7 ms·

The thing we need now is a version of the GDPR for hardware and software. A law that says that non-essential features mustn't be inseparably bundled with essent

by franga2000 8y ago

The thing we need now is a version of the GDPR for hardware and software. A law that says that non-essential features mustn't be inseparably bundled with essential system features so the user can disable them without killing the system. Just like the GDPR did for essential data and marketing data. Is this so far-fetched?

tonysdg 8y ago
It'd be damn tricky to implement, probably impossibly so. I can think of a few reasons: - Modern lithography just isn't that precise to my understanding. The whole point of binning chips is that you aim for an entire wafer of Core i9s, but you accept that some flaws will occur and will require disabling features of the chip. Are the disabled features "non-essential"? Certainly seems like they are if they can be disabled. - From a marketing perspective, you'd need to help customers decipher dozens of different models of the same chip. For n features, you'd need (2^n)-1 chips, right? So Model A would support everything; Model B would support everything except virtualization; Model C eould support everything except HDCP; and so on. - And as a customer, does that mean I need to spend $500 and replace my CPU everytime I realize I need a new feature? How would that work for laptops, where chips are frequently soldered to the motherboard? I'm sympathetic to the idea of requiring transparency in general, but unfortunately hardware is a helluva lot trickier than software.
- kilburn 8y ago
  You can disable most of that stuff from the bios/efi, so you already can effectively opt out of those features. This would be enough for a harware-gdpr thingy I think...
  - tonysdg 8y ago
    That's true -- I guess I hadn't been thinking of it from that perspective. There'd still be the problem of asking consumers to "opt out/in" of these features, of course. It's hard enough asking consumers to make informed decisions when it comes to "can we use your photos/track you online" -- now you'd be asking "do you want to run virtual machines/access encrypted content/etc.". But I guess I'd appreciate the ability to turn more stuff on/off in the BIOS -- makes me think of the whole "dark silicon" notion (if I don't use my laptop for Netflix, can I disable the streaming encryption stuff to save battery life?).

tonysdg 8y ago

It'd be damn tricky to implement, probably impossibly so. I can think of a few reasons: - Modern lithography just isn't that precise to my understanding. The whole point of binning chips is that you aim for an entire wafer of Core i9s, but you accept that some flaws will occur and will require disabling features of the chip. Are the disabled features "non-essential"? Certainly seems like they are if they can be disabled. - From a marketing perspective, you'd need to help customers decipher dozens of different models of the same chip. For n features, you'd need (2^n)-1 chips, right? So Model A would support everything; Model B would support everything except virtualization; Model C eould support everything except HDCP; and so on. - And as a customer, does that mean I need to spend $500 and replace my CPU everytime I realize I need a new feature? How would that work for laptops, where chips are frequently soldered to the motherboard? I'm sympathetic to the idea of requiring transparency in general, but unfortunately hardware is a helluva lot trickier than software.

kilburn 8y ago
You can disable most of that stuff from the bios/efi, so you already can effectively opt out of those features. This would be enough for a harware-gdpr thingy I think...
- tonysdg 8y ago
  That's true -- I guess I hadn't been thinking of it from that perspective. There'd still be the problem of asking consumers to "opt out/in" of these features, of course. It's hard enough asking consumers to make informed decisions when it comes to "can we use your photos/track you online" -- now you'd be asking "do you want to run virtual machines/access encrypted content/etc.". But I guess I'd appreciate the ability to turn more stuff on/off in the BIOS -- makes me think of the whole "dark silicon" notion (if I don't use my laptop for Netflix, can I disable the streaming encryption stuff to save battery life?).