631
Chinese memory can now match the speed and latency configs of the RAM in our gaming PCs (www.pcgamer.com)
submitted 1 month ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
173 comments fedilink hide all child comments
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] 9 points 1 month ago (10 children)

To make a stick of RAM spyware, would cost $100k/stick or more, and the engineering to do so, could make HBM6 instead. By all means investigate the chips to see if magic chips are inside, but that is the approach we should take. Why aren't Chinese sneakers spying on you? Far easier to hide and do more cheaply.

The hysteria of foreign spyware is shaped by established monopolies who want to keep their monopolies. There is never a proposed solution of actually verifying/inspecting for spyware.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 10 child comments
    •
  • [–] 5 points 1 month ago* (7 children)

    Well, you absolutelly can make digital products that run at least some built-in software and have network connectivity spy on people, but RAM is no such product in either sense - in neither runs software (and given it's performance constrainst it would be stupidly hard to add it as a feature) nor does it have any network connectivity.

    Routers and motherboards, for example, yeah - both have network connectivity and both include and run software so shipping them with spyware is just a question of the factory or distributer putting the right software in them (for motherboards, in the BIOS and running inside as secure code, inside the CPU itself or even in certain peripherals).

    (It would be possible to put it in places with more indirect access to networking - such as SSDs - but it's more complex at they would need to hack OS binaries on the fly)

    Of course, even for the stuff were it's possible, it's seriously deluded to think only one of the nations with insane civil society surveillance levels that sells those things - China - would be adding spyware to it but not the other one - the US: devices with the capabilities to support spyware made in or designed in any nation which does a lot of surveillance are always suspect.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 7 child comments
    •
  • [–] 1 point 1 month ago (6 children)

    Motherboards/routers (these are motherboards too) require very careful inspection, specifically if bios chip is unusual, or extra chip connected to bios. There is concern trolling over routers because Huawei is best in world. There is no concern about Motherboards, because only Taiwan is the competitor to China. The point is that inspections instead of baseless hysteria over origin is the right policy.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 6 child comments
    •
  • [–] 2 points 1 month ago (5 children)

    It's not a question of concern, it's a question of what's technically possible.

    It's technically possible to ship a motherboard with spyware capabilities in the BIOS.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 5 child comments
    •
  • [–] 2 points 1 month ago (4 children)

    There are experts, even stupid fat american ones, who could confirm the existence of such spyware capabilities.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 4 child comments
    •
  • [–] 2 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (3 children)

    Yeah, well, when was the last time common people and business paid attention to IT Security experts BEFORE their systems were broken into?!

    Also, who would pay the people with the necessary expertise to decompile all BIOS of all motherboard shipments (if at all possible, in this day and age when a lot of shit is encrypted with the keys inside a TPM module)?

    I mean, just go at it another way - notice how thousands of pager sent to Lebanon were altered by the Israelis and nobody were aware of it until the Israelis made them explode.

    In this day and age it's pretty straightforward to just alter the software for some shipments and not others or add a weakness (like both Intel and AMD CPUs have) that can be used as a backdoor by software that's installed remotely (for example, pushed as a Windows update, something which certain American 3 letter agencies can most certainly do since the have the power to demand the signing keys from MS).

    There are huge numbers of vectors for spyware to end up in certain computers that start with subtly backdooring the hardware itself.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 3 child comments
    •
  • [–] 2 points 1 month ago (2 children)

    when was the last time common people and business paid attention to IT Security experts BEFORE their systems were broken into?!

    You/America can be worried about spyware from China. So the US makes an inspection department, like it has for food and drugs, that certifies there is no spyware. That is a completely different approach than fabricating spyware hysteria, and then forcing everyone to believe it.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
    •
  • [–] 3 points 1 month ago* (1 child)

    I think that at least when it comes to America it's more than widely proven that they have an insanely large digital spying infrastructure (not just the 4-eyes stuff but also all that the NSA does, a lot of which having been revealed by Snowden) and even very openly laws such as the Patriot Act and the Cloud Act that let them force American companies to spy for them.

    No "hysteria" necessary to conclude that America will do whatever it takes to spy on everybody (both internally and internationally).

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 1 child comment
    •
  • [–] 1 point 1 month ago

    I agree the US spies. It is easy on a full general compute stack, ie. PCs/phones. Routers is harder, but NSA experts could probably find suspicious chips on hardware, and if those experts were part of a government for Americans, they could find violations installed at NSA's requests too.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • [–] 2 points 1 month ago (1 child)

    To make a stick of RAM spyware, would cost $100k/stick or more,

    how the fuck did you pull that number out of your ass?

    the smallest, simplest embedded CPUs built onto the stick and wired in could do a lot. even if they can't handle the operating memory frequency, they could access contents through another channel, and also the memory bus.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 1 child comment
    •
  • [–] 1 point 1 month ago

    Make it look like a dram module, make the other 7 dram modules look like ones that are 7/8ths the standard size, and make the set of 8 pins work with 7 actual dram modules while still performing like a cheap standard module. so people buy it. There are no microsopic CPUs or with no pin traces leading to them.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent