The original Bloomberg story said that Amazon actually was the first to discover this and report it to the FBI.
IT security profesionals are calling these devices “Feinstein” chips, or simply Feinsteins.
Is this what is screwing up the NASDAQ?
Heck, I know how to get God Mode on any Winsows machine. It’s easy. A bunch of other hacks are easy. Anyone here know what F3GUM is? Still works a lot of places. But I’m a good guy - don’t hack - try to help others defend against hacks.
Gives them a great ability to blackmail leaders in Western countries.
On a serious note, backdoored hardware has been a topic of discussion for years. In fact I’m surprised it took this long to (tentitively) find one.
To: conservatism_IS_compassionI’m more worried about someone inserting unwanted logic inside a chip. Seems like in principle that could be hard to detect via testing.
True, hard to detect. Before I retired, I worked as an IT senior systems engineer. Several decades ago, I wrote custom machine code for IBM mainframes I maintained at my job that controlled the flow of thousands of programs that ran. I secretly embedded code that gave my programs top priority over everything else running. Many years after I left that department, my code was still running and no one detected it (despite a dozen other engineers working on the systems code). And no one would unless specifically testing with the trigger code I used to enable it. Lots of programmers did this sort of stuff for fun, because they could - nothing malicious.
It's different now, with governments doing it for malicious reasons.
19 posted on 10/4/2018, 1:03:56 PM by roadcat
Here’s the deal: it’s a horrendous, sinister deed; but catching on to it and learning the particulars pretty much guarantees that countermeasures will be discovered and made available.
diane feinstein’s driver is unaware of any plobrems
Anyone see a good technical articulate on this yet? Almost all the reports don’t say much.
So in other words we can rest easy knowing our tech companies won’t lie to us and the Chinese are very ethical.
the meaning of this and a presidential report out today and the shriveling of the US manufacturing base caused in part by predatory chinese practices means in effect that the whole US supply chain that starts in China has to re shored to the USA.
I fully believe it as it’s not the first time.
I remember when we didn’t allow Communists to make anything for our computers, were not allowed super computers, and couldn’t get a rocket off the ground. Then Clintons.
Born in the USA: Computer Hardware Made in America
Yes, there are. However, not every part of these components is made in America. Finished components like DRAM and SSDs use domestically-produced NAND wafers. The other parts of the component—circuit boards, controllers, and assembly—are imported from around the globe, mainly China.