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but its chips don’t make it out of the country because they’re largely used in products built for the Chinese government. Very wise of them. Right now the UK n
by gaius 9y ago
but its chips don’t make it out of the country because they’re largely used in products built for the Chinese government.
Very wise of them. Right now the UK needs to make a serious push to make ARM our primary choice, and fabbed here too. This is as strategic as nukes.
- dogma1138 9y agoIt's too late for that ARM is no longer a UK company.
- madez 9y agoThe argument of national security goes a long way.
- pjc50 9y agoIt certainly goes a long way towards redirecting money to favoured state companies and building protectionist barriers, yes. Whether it provides any actual security is another matter.
- klodolph 9y agoAre you aware of historical events like the 1982 Siberian pipeline explosion? It was allegedly caused by sabotaged software inserted by a Canadian company on behalf of the CIA. Modern chips are certainly dense enough and have enough layers that you can hide Trojans in them. Buying e.g. routers with Chinese ICs is a credible threat to the US government.
- kogepathic 9y ago> Modern chips are certainly dense enough and have enough layers that you can hide Trojans in them. Buying e.g. routers with Chinese ICs is a credible threat to the US government. Why bother hiding the malware in hardware? Most electronics are made in China these days anyway, and only a very, very small fraction of users ever replace or investigate the firmware on their devices. Much easier and cheaper just to load a compromised firmware during manufacture and snoop that way.
- klodolph 9y ago> …only a very, very small fraction of users ever replace or investigate the firmware on their devices… Remember that the users we are talking about here are US government agencies. Yes, they do investigate firmware. Yes, they do code reviews of your firmware source code. No, they won't let you just ship them a Chinese router with factory firmware on it.
- pjc50 9y agoThere's a strange little collaboration between BT, GCHQ and Huawei going on at "Adastral Park" (Martlesham Heath). It's all top secret, but the person who told me about it hinted that it wasn't about removing the surveillance backdoors but making sure that GCHQ had access to them.
- oh_sigh 9y agoThe explosion happened because Soviets stole control software and tried to run it on their system.
- klodolph 9y agoThe software was not stolen, it was purchased from a Canadian company. The explosion happened because of the CIA's sabotage efforts.
- oh_sigh 9y agoThis (and many other sources online) claim that the Soviets stole it from a Canadian company: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/1455559/CIA-plot-led-to-huge-blast-in-Siberian-gas-pipeline.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/1... Basically, the CIA learned that the Soviets were looking for this software, and got the Canadian company to plant a bug in it before the soviets could steal it.
- lurr 9y agoIt works as well as "think of the children".
- sanxiyn 9y agoYou mean ARM Holdings plc, a wholly owned subsidary of SoftBank Group Corp.?
- gaius 9y agoWell, quite. Didn’t the US block the sale of MIPS to a Chinese buyer?
- keltor 9y agoIt wouldn't really matter anyways since the Chinese have been making MIPS64 chips for more than a decade. The current high end chip in China is actually new arch based on the DEC Alpha.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- Proven 9y agoStatist nonsense
- talideon 9y agoEven before Softbank bought them, ARM weren't even a fabless operation: their whole business model is IP cores. There's very little strategic value in that; you'd be as well off founding a semiconductor manufacturer to build RISC V processors.
- jotm 9y agoDrumming up national security for the UK? I guess if you're planning to go to war with the EU... Otherwise it's as useless as Trident.