Subnostr

nostr:npub15fkerqqyp9mlh7n8xd6d5k9s27etuvaarvnp2vqed83dw9c603pqs5j9gr yeah it's a whole world out there. I'm not trusting of governments in the slightest and I'm sure they have some very nasty capabilities.

If you are fucking with the government I think it's absolutely a thing you should account for. But if you're asking me "what's the probability that there is actually a signal flare on every Intel chip watching for naughty words" I would say on the whole it's not extremely likely right now.

CPU exploits are different. I'm fairly sure many of those are intentional but actually exploiting them generally has to be done by some kind of additional malware.

d 2y ago

I don't think they're doing stuff like monitoring for hate speech, I mean more like "this guy is behaving oddly, take a closer look". Like how back before encryption was commonplace, just using encryption might make you stand out.

An example might be the user taking more extreme than usual steps to secure their network. The chip could try to determine that by various forms of inspection, using methods designed to hide any required traffic with normal traffic, and depending on what the results looked like, it might flag the user as an unusually savvy person of interest.

Now maybe that's not super useful to the government by itself, but user profiles could be built up checking lots of different things and I bet the result would be pretty useful to an intelligence agency. Not a big deal in the general case when the government doesn't care about you, but a problem once they decide to put you under the microscope.

On the other hand they could also just show up at your house at the crack of dawn, kill you, plant child pornography on your computer and use the media to drag your name through the mud. :02shrug:

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Fe₂🦀₃⋅H₂🦀 2y ago

nostr:npub15fkerqqyp9mlh7n8xd6d5k9s27etuvaarvnp2vqed83dw9c603pqs5j9gr it's difficult to get a realistic assessment of the situation without letting runaway pessimism take over. I would in some ways compare it to your (correct) advice to the right that the FBI is not an omnipotent god that monitors all thing all the time.

What is known is that the FBI is Satan's secret police incarnate. The open question is how much absolute control they have over these hardware manufacturers. Being able to instruct them on what to do vs the companies constructing competent dragnets that can't be discovered are very different topics.