Subnostr

But the vulnerabilities definitely exist, whether they're being actively exploited much or not. And it's going to be *very* hard to inspect an on-die black box like that. Few people have the tools to even attempt it, and I can think of a bunch of ways offhand to make it more difficult to detect that it's doing shady stuff.

I'm not super concerned about it myself, but if I was a terrorist or something I would take the threat seriously. It's bad enough that the hardware companies don't prioritize user security, but the fact that they outright hide and lie about functionality (on multiple levels) in their hardware is very disturbing.

I agree that the government is not super competent in general, but we can't ignore the possibility that in some cases they're simply lying about how they built their case. Parallel construction happens all the time and we know all these big companies cooperate with the government. Some of them surely have teams of spooks actively working within them, whether the companies actually know about it or not. How many of these "hardware exploits" are true accidents, and how many are sneaky exploits some NSA dorks dreamed up and slipped into the spec?

Fe₂🦀₃⋅H₂🦀 2y ago

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.

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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: