this post was submitted on 23 May 2025
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[–] [email protected] 9 points 10 hours ago (2 children)

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 :/

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 hours ago* (last edited 2 hours ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 minutes ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 hours ago

Also, don't get me started on speculative execution vulns...