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.
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…
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.
But who would buy such hardware? :)
so good luck hiding a VPN client.
In my imagination, there is no VPN client. The whole network is behind a VPN router and the internet gateway is where it needs to be.
If politicians had advisors then how would they justify doing the dumb shit their owners want them to, then they can’t plead ignorance.
Finally my Intel stock will rise. This will definitely force Nvidia GPU to be manufactured in the US with always on DRM.
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.
Sounds like US capitalism in 2025… tax the poor (slave class) to give more money to the rich.
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
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……
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.
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.
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.
You joke, but western governments regularly pull the “our surveillance is good because we aren’t an authoritarian regime” trope.
Laughs in Faraday.
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?
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
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?
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?
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.
Why would they make their own products illegal in Europe?
…okay, so invest in Chinese GPU companies? Invest in Chinese GPU companies.
Look like there’s lots of Chinese mini pcs using the 395+ Max APU
I looked into those recently, actually expected the GPUs to be a lot farther behind than they are. The things that are really pushing them back are the drivers and the outdated process node, but there are already GPUs comparable to the lower end current generation cards from the 3 big manufacturers on paper (and even those have 16GB of VRAM, Nvidia 😤).
The image of China as an uncreative, uneducated backwards nation of drones good only for assembling phones, hasn’t been the reality for at least a decade.
A lot of people in the West don’t realize this because to this day there’s a vicious cycle of people only import cheap Chinese crap because China has a reputation for only making cheap crap because people only import the cheap crap. They don’t realize that China is also making top tier products, because nobody’s trying to import top tier Chinese products.
because nobody’s trying to import top tier Chinese products
oh, but they do, they import it rebranded with western logos
They’re a loooooong way off being able to match any nvida card from the last like 7 years, at least.
You have been dead wrong with every reply. Why are you still trying?
I have him tagged. I see him everywhere, and continues to be wrong all the time. No idea why she even spends her time doing this.
Aww cute. Rent free.
Where are these Chinese GPUs with anything that can match DLSS and any RTX card?
DLSS and RTX are not why these bans are happening bud
Who said they are? What an odd thing to say.
I said that theyre Chinese GPUs cant even match any RTX cards or DLSS. Where did I say they were banned because of that?
the entire topic is an article about geo tracking cards to avoid china getting around bans, and the larger context of that is AI; not gaming
DLSS is entirely off-topic and irrelevant to workloads other than games, and thus the discussion here
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!
