5-eyes legislation to kill End-to-End encryption on a hardware level

RESIST.

honka_memes-128px-40

Kinda depressing, not gonna lie. The question is - where will this leave de-googled android devices? Will users of those phones effectively become outlaws?

1 Like

I imagine the :male_detective: :dragon_face: :alien: idea of it is - nowhere, since it’s hardware.
Unless you use some fully open-sourced RISC-V phone or something…which is a stretch so far, and definitely “not for the masses”.

Yes!
Black market all the way :clown_face: :earth_africa:

So there’s some binary blob hidden inside tensor chips which can phone home?

I imagine this will be it:

Already is on latest AMD :unamused:

“Chip-To-Cloud security” ™

Damn son - it’s not even 9am yet and my faith in humanity is gone.

1 Like

You’re welcome!
honka_memes-128px-35

Brought to you by :clown_face: :earth_africa:

The reason I’m horrified is that if this shit is built into the hardware, it will know you’re running a custom OS and will likely single you out for “additional security scanning”.

It also occurs to me that enterprise users are unlikely to be particularly happy with this, as it would potentially allow employees from Micro$oft, Apple etc. to harvest confidential information (think about bank details, trade secrets, private customer information etc). This would expose enterprises to liability for data breaches that are entirely outside of their control. Something will have to give, and logically at least some enterprise customers will be allowed to buy hardware that does not have this kind of spyware built in. This in turn means that such hardware will eventually be available on the resale market.

Alternatively, if you have cause to visit China, you could do a lot worse than buy local Chinese-made hardware. Sure it is probably chock full of backdoors that allow Chinese snoops to monitor what you are doing. But as long as you’re neither Chinese, nor living in China, nor using your device to do some kind of cutting edge scientific/technological research, they’re unlikely to give a damn about you. Also the US/5-eyes have absolutely no leverage to force local Chinese hardware manufacturers to put backdoors in products which are destined for the local Chinese market.

1 Like

Of course, right now there are special hardware made for NSA that does not have Intel ME on x86 motherboards…It’s not available on mass market or black market though.


On China remarks - bad tactics and bad idea in my mind, their goals are the same.

time for an upgrade i guess…

image

2 Likes

I think it goes beyond the NSA - imagine a hacker used a social engineering attack on a hardware manufacturer to access several bank accounts and transfer the funds into accounts controlled by the hacker (which are then presumably withdrawn/used to acquire bitcoin and laundered). That would destroy public faith in the financial system, causing a recession and massive political upheaval. So anyone working in “critical infrastructure” like banks would have to be granted separate hardware.

Regarding China, I agree it’s not great - but my threat profile does not involve Chinese spies. They’re not interested in me, and I’m not worried about them.

It will be another failed attempt to lock things down via the bios. MicroDICK has tried three times now and failed every time.

Ahhhh memories of the clipper chip come flooding back . . . .