let’s try to stifle Chinese innovation by … checks notes … expanding our surveillance state. Usually we are the ones calling China a surveillance state, but it’s fine(it’s not) once we do it.
You joke, but western governments regularly pull the “our surveillance is good because we aren’t an authoritarian regime” trope.
There is nothing more American than hipocracy my friend
Yeah. All the FUD about Huawei really solidified in my mind how stupid the average internet user is these days.
It’s like, everything they were bitching about has already been confirmed to be happening with US companies thanks to PRISM and the Snowden leaks.
This is absolutely insane and no one will want to buy those GPUs.
Unless, of course, they’re in all the GPUs that people want.
…It’s unfortunately more likely that the majority of people won’t notice or care, though.
Yeah if you think most people are going to care or even know about this, you haven’t been paying attention to the last 20 years.
Have some faith bud.
Faith in what? The unending march to tech dystopia?
Just like nobody is buying the current generation because it’s insane, right?
Oh Senator Know-Nothing…
What are you going to do about firewalls and air-gapped networks? JFK you stupid asshole… GTFO
Next up GPUs require always-on connections and Nvidia requires a monthly subscription to pay for that.
For just $19.99 a month you can have us track your GPU*, or choose the premium ad-free upgrade for just $149.99 a months, so you can enjoy your favorite games without ad breakes.
^^^* ^^^failure ^^^to ^^^comply ^^^will ^^^be ^^^punished ^^^by ^^^deportation
Don’t give them any ideas.
Senator Tom Cotton
Ah. Yeah, that tracks.
Care to tell more?
Famously he declared that slavery was justified because it was necessary to create the US:
IMHO there are a few, very few, things that Usa should forbid their own people to say.
Glorifying slavery might be one of them. But sadly they are not ready for that, yet.
When Americans were supporting ISIS we look at them like they are crazy, but when they are supporting the confederacy, we give them high up political posts.
Also lied about being a ranger. Stolen valor anyone?
Why would they make their own products illegal in Europe?
